The fiscal havoc Republicans have wreaked

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Republicans are in Tampa this week blaming President Obama for... well, for pretty much everything, but mostly, it would seem (based on Christie's speech last night), for not being serious enough and so not doing enough about the bloated budget deficit and ballooning national debt.

The propaganda will be in heavy supply, and Romney is being touted as, and will tout himself as when he takes the podium Thursday night, just the sort of responsible fiscal conservative America needs at this time of fiscal crisis.

Don't believe a word of it.

First, of course, there's the Romney-Ryan (and orthodox Republican) "plan," which mostly focuses on tax cuts for the wealthy (you know, people like... Mitt Romney), paying for them, sort of, by crushing government into oblivion -- there are a lot of unspecified spending cuts, though not to national defense, which is indeed rather bloated, unspecified largely because the devil, as they say, is in the details, or in other words because any such cuts would be unpopular, along with entitlement reform of the kind that would essentially destroy hugely popular and hugely successful programs like Social Security and Medicare -- that is, summing up, paying for them by burdening everyone else, the vast majority of Americans who aren't rich.

You won't hear any of that in Tampa, though you'll hear a lot about how Obama and the Democrats are waging class war and unfairly picking on the wonderful job creating "makers" who just happen to be rich, boo-hoo for them, pity the poor souls and their god-given wealth, and you'll hear a lot about how the only way to get the economy moving again, and to resolve the fiscal crisis, is to reintroduce some serious trickling down. Oh, they won't call it that, but that's what they mean when they propose slashing taxes (on the rich, though they'll claim it's much broader than that) and spending (mostly for programs that benefit everyone else).

But then, second, there's this... the fact that the current fiscal crisis is largely a Republican creation, a product of the gluttonous Bush years, when the GOP controlled the White House and Capitol Hill and ran roughshod all over fiscal responsibility through tax cutting and warmongering.

Here's where a graphic would help, and helpfully Ezra Klein provides one:

Pretty clear, no? As Klein explains:

The top layer, the orange one, that's the Bush tax cuts. There is no single policy we have passed that has added as much to the debt, or that is projected to add as much to the debt in the future, as the Bush tax cuts, which Republicans passed in 2001 and 2003 and Obama and the Republicans extended in 2010. To my knowledge, all elected Republicans want to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Democrats, by and large, want to end them for income over $250,000.

In second place is the economic crisis. That's the medium blue. Recessions drive tax revenue down because people lose their jobs, and when you lose your job, you lose your income, and when you lose your income, you can't pay taxes. Tax revenues in recent years have been 15.4 percent of GDP — the lowest level since the 1950s. Meanwhile, they drive social spending up, because programs like unemployment insurance and Medicaid automatically begin spending more to help the people who have been laid off.

Then comes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's the red. And then recovery measures like the stimulus. That's the light blue, and the part for which you can really blame Obama and the Democrats– though it’s worth remembering that the stimulus had to happen because of a recession that began before Obama entered office, and that the Senate Republicans proposed and voted for a $3 trillion tax cut stimulus that would have added almost four times what Obama's stimulus added to the debt.

Then there's the financial rescue measures like TARP, which is the dark blue line. That's almost nothing, as much of that money has been paid back.

In other words, a largely Republican mess, made worse by a global economic downturn that hardly was Obama's fault. And, indeed, the president has tried to do something about it.

First, he pulled the economy back from the brink of collapse, not least through a stimulus package that Republicans tried to block and through rescuing the domestic auto industry, which some Republicans, including Romney, also tried to block.

So contrary to Republican propagands, it's not that Obama has done so poorly at fixing the economy, it's that the economy would be so much worse were it not for him, were Republicans the ones calling the shots.

Which in many ways they have, controlling the House since 2010, using the filibuster like a disloyal opposition in the Senate, and pursuing a course of absolute obstructionism at every turn, even when the president was handing them a deal that was incredibly friendly to conservatism: "Obama has proposed a multi-trillion dollar deficit reduction plan. Republicans just refused to pass it." He was more than willing to compromise, even to put key entitlement programs on the table, much to the chagrin of progressives, but... no. Never. Refusing to hand him any sort of victory, Republicans chose to block any measure other than one steeped in their right-wing extremism, like the Ryan budget, that aimed to get the country's fiscal house in order.

All of which makes their rhetoric about fiscal responsibility, about how Romney will do what needs to be done, complete and utter bullshit.