This is the narrative that must be hammered into every American head. The GOP continue attempting to spin their patently failed economic policies into successes that were only evident in their imagination or in some alternate universe. It is journalistic fraud that while the GOP spin the lies and continue to misinform its constituent that there is not the required pushback from the main stream media.
The reality is the GOP over the last 30 year have created policies that have near bankrupted poor and shrank the middle class by creating policies that transferred the country’s wealth and individual wealth to the top one percent our population.
By David Axelrod Friday, January 15, 2010
For its Topic A feature last Sunday, The Post invited a panel of political operatives to offer their advice to the Democratic Party on strategy for 2010 [Sunday Opinion, Jan. 10]. Improbably, one of the operatives asked was Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s longtime chief strategist.
Rove has some impressive campaign victories to his credit. But given the shape in which the last administration left this country, I’m not sure I would solicit his advice. And given the backhanded advice he offered, I’m not sure he was all that eager to help.
Of all the claims Rove made, one in particular caught my eye for its sheer audacity and shamelessness — that congressional Democrats "will run up more debt by October than Bush did in eight years."
So, let’s review a little history:
The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus — with a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. When the Bush administration left office, it handed President Obama a $1.3 trillion deficit — and projected shortfalls of $8 trillion for the next decade. During eight years in office, the Bush administration passed two major tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest Americans, enacted a costly Medicare prescription-drug benefit and waged two wars, without paying for any of it.
To put the breathtaking scope of this irresponsibility in perspective, the Bush administration’s swing from surpluses to deficits added more debt in its eight years than all the previous administrations in the history of our republic combined. And its spending spree is the unwelcome gift that keeps on giving: Going forward, these unpaid-for policies will continue to add trillions to our deficit. CONTINUED
David Axelrod – What Karl Rove got wrong on the U.S. deficit – washingtonpost.com