Things Democrats Say

There are a few things that I keep hearing from the left. These are repeated so often that I doubt that they even think about them.

Right now the big thing is to claim that the Republicans are threatening the economy with their inflexible demands. The thing here is that it takes two to have inflexible demands. The Republicans are demanding budget cuts without a tax increase. The Democrats are demanding a tax increase. The Republicans' demands are only inflexible if you accept the Democrats' position on continuing government growth.

A corollary is that the Republicans didn't care about the deficit under Bush. There is a little truth to this since Bush was a Republican and ran deficits. That is about as far as it goes. The truth is that Bush was fighting his own party over spending and the Bush deficits were nothing compared to the Obama deficits. The graph here shows that, except for 2009, Bush's deficits ran around 2% of the GDP while Obama's deficits are quite a bit higher. His lowest projected deficit is 4.1% GDP followed by years of increases. The chart here puts the Bush and Obama deficits into a 30-year perspective. The deficit is a concern because tax revenues are the lowest they have been in seven years and government spending is the highest it has been ever. The fact is that if Obama's deficits were as low as Bush's we would not be having this fight.

It should also be remembered that Bush had significant trouble getting the Medicare drug plan, No Child Left Behind, and the TARP passed. His party split on these and they only passed because of significant Democrat support.

The final thing that Democrats keep saying is that the Republicans have moved to the far right. This is rather silly considering that both the President and the Secretary of State were Marxists in college and followers of the Marxist writer Saul Alinsky (Obama's work as a community organizer was based on Alinsky's theories and Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis on Alinsky). Starting with Howard Dean in 2004, the Democrats moved to the left. Both Presidents Bush and Bill Clinton were centrists and both parties have abandoned the center. The Republicans only seem to have moved further to the right because the Democrats made their own move to the left earlier.