If they destroy the country, what will they do for jobs?

by Rich Miles

Paul Krugman has a piece in the NY Times today that lines out the problem with Republicans quite clearly: they won't accept tax increases to reduce the deficit, but they won't accept spending cuts either, so in effect, we end up with status quo: huge deficits and no way to significantly reduce them.

Republicans say they want to reduce the size of government, but they keep doing things to make government bigger, and more unruly, and more deficit-laden, and they keep blaming all this on anyone but themselves.

And so, we end up with a government that is bloated beyond all imagining, and getting bigger by the day, and no one, of either party, willing to take the deeply unpopular steps of significantly cutting one or more of the Big 4: SocSec, Medicare, Medicaid, and whatever the new medical plan is going to look like. Whatever it looks like, it's a pretty sure bet that it's going to be damned expensive. But no one wants to cut anything. The closest we've gotten to cutting SocSec is that in 2010, recipients won't get a cost of living increase (COLA). And that, as is so often the case in Washington, is not a cut - it's just a failure to increase.

So we're going to see the cost of our government balloon up and up and UP, until we reach the next threshold of disbelief: a quadrillion dollars. We've been panicked into a blase' attitude toward a trillion dollars, haven't we? And a quadrillion is only a thousand trillions, right? At the rate we're going, we should cross that threshold in less than 10 years.

And still, the Republicans will not advocate for either serious cuts, or serious tax increases. So the numbers keep getting bigger and bigger. And our country goes further and further down the drain, and the 59-41 Senate is as gridlocked as ever it was at 50-50.

And our country continues to die. And all the Republicans can think of to do is obstruct, and seek to regain power. As if that's going to make any difference in a positive direction.

Because as much as the Republicans want to think so, the deficits are not going away until grown-ups take over the Legislatures in Washington, and all the state capitals.

And there are no grown-ups in the Republican Party. By definition.