People wave signs at a tea party protest. | Reuters Photo
First, I want to tell everyone that I have been nursing a nerve injury in my left hand. It has caused me to not want to type much as there was no telling which keys my fingers would hit. The numbness is subsiding some and I am able to work the fingers again. I’m back, somewhat.
The tea partiers rant and rave about the national debt, but fail to remember just how it got to where it is today. This is from an article back in July from Politico:
Sixty-one percent of the 697 self-identified tea party supporters surveyed identified the federal debt as one of the “extremely serious threats” to the future well-being of the United States.
They blame Obama, of course, but here’s the real reason our national debt is out of hand:
There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn’t include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt.
As a result of two costly wars funded by debt, our fiscal house was in dismal shape even before the financial crisis — and those fiscal woes compounded the downturn.
Where were these pasty old white men with their “big government” rhetoric in 2003?
I got an email today heralding the passing of financial reform. I have often spoke of the tremndous job Obama has done in a very short time, and this snippet says it all.
Mitch Stewart, BarackObama.com wrote:
Tom, we won
From: Mitch Stewart, BarackObama.com [info@barackobama.com] Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2010 1:37 PM To: Tom Subject: Tom, we won …The Recovery Act, health reform, and now Wall Street reform, on top of everything else. In a year and a half, this administration has made bigger, bolder progress than any president’s in decades.
The search for a legislative way forward on energy will continue Tuesday when Democrats reconvene to strategize ahead of a Wednesday energy meeting at the White House. Presenters from last Thursday’s Democratic caucus meeting, including Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) who laid out her CLEAR Act in a well-conceived video, will field questions from colleagues. Cantwell’s video, presented at a caucus meeting to decide what direction to take on energy legislation, describes the energy bill she is sponsoring with Susan Collins (R-Me.).
The CLEAR Act would spur green energy investment while avoiding regional disparities, according to a new study by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. The legislation would cap national greenhouse gas emissions, auctioning off all allowances for emissions and then refunding 75 percent of federal revenues to taxpayers, using the other 25 percent to invest in green technologies.
I had high hopes for the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham climate change bill, but Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the coward, decided that it was just way too liberal and took his ball and went home crying all the way about faulty climate science when everyone knows that big oil hired scientists to diss the real science and muddy the once clear waters of global warming truth. My heart sunk when the effort collapsed without GOP support. But the guys on the hill have to realize that any progressive measure will collapse if it depends on any GOP support at all to pass.
Now that my favorite Senator, Maria Cantwell (D-WA) has introduced legislation that would get the job done without cap-and-trade which was a faulty idea to begin with, my hopes are soaring again that we will begin to take real steps toward a clean energy future, instead of just giving it lip service like we have done for the past four decades. Cantwell’s plan limits carbon emissions. Cap-and-trade did not, and allowed big polluters to pay to keep on polluting.
The board of the NAACP, the “nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization,” endorsed marriage equality at a meeting this afternoon. The move comes 10 days after President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage. The NAACP’s move comes as attitudes about gays and lesbians in the African American community are changing rapidly. A recent […]
JR: It’s remarkable how warm it was globally in April considering that we were only just coming out of a double dip La Niña. If we don’t triple dip, we’ll set more temperature records soon. Indeed, NOAA models predict a good chance of an El Niño forming in the late summer, which would make it quite […]
BuzzFeed reports that Rep. Mark Thornberry (R-TX) and Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) have inserted a provision into the latest defense authorization bill that would “‘strike the current ban on domestic dissemination’ of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon.” The proposal would “give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentago […]
This week, the New York Times reported that Joe Ricketts, a right-wing billionaire and founder of TD Ameritrade, is soliciting multi-million dollar ad proposals to attack President Obama. One such proposal, leaked to the paper, was a $10 million, racially-charged campaign entitled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End his Spending [.. […]
by Adam James Ever hear the one about the Icelandic geothermal systems engineer and the Kenyan project developer who walk into a bar? As interesting this meeting might be, it’s unlikely to happen anywhere but in a bad renewable energy joke. Or at a geothermal conference. Enter the Clean Energy Solutions Center, a new website […]
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The Real Reason the National Debt is So High
People wave signs at a tea party protest. | Reuters Photo
First, I want to tell everyone that I have been nursing a nerve injury in my left hand. It has caused me to not want to type much as there was no telling which keys my fingers would hit. The numbness is subsiding some and I am able to work the fingers again. I’m back, somewhat.
The tea partiers rant and rave about the national debt, but fail to remember just how it got to where it is today. This is from an article back in July from Politico:
They blame Obama, of course, but here’s the real reason our national debt is out of hand:
Re: The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond
Where were these pasty old white men with their “big government” rhetoric in 2003?