I was once a republican. I believed that maintaining the national debt at a manageable sustainable level is important. The Republican party said they did as well.
I believed that annual budget deficits were often unavoidable during recessionary cycles but knew that during grow cycles budgets needed to be balanced in order to be able to sustain a manageable national debt level. I thought te Republican party believed the same.
I was wrong on both counts as the Republican party has been most responsible for our national debt explosion every since Ronald Wilson Reagan was our president. It continues under Trump unabated and NO ONE in the Republican party is even talking about the national debt or budget deficits any longer.
It’s like no one cares anymore. Likely that is because they don’t. The Republican Party aversion to raising taxes during growth cycles is stuff of legendary proportions. Even though that is how debt control works. Reducing taxes to “stimulate economic growth” is something we’ve seen time and again just doesn’t work. The national debt stands as a monumental statue to that fact.
The Party of Lincoln (actually it no longer is) has become the Party of the Wealthy , By the Wealthy, and For the Wealthy. Its primary focus is to insure that wealth remains concentrated in the hands of those occupying the top 1 or 2 percent on the economic scale. A sure tract to oligarchy.
Below excerpt is from The New York Times.
… The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 left the vast majority of working people and the Democrats’ base of African-Americans, Hispanics, single women and millennials shattered for years. They lost much of their wealth and were forced into new jobs that often paid less. Many faced prohibitive student debt. With wages stagnant for a decade, they were frustrated with the daunting costs of health care, prescription drugs, child care and housing. Yet in the main, Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton — and now Mr. Trump — hailed the economy’s progress, the millions of new jobs. But that was and is clueless. Mr. Trump will be the latest presidential candidate punished by the voters for not getting it.
The Democrats in the 2018 wave election did get it and made their biggest gains, compared with 2016, not in the suburbs — despite winning most of their new seats there — but in the rural areas and among white working class voters, particularly women. This pullback from Mr. Trump among white working class women in particular went further this year. As of 2019, he enjoyed only a single-digit lead with the voters who played such a big role in the 2016 surprise. In 2018, Democrats succeeded by attacking Republicans for attempting to repeal Obamacare and failing to lower skyrocketing prescription drug costs. They proposed trillion-dollar investments in infrastructure and battled to drive dark money out of politics.
Mr. Trump and the Republican Congress continued to seek the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, working both to make it fail in practice and to slash federal health care spending for seniors and the poor. That made health care the top reason for voting for Democrats in 2018, but it also revealed what has become a defining partisan difference: a Republican Party determined to destroy government outside of defense and a Democratic Party determined to use it expansively.
The Democrats today are reacting not only to Mr. Trump but to the Tea Party-dominated Republican Party that preceded and prepared the way for him with gridlocked government. After coming to power in the 2010 wave election, the Republicans tried to keep the government from addressing virtually any problem at all. The Tea Party movement was animated by its hostility to Mr. Obama and his activist government. Empowered in the House, it forced an I.M.F.-like budget austerity on the federal government and blocked any new economic stimulus and investment. As a candidate, Mr. Trump built his base among Tea Party Republicans and Evangelicals in order to carry forward the assault on government nationally and in the states. The Democrats watched in frustration as the government was presumed to be impotent to address wage stagnation, surging inequality, climate change, the slaughter from automatic weapons and the flood of dark money into politics.
But this dam has burst. With Mr. Trump’s ever-escalating assault on government, the proportion of Americans who say that government “should do more to solve problems and meet the needs of people” surged to the highest level in 20 years. Democratic candidates who understand this political moment will push for a government that changes the country’s course, as it did under Democratic presidents after the progressive victories of 2008 and 1964 and especially after the 1932 triumph of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Democratic voters today look at the chief executives of major corporations and they see the face of an era where greed was unchecked, where companies failed to invest in their workers and used their big donations and lobbyists to rig the political system against the middle and working classes. They are determined that government must do something not only about corruption and corporate excess, but also inequality, universal health care, the state of the working family, climate change, globalization, entrenched racial and gender disparities and more…
Democrats have an amazing opportunity to take back America for the middle class and those less fortunate. But, the mega guns of the Republican party and its wealthy donors are gearing up for the monumental fight they KNOW is coming. Independents and Democrats need to unite to destroy the seeds of Trumpism before it destroys America.
