The Road to Prosperity is Not Through GOP False Promises

I am sick and tired of seeing Republican Party leaders talk about how reducing taxes will bring back prosperity and reduce the budget deficit. All that the past few Republican Presidents have been able to do is increase the deficit. I hate to say it but the only US President in modern history whose administration presided over several consecutive budget surpluses was Bill Clinton. Before him the last President to have a surplus was Lyndon Johnson. The last Republican to preside over a surplus was Eisenhower.

Republican Presidents started massive deficit-spending with Ronald Reagan, whose constant attacks on “tax-and-spend Democrats” belied the truth. But before you accuse me of being a pro-Democrat partisan, I know that Obama’s administration has run up the largest annual deficits in history. He can blame the Great Recession for some of his budget problems but his three years of Trillion-dollar deficits were still followed by years of huge deficits about twice the amount of George W. Bush’s wartime budgets.

The thing is, we’re still locked into two wars and it is starting to look like we are involved in Syria, too. I don’t know how much of our budget is going to the Department of Defense but if you turn the Republicans loose on the budget we’re probably going to see double-trillion deficits.

The US government is now so deep in debt the only thing it can do is raise taxes. You won’t get much support for that point of view from a Republican President and Congress. I don’t know who will win the White House this year but we need to turn our backs on the Republican Party and hand Congress back to the Democrats. If we have any more government shutdowns or tax reductions the US debt is going to become outrageous.

I read that the shutdown engineered by the Republicans actually helped lower the deficit but when you look at the numbers it seems like that just won’t help. We don’t need “less government” we need more tax revenues flowing into the Federal coffers until we pay off this $6.6 trillion in debt. It would help a lot if Congress forced US companies to pay taxes on the money they hide overseas.

Last March Bloomberg reported that $2.1 trillion was sitting in offshore accounts, where corporations have been hiding their profits to avoid paying taxes on them. It would cost those companies 35% of their assets to move that money back into the US. That is they would have to pay a 35% tax. It’s not like they are using this money. Why not pay the US government $700 billion and help write down a huge chunk of the national debt? They could even get Congress to pass a law saying it would do just that.

And then those companies would still have $1.4 trillion to invest in new jobs, community projects, give to charity, or do whatever they want with it. They can’t use the money right now so they might as well swallow the bullet, pay their taxes, and help everyone out.

But where are the Republicans when this kind of talk comes up? They act like this money doesn’t exist. They don’t talk about persuading or coercing these companies to bring that money into the US economy. All they want to do is cut taxes and increase the deficit even more.

Why do any of you vote for these guys again? It isn’t for the economic sense of their arguments because there isn’t any.