Tag: Debt Ceiling

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Congress GOP Whining U.S. Senate

Lindsey Graham Pitches A Hissy Fit Over The House Debt Ceiling Deal: ‘I Will Not Be Intimidated!’

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has long been known as one of the biggest whiners in Congress, but he really outdid himself Sunday during an appearance on Fox when asked the debt ceiling agreement worked out between Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and President Joe Biden.

Graham’s main beef with the proposed legislation is that he claims it cuts military spending.

The South Carolina Republican told host Shannon Bream, “You know, number one, I respect Kevin McCarthy,” Graham said. “I want to raise the debt ceiling; it’d be irresponsible not to do it.”

“And I know you can’t get the perfect, but what I will not do is adopt the Biden defense budget and call it a success,” he complained. “Kevin said that the defense is fully funded. If we adopt the Biden defense budget, it increases defense spending below inflation. 3.2% increase in defense is below inflation.”

Graham then accused GOP supporters of the bill of “doing a great disservice to the party of Ronald Reagan.”

“I like Kevin a lot, but don’t tell me that the Biden defense budget fully funds the military,” Graham bristled. “So I look forward to the details, but if you send me the Biden defense budget to the United States Senate and declare it to the people of the United States, you will have a hard time with me.”

Unless spending on defense is increased, Graham insisted, he will not vote for the bill when it comes before the Senate.

“If you ask me now to swallow it because of the debt ceiling, you can forget it,” he remarked. “In 2011, my good friend Mitch McConnell negotiated to deal with Joe Biden that virtually destroyed the Defense Department in the name of raising the debt ceiling. Another round of sequestration, not only will I vote no, I will not be intimidated by June 5th.”

Virtually destroyed the Defense Department? Is that supposed to be some sort of joke? The one thing this country always funds above and beyond all other priorities (including children, education, food, and housing) is defense. For Graham to suggest otherwise is proof that he’s just as clueless and histrionic as ever.

Here’s the video of Lindsey clutching his pearls:

 

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Congress Economics GOP Kevin McCarthy

McCarthy Lacks The Republican Votes Needed To Pass His Draconian Budget Cuts: Report

It appears that Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) dream of making drastic cuts in the federal budget as a condition for raising the debt limit is dissipating by the second, with reports suggesting that he doesn’t even have the Republican votes he needs to take a knife to spending programs.

Jackie Calmes of The Los Angeles Times notes that when GOP House members saw the actual cuts McCarthy is proposing, many of them balked and said they cannot support such draconian measures.

We got evidence of the squeeze this week, even as McCarthy, in his on-again, off-again debt ceiling negotiations with President Biden, was full of budget-cutting bravado to reporters. Just before midnight on Monday — midnight! — the House Appropriations Committee canceled its Tuesday and Wednesday meetings when voting was scheduled on the first of the dozen bills that annually fund the federal government’s operations. Those bills have to fill in the gory details of the spending cuts that Republicans left unidentified when they passed McCarthy’s debt limit bill last month.

The devil, the old saying goes, is in the details, and that’s the problem: McCarthy cannot get the votes he needs to enact his massive cutbacks.

Oh, and as you’d expect, when the Speaker couldn’t muster the votes, he began lying to cover the reason he was calling for a postponement.

The stated reason for the postponement: The committee’s Republican majority wanted to give McCarthy “maximum flexibility” in his talks with Biden.

The real reason: They didn’t have the votes to pass their own bills. Failure, in turn, would have undercut McCarthy’s leverage in the negotiations.

Clearly, McCarthy is getting hit on both sides. The White House is telling him the cuts are a no-go and his own Republican colleagues are also letting him know they won’t sign their name to anything that could hurt them politically with an election now just a little more than a year away.

Oh, and there’s also the matter of Republican hypocrisy, which was revealed when it was reported that they also intend to try and extend the Trump tax cuts for billionaires.

Even then, the savings generated would be small relative to the nation’s annual budget deficits. And Republicans, if they have their way, would in effect wipe out those savings by extending all the Trump-era tax cuts for another decade, adding trillions more to the federal debt they purport to fear.

What will McCarthy do? Probably what politicians are known for doing: Declaring victory and walking away really quickly before anyone can ask any questions. It’s the old Washington two-step, and all it requires is the willingness to pretend.

 

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Congress GOP Taxation WTF?!

EXPOSED: GOP Will Push $3 Trillion Tax Cut For The Rich Just Weeks After Debt Limit Deadline

As they continue to threaten the U.S. economy with a debt ceiling default that would be devastating for Americans and the reputation of the United States across the globe, the GOP is also secretly plotting to begin making a push for $3 trillion in tax cuts for the very rich.

Politico’s Brendan Duke reports that Republicans will introduce their massive tax cut just two weeks after the June 1 debt limit deadline, suggesting that they’ve been planning the measure for some time now.

Keep in mind these tax cuts would be in addition to the massive Trump tax cuts which have already ballooned the federal deficit and long-term debt, with the Center for American Progress noting:

President Donald Trump’s signature tax bill, enacted when Republicans gained control of the White House and both houses of Congress in 2017, will have cost roughly $1.7 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2023. These tax cuts reduced personal income tax rates and permanently lowered the corporate tax rate, among other changes. Despite being paired with a further expansion of the child tax credit, the 2017 changes also largely benefited the wealthy, once again making the U.S. tax code significantly more regressive.

Now add in the tax cuts passed during the presidency of George W. Bush and you wind up with $10 trillion in lost revenues that would certainly come in handy right about now, especially since Republicans have already made it clear they don’t plan to cut a dime from the Department of Defense, which will continue to see massive inflows of taxpayer money even though the United States isn’t at war with anyone.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy notes that two-thirds of the benefits in a new tax cut would go to the richest fifth of Americans, meaning millionaires and billionaires, the very people who can afford to pay more.

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has been saying for weeks that the United States doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem, but the numbers show otherwise, and his plan to cut taxes again is the strongest proof yet that Republicans will eventually be going after Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. They deny that’s their plan, but these are the same fiscal fanatics who subscribe to what Americans for Tax Reform founder and president Grover Norquist said back in 2001:

“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

If they have to drown millions of us in debt, poverty, starvation, and want, that’s a price they’re more than willing to see the average American pay to keep taxes on the rich as low as possible.

 

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Congress Economics GOP WTF?!

GOP Brags About Taking The Nation ‘Hostage’ With Debt Ceiling Demands

In today’s edition of saying the quiet part out loud we have Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) giddily admitting that he and his fellow Republicans are indeed taking the nation hostage with their absurd demands for massive cuts to the federal budget before they’ll agree to raise the federal debt ceiling.

Joseph Zeballos-Roig of Semafor reports that Gaetz had this to say on Tuesday:

“I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, & they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage.”

Gaetz’s comments were countered by groups aligned with the White House and Democrats in Congress, according to HuffPost.

Gaetz’s seeming brazenness immediately drew fire from some Democratic allies on Twitter. CAP Action, the political arm of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, said, “Rep. Gaetz said the quiet part out loud ― this was never about fiscal health, and always about holding our economy hostage to enact an extremist economic agenda that experts predict would push the economy into recession.”

If the U.S. does indeed wind up defaulting on the debt, it could prove catastrophic for the American economy, leading to massive job losses and a recession.

This isn’t the first time a Republican has compared the debt ceiling debate to hostage taking.

In 2012, then-Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell noted, “What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.”

Would the GOP be willing to throw the economy into freefall? If they think it will help their electoral chances in the 2024 election, there’s basically nothing Republicans won’t do, including sacrificing the economic health of the nation.

 

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Congress GOP

WATCH: Republican Gets Caught In His Own Debt Ceiling Hypocrisy

Republican Florida Congressman Byron Donalds got caught in his blatant hypocrisy when he tried to explain why his party’s refusal to raise the federal debt ceiling during the Biden administration is different than the way the GOP happily acquiesced to raising it when Donald Trump was president.

During a Sunday appearance on “Meet the Press,” host Chuck Todd played a video clip of Trump saying 2019,  “I can’t imagine anybody ever even thinking of using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge.”

Asked why he disagrees with that, Donalds replied, “[Trump] also said the other day on a rival network, that he said that when he was president, and when asked why he wasn’t saying it now, he said it’s because he’s not president.”

Todd pushed back: “Do you realize how absurd that sounds?”

“That is not absurd,” Donalds insisted.

“How is that not absurd?” Todd inquired. “It’s absurd.”

“He is always negotiating, Chuck. That’s what he does,” Donald remarked. “It’s actually one of the reasons why so many deals for our country worked out to our benefit as compared to his predecessors, both Republican and Democrat, because he’s always negotiating.”

“But do you realize how partisan that sounds?” Todd asked. “He is basically saying ‘When I’m president, there’s no negotiating on this. But hey, when somebody else is president, screw them.’”

Todd also wondered why Republicans are refusing to admit that the Trump-era tax cuts have blown a massive $2 trillion dollar hole in federal revenue.

“We can’t litigate the tax cuts because of what happened with COVID,” Todd noted. “We don’t know how much this ate into everything, but it certainly looks like there were going to be fewer revenues coming into the government.”

“That is not true, Chuck,” Donalds alleged. “In 2019, we took in more revenue than we ever have in the history of our nation.”

That’s when the NBC host hit Donalds with this reminder:

“You realize that President Trump has added more to the deficit than Joe Biden?”

Donalds claimed, “Most of that’s COVID,” but Todd corrected him: “Half of it’s COVID, half of it’s the tax cut.”

But Donalds again tried to suggest that the facts weren’t the facts: “That is not true because we raised more revenue.”

Todd:

“The numbers are the numbers. If somehow you keep cutting taxes, but more revenue comes into the government, that math doesn’t work over time. You can have it in the first year due to some various accounting tricks, but it doesn’t work over time.”

Again, Donalds used rhetoric instead of facts, “The purpose of tax policy is to raise revenue for the federal government, not to equalize society.”

What in the hell does that even mean?! If you take in less tax revenues, you are bound to have less money in federal coffers. And now we have a $2 trillion shortfall in revenue, but Republicans insist on cutting spending to the bone (including funds for veterans, healthcare, and programs for the most vulnerable Americans) instead of rescinding the Trump tax cuts for billionaires.

Here’s the video: