Texas continues its slide towards Mississippi by electing predominantly Republicans. Texas has fallen into the bottom of U.S. states in most metrics. Perhaps the one bright spot in Texas has been the employment picture.
For various reasons, few of which have to do with Republicans, I'm sure, the major cities in Texas did not suffer a real estate bubble and collapse that hit many other areas of the country. Our unemployment rates also did not rise as high as the rest of the country. Could it have something to do with the fact that the major cities in Texas tend to keep voting for Democratic mayors? Could be.
Getting sidetracked.....one of the major themes in the avalanche of political ads here in Texas is bashing Obama. A couple of candidates claim to be the "best antidote" to Obamacare, as if providing health insurance is a bad thing. Laughably, one Supreme Court justice brags proudly that he fought to keep "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Really important stuff. All of them claim to be "REAL" conservatives, whatever that means. One thing it means is that they will never get my vote.
Sidetracked again.....another major theme running through these Republican ads is how Obama is spending the nation into oblivion. Spending out of control! An avalanche of spending! Well, well, my suspicion is confirmed. Obama isn't spending anywhere near what recent Republicans did. See the chart and story below.
How is it that Republicans still have this aura of fiscal restraint when it turns out they spend like drunken sailors, and it's the Democrats (Clinton and Obama) that get things under control? How? Lies, lies, lies.
David Dewhurst is about the worst now. His ads are just one lie after another. One that sticks in my mind, and probably the mind of the mindless Republicans in Texas is that "Dewhurst will cut spending, cut taxes, and balance the budget." Mindless pandering lies. But Texans seem to eat it up. Texans don't want truth. Texans want someone who tells good lies.
Anyway, check out the spending chart. (Click it if you have trouble reading it)
An Obama Spending Spree? Hardly.
A dominant theme of the national political discourse has been the crushing spending spree the U.S. has ostensibly embarked on during the Obama presidency. That argument, ignited by Republicans and picked up by many elite opinion makers, has infused the national dialogue and shaped the public debate in nearly every major budget battle of the last thee years.
But the numbers tell a different story.
The fact that the national debt has risen from $10.6 trillion to $15.6 trillion under Obama’s watch makes for easy partisan attacks. But the vast bulk of the increase was caused by a combination of revenue losses due to the 2008-09 economic downturn as well as Bush-era tax cuts and automatic increases in safety-net spending that were already written into law.
Obama’s policies, including the much-criticized stimulus package, have caused the slowest increase in federal spending of any president in almost 60 nears, according to data compiled by the financial news service MarketWatch (not dominated by liberals).
The chart shows that Presidents Reagan, both Bushes, and to a lesser extent Clinton, grew federal spending at a far quicker pace than Obama. Part of the reason for the slow growth is that Obama — unlike his Republican and Democratic predecessors — signed a law in February 2010 necessitating that new spending laws are paid for. In addition, Obama last year signed into law over $2 trillion in debt-reduction over the next decade.
Republicans argue that safety-net spending has crossed a critical threshold in recent years and Obama has been unwilling to address it. The two sides have jousted over who is to blame but the President has put hundreds of billions in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security on the table in deals that have been derailed, thanks in no small part to the GOP’s resistance to raising new tax revenues to help bridge the budget shortfall.
Last week, Obama’s likely Republican opponent Mitt Romney accused Obama of lighting a “prairie fire” of spending and said he “added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.”
Link is here. I guarantee you won't hear about this if all you watch is FOX. Of course, if all you watch is FOX, you won't be reading this here.
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