A zombie lie is a false statement that keeps getting repeated no matter how often it has been refuted. Zombies are difficult to kill and they keep coming back. We need a term for a true statement that isn’t believed no matter how many times it is repeated. “Zombie truth” doesn’t seem to quite capture what I’m looking for. My term would describe Bruce Bartlett’s column in today’s New York Times. He makes many true statements that are often repeated but seem to have no impact on our political discourse. At the core, however, is this basic fact:
In January 2001, the [Congressional Budget Office] projected that the federal government would run a total budget surplus of $3.5 trillion through 2008 if policy was unchanged and the economy continued according to forecast. In fact, there was a deficit of $5.5 trillion.
Mr. Bartlett details all the factors that combined to take nine trillion dollars away from our treasury during Bush’s presidency. He also explains how we got to the point in 2001 that we were on target to run large surpluses and why Bush’s rationale for his tax cuts was dishonest. For a full accounting, go read his post. The short version is that Clinton’s tax hike in 1993 (that was opposed by every Republican in Congress) and the Paygo rules enacted by Congress in 1990 (which prohibited new spending without new revenues) combined with a booming economy to fill our government’s coffers. Bush eliminated those tax hikes and made deep cuts instead. Then the Republican Congress eliminated the Paygo rule in 2002. The result was much less revenue combined with much higher spending that was not offset by new revenue. It wasn’t just our wars that were put on the credit card. It was Medicare Part D and pretty much everything else.
The first thing the Democrats did when the took over Congress in 2007 was to reinstate the Paygo rule, although they’ve had to waive it a couple of times to deal with the Great Recession.
The Republicans can dangle teabags from their hats all they want, but they created the debt and the financial crisis that required a massive stimulus bill.
They don’t care about debt. They care about low taxes that cause debt. Then they’ll tell you the problem is the spending. Yeah, they spent too much when they had power, too. They simply have no credibility on the economy. Yet, no matter how many times we point this out, they still are taken seriously by more than a hundred million Americans.
