Cuts? Ha!

John Boehner's bill cuts discretionary spending by $917B over 10 years. That's $91.7B a year (I can do maths!) which I think isn't even inflation adjusted, and certainly is cumulative. So it means cutting our deficit from about $1.1T to $1T, which will then promptly begin growing again.

Yes, there's a promise of more cuts, but no one here can believe in any such promise. Future action is always negotiated. Raising the debt limit is real and can't be rolled back any time soon; spending cuts are at best very temporary, and if promised in the future, don't exist at all.

The biggest win for the right in this bill is that they got the Democrats to concede to spending cuts without revenue increases, even if the spending cuts pretty much only exist on paper. As Bill O'Reilly said last night, combined with the massive outcry from the "far left" about how terrible this deal is, and the cries from the "far right" about how this isn't enough cutting, this basically sets up the 2012 elections thusly: if you want government to spend less, you'll vote for Republicans; if you want it to spend more, you'll vote for Democrats.

It's still amazing to me that pundits and politicians on the left are continuing to push this line that the GOP is the "Party of No." The Republicans passed multiple bills out of the House -- none with Democratic support -- and the Senate Democrats killed each one. Finally when they got to the final bill in the House, the Republicans supported it in far greater numbers and percentages than the Democrats. Can someone please explain the rational basis for this "Party of No" stuff?

Not that I care if my party has such a label: I believe the job of an elected representative in government is primarily to tell constituents No. No, I won't protect your business with regulation and higher taxes on competitors; no, I won't give you a tax credit; no, I won't build you a sports stadium; no, I won't extend your unemployment indefinitely. Saying no is hard, but it's part of the job of any good representative, and attacking someone for saying "no" is, to me, akin to attacking someone else for having courage. If you want to say that a specific use of the word "no" is wrong, fine; but that, of course, isn't what they are doing.

What isn't amazing to me is that the left is continuing to trot out the claim that Republicans are "terrorists." The idea they are trying to get across is that Republicans will only agree to a plan on their own terms, or else they will "blow up" the country's economy. But the facts show clearly, as demonstrated above, that, from the beginning, it's the Democrats that have opposed every Republican offer; meanwhile, the Democrats refused to put any offer on the table at all. And in the final bill, the Republicans still backed it far more than the Democrats did.

Just who do they think they are fooling when they make such an obvious lie by saying the Republicans are the ones trying to "blow up" anything?

This level of self-deception is always amazing to me, though perhaps it shouldn't be.