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Radical Freedom
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Shared Sacrifice: Obama's Demagoguery
by Sheldon Richman, July 29, 2011
The most offensive claim made during the debt-ceiling controversy is that theres a moral equivalence between cutting government spending and raising taxes. President Obama asks for shared sacrifice to reduce the budget deficit. In his view, if the government spends more than it takes in it currently borrows more than 40 cents of every dollar spent the balanced approach is to cut spending and raise taxes.
There are quotation marks around cut for a good reason. No one Republican House Speaker John Boehner included wants to cut spending in the commonsense meaning of the term: namely, reducing government spending from todays level ($3.8 trillion). No, in Washington-talk, to cut a budget is merely to reduce the rate of increase that would have occurred in the future if current law were left unchanged.
If the politicians were honest and reporters committed to telling the public the truth they would talk about smaller increases in spending, not cuts, but even that wouldnt be entirely truthful, because in many cases the reduction in future increases itself is an illusion. It involves merely canceling the authority to spend money that no one expects to actually be spent.
"Shared Sacrifice": Obama's Demagoguery by Sheldon Richman
.
by Sheldon Richman, July 29, 2011
The most offensive claim made during the debt-ceiling controversy is that theres a moral equivalence between cutting government spending and raising taxes. President Obama asks for shared sacrifice to reduce the budget deficit. In his view, if the government spends more than it takes in it currently borrows more than 40 cents of every dollar spent the balanced approach is to cut spending and raise taxes.
There are quotation marks around cut for a good reason. No one Republican House Speaker John Boehner included wants to cut spending in the commonsense meaning of the term: namely, reducing government spending from todays level ($3.8 trillion). No, in Washington-talk, to cut a budget is merely to reduce the rate of increase that would have occurred in the future if current law were left unchanged.
If the politicians were honest and reporters committed to telling the public the truth they would talk about smaller increases in spending, not cuts, but even that wouldnt be entirely truthful, because in many cases the reduction in future increases itself is an illusion. It involves merely canceling the authority to spend money that no one expects to actually be spent.
"Shared Sacrifice": Obama's Demagoguery by Sheldon Richman
.