If you know any wingnuts in your personal life, please tell them that all John Boehner’s threats and posturing only resulted in saving less than a third of the money it cost to extend the Bush tax cuts.
In both cases, Democrats made big concessions on key Republican agenda items — tax and spending cuts — in the face of intransigent opposition from the GOP. But while the appropriations deal from last night cuts $38.5 billion in spending over the next six months (through the end of the fiscal year in September), the tax cut deal deprives the government of roughly $150 billion in revenue over a similar period of time.
Extending the Bush tax cuts “would result in a $200 billion to $300 billion cost to the US Treasury compared to what had been expected” in one year — or $100 to $150 billion in six months. So while they very nearly shut down the government to extract painful spending cuts, Republicans had already wiped out those spending cuts many times over with the revenue lost from extending the Bush tax cuts.
We could have tripled the amount of money spent in each program that was cut and still wound up spending less than the cost of extending Bush’s tax cuts. So, please don’t let your wingnut friends go to sleep tonight thinking that the Republicans give a shit about the deficit. They don’t, which is why they keep letting it skyrocket every time they get into power. They just don’t like paying taxes. As Dick Cheney said, “Deficits don’t matter.”
