Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Wacky, Lying Tom Feeney

It doesn’t surprise me that Tom Feeney (R–FL24) is posting on pseudoconservative blogs such as RedState.com. Feeney has long been known for his questionable ethics—his part in the Bush/Gore election shenanigans in Florida, his rental property shenanigans, his dealings with Jack Abramoff, his illicit charging of trip expenses to American taxpayers, asking a programmer to design a method to falsify touch-screen voting results, his cowardly campaigning tactics in the 2006 election—and he will hopefully go down in defeat in 2008.

But I was still taken aback by a column he wrote yesterday. This is the second paragraph of his screed:

Buh?

No, seriously: Buh?!

While Feeney doesn’t describe the metric he’s using for “economic growth,” it’s safe to assume that he’s talking about the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—after all, that’s what most people use to describe economic growth.

The thing is, Bush and the Republicans can hardly be credited for the rising GDP. The GDP has a tendency to go up just fine no matter who is in office. Witness its history from 1790 through 2006:

Aside from a rocky period around the first World War, a sharp drop with the 1929 stock market crash, and then a post-WWII dip, the US GDP tends to grow exponentially. This is probably easier to see using a logarithmic axis for the GDP:

On this graph, it’s a fairly straight line. Again, you’ll note the slight flattening out during the WWI years, a sharp drop with the market crash, and a little bobble after WWII. But “up” is its normal direction, and crediting that to this administration is nonsensical at best.

“Oh, dear, I forgot the mortgage payment.”

However, this is just the pure GDP. If the nation were a person, this would in effect be gross pay—and therefore, not the whole story. While inflation has been factored in (that’s what that “adjusted for 2000 dollars” means), the national debt is not shown here—and that’s a more telling story.

If you are getting paid $50,000 a year, and you borrow $30,000, that doesn’t mean you got paid $80,000. You may have $80,000 available, but you’re going to have to pay that $30,000 back somehow.

So it is with the national debt. After having paid down the rather steep debt that WWII had necessitated, this country held its debt fairly steady for forty years, through congresses held by both parties (Republicans had a majority in both the House and Senate from 1947–9 and from 1953–5; Democrats held both the House and Senate all the other years up until Reagan’s first term).

Unfortunately, Reagan’s vaunted economic recovery was a false one. Yes, he wanted to cut taxes, but he didn’t seem to want to pay the price for it. As a result, much of the “recovery” was funded by borrowing money, and our national debt more than tripled, spiraling up to nearly $4 trillion dollars (adjusted to year-2000 dollars). George Bush continued the process, pushing the debt to close to $5 trillion (same adjustment).

When Clinton took office, the trend immediately began slowing, and by the year 2000, the debt had stopped short of $6 trillion, and was actually declining for the first time since Reagan took office.

Irresponsibility

Enter GWB, and Republican majorities in both the House and Senate. The rate of borrowing immediately steepened drastically.

Here’s a graph of how it pans out. The dark green line is the real GDP; the red line is the national debt, and the grey, washed-out line is the GDP adjusted for the debt. The blue regions are periods of Democratic presidents; the red are for Republican presidents (their initials can be seen across the top of the graph).

Note that the adjusted GDP is in decline during both the Reagan/Bush eras, and during GWB’s term. (As bad as the oil crisis was in Carter’s day, even he managed to keep the net GDP from declining.) And this graph shows data only through 2006, when the national debt had reached $7.5 trillion. As of today, February 13, 2008, it is well on its way to $9.3 trillion dollars.

What growth?

Feeney refers to “24 quarters of growth”—six years. In fact, the net GDP began declining as soon as GWB took office—and Feeney, bless his blackened, mummified little heart, helped him do it by rubber-stamping any fool thing that GWB wanted. Those 24 quarters were false growth, funded by a shocking increase in the public debt.

The culprits

For the last six years, it is the Republican majorities in the House and Senate that have called the shots, and now they are trying to blame the Democrats with all the panache and grace of a creep in a suit running out on a check at a restaurant, wiping his greasy mouth while pointing madly at the next table on his way out the door, telling the waiter “they’re paying my bill, give it to them” as he spews chunks of the lobster he crammed in at the last moment.

The current GOP is not even remotely close to anything that could be considered fiscally responsible anymore. Since 1981, the GOP has shown a consistent record of racking up debt, charging as much as it can on the national credit card, and trying to hand the bulk of the funds to cronies while strewing fives and tens on the streets to distract those who will be repaying the bulk of that debt.

Being responsible . . . and sane

A responsible fiscal policy would consist of this: First and foremost, reduce spending. I’m not talking about across-the-board percentage cuts—that’s a short-sighted and simplistic strategy that guarantees more waste and less effectiveness. Programs must be studied and subjected to debate, but programs must be cut in order to reduce the borrowing. Other programs will have to be streamlined, and improvements in efficiency brought to bear. A responsible administration would work on an incentive program to get legislators to give up wasteful sacred cows in favor of more effective use of our funds.

Second, pay the debt back down to something approaching its historical levels. Even if it were between $2 and $3 trillion dollars, I know I would breathe a lot easier.

Then, and only then, does one get to reduce overall taxes.

It’s a hard thing for a Republican to say—I’m terribly uncomfortable with higher taxes. But taxes are the price of living in a civilized country, and even while I certainly have a side of me that resents paying unnecessarily high taxes, I also see paying taxes in general as a privilege and an honor, as my duty as an American. What irks me more than paying taxes is having that money used unwisely—like paying Feeney for travel expenses that I shouldn’t have to. (In fact, I wish I had a way of declaring that my money not be used to pay certain representatives or senators—that might make things interesting.)

Feeney is lying—and he knows it. If his constituents have any principles at all, they will vote him out come November. Unfortunately, looking over the comments that his article generated, most of the choir he’s preaching to is just too hostile, too short-sighted, too prejudiced and quite possibly too stupid to comprehend just how pervasive and blatant his lies are. Instead of behaving like Republicans, they give their true natures away: they’re pseudoconservative groupies, not actual Republicans.

In the last thirty seconds, the public debt has gone up by another $650,000, more or less. Any real Republican would be outraged by that.