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Pete Buttigieg, the current Democratic Party’s forced star, spent time lying about the Democratic Party as he used GOP talking points to describe the party’s stance on deficits.
Pete Buttigieg false statement on Democrats and deficits
“My party’s not known for worrying about deficits and the debt too much,” Pete Buttigieg said. “But it’s time for us to start getting into that business because what we’ve seen in Washington is that the party that talked a lot about the deficit when they were trying to kill off programs when it came time for the corporate tax cuts, it turns out, they don’t care. There is a trillion-dollar deficit now and created under a Republican administration which means if my party doesn’t start getting interested in deficits, then nobody will.”
As Lawrence O’Donnell points out, the statement starts with a lie. Democrats do worry about the deficits and it took Clinton and Obama to clean up after Republicans each time.
It is hard to understand the need of centrist Democrats to attach themselves to Republican talking points. Recently Klobuchar said the following while speaking to Chris Matthews.
“We should be matching our education system with the jobs in our economy,” Amy Klobuchar said. “And to me, that means, no, you just don’t make everything free. And you don’t pay for free college for rich kids. Look at this, the fastest-growing degrees are one and two years. We do not have a shortage of CEOs or MBAs. We have a shortage of plumbers”
Maybe we should charge rich kids tuition for high school. Also, we must not forget Michael Bennet’s attack on Medicare for All where he used GOP talking points as well.
It is bad enough we must fight Republicans to get middle-class and poor centric policies. Fighting the centrist flank of the Democratic Party as well hurts the base.
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I find it irritating the accusation that if any Democrat dares to disagree with Bernie, they are automatically taking a Republican point of view. Also, progressives generally do not like Clinton or Obama, so how can they take cues from them as Donaldson does? This country is already 20 trillion dollars in debt from the Trump tax cuts, which NO Democratic candidate for President supports. “Medicare for All” is estimated to cost the Federal government 34 extra trillion dollars over 10 years. Improving the Affordable Care Act which the Republicans DON’T support would cost the government a lot less money than that to cover the vast majority of the population. It simply isn’t true that the Affordable Care Act is different from what every industrialized country does- Switzerland actually has a VERY similar system to the exchanges on the ACA. And even in Canada, 30% of their health spending comes from private sources, instead of 100% as in the Medicare for All idea. Add 16 trillion over 10 years that Bernie wants to spend to combat change to 20 trillion and 34 trillion and you get 70 trillion dollars over ten years to spend on everything Bernie wants to spend on as well as getting our country out of debt. Where are we going to come up with 70 trillion dollars? As for climate change, planting a trillion trees worldwide would cost a LOT less than 16 trillion dollars and it is considered to be one of the most effective means of combating climate change. Americans can also drive a lot less and consume a lot less energy as well as eating less meat. The “Green New Deal” doesn’t seem to call for cuts to consumption of energy but rather just keeping energy consumption the same, but using renewables for this high energy consumption.