This isn’t rhetoric, friends, this is hard cold fact gathered from government websites using official census data and US Department of Treasury numbers. No bumper sticker slogans, no five second sound bites, it’s the real deal and you can double-check it yourself.
Just three Republican Presidents are responsible for 70% of the National debt which is currently $9.5 Trillion and is growing at $1.7 Billion per day. The size of our debt adversely affects the value of the dollar against other international currencies. The bigger the debt the more foreign imports cost, like oil for example. The debt is growing that fast because the Republicans are borrowing from China and Japan to spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined, fund the War in Iraq and pay interest on those loans.
(data from the Department of Treasury) Please notice that in the last year of Bush 41’s presidency the size of the debt fell. That was because he raised taxes in an effort to fix what Ronald Reagan’s VooDoo economics had done to America (he lost the Presidency because of it). Clinton immediately raised them again and it ENDED the Reagan recession. Raising Taxes to reduce the deficit is GOOD for the economy, Bush 41 and Clinton proved it.
If that isn’t enough to convince you the Republicans don’t know what the frack they’re doing, new research from Larry Bartels out of Princeton shows middle class wage growth is double when a Democrat is president compared to when a Republican is president.
“… Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families…grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike…” It isn’t a zero sum game, we don’t have to hurt the poor to grow the rich.
“Under Democratic presidents poor families did slightly better than richer families (at least in proportional terms), producing a modest net decrease in income inequality; under Republican presidents, rich families did vastly better than poorer families, producing a considerable net increase in income inequality.”
So, you might ask, what will the Democrats do for me today? Fortune Magazine outlined both presidential candidate’s economic policy platforms. Not surprisingly McCain’s looks remarkably like Dubya’s. Tax cuts for the rich with no way to pay for them, thus increasing the national debt even more. Obama’s plans adhere to the pay-go policy adopted by the Democratic Congress; every increase in spending or decrease in revenue must be accompanied by an offset. According to Fortune Magazine this is what the two candidate’s tax proposals would do for you:
Keep in mind that these are after-tax incomes, take home pay as it were. Everybody taking home less than $50,000 a month would break even or get a tax cut under Obama and he’d pay for it with an increase on the top 5% of incomes. McCain, not so much, just borrow more from China.
Spread the facts, defeat ignorance.
Andy Hailey