Not that you need another example of GOP hypocrisy

Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek has pointed out a discrepancy that has annoyed me lately. It's good to see it in print and good to hear NPR make note of it as well. The GOP has been saying:

If we don't reduce the deficit the economy, bad as it is, will get even worse.

If we don't continue the Bush tax cuts the economy, bad as it is, will get even worse.

But, wait! Doesn't letting the Bush tax cuts expire help lower the deficit? It would be impossible for both statements to be true. Shh. Don't tell anyone. Though it is possible that both are false.

A few more things that Zakaria points out:

When Clinton left office he was running a budget surplus. Even before Bush said goodbye (even before the recession) he was running major deficits. There were three reasons for that difference: (1) the tax cuts, (2) the unfunded Medicare prescription drug program (there was no match in other cost reductions or tax increases), and (3) post 9/11 security spending, including Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The tax cuts were the biggest difference.

Clinton raised taxes in 1992 and we had a major economic boom for the next 8 years. Bush cut taxes and the economy when he left was about where it was when he took office with the addition of millions of unemployed.

I've said before there are additions to the deficit that are structural in nature and others that help us out of our current economic mess. The GOP has been working hard to make sure we don't address the structural problems and also don't help the economy recover.

The July jobs numbers came out today. They weren't good -- we're down 131K jobs. Lou Dubose of the Washington Spectator (alas, no link) puts things into perspective. Between the number of jobs lost in the last few years and the number of people fresh out of school and now in the labor pool we need 11.3 million jobs to get the unemployment rate back to where it was before the recession. In the best month of the last decade we added 208K jobs. If we kept that rate up consistently it would take us 136 months (11 years) to get us back to where we were. We gained 83K jobs in June. We lost 131K jobs in July. I've heard that a good number of people in their 40s & 50s have now been unemployed so long and thus look unattractive to employers that they may never work again. And the GOP says we can't afford to stimulate the economy? We can't afford not to. Voters give indications of rewarding the GOP for their obstructionist ways?