With only a little more than 24 hours to go before polls close, I thought I would try to concisely summarize the key pro-Blue talking points to help those of you who are engaging potential voters.
So let's dive in:
- Republicans had eight years in office - with near total control of all three branches of government for most of those eight years. Democrats have only had two (though Republicans still control the judicial branch). As the President himself mentioned during the 2008 campaign, It's going to take more than two years to undo eight years of damage.
- Republican's complaining about the bailouts? Republicans handed out the bank bailouts in 2008 - before the election. Bush's economic team handed out the money with no strings attached.
- Republican's complaining about budget deficits? (This one really gets me as it should get you.) Republicans created the deficits. At the end of Clinton's term in office, he left us with annual budget surpluses. When Bush came to office, Republicans undid the surpluses by not only giving huge tax breaks to rich folks (who weren't even asking for them), but by driving up spending to historical highs. The combination allowed the national debt to balloon.
Read on for more ...
- The healthcare bill is an expensive waste of money? How? The bill didn't create a national healthcare system. It mostly reformed the rules by which insurance companies must play by. It also engineered efficiencies into the operations of Medicare and Medicaid. The reforms will actually reduce deficits.
- Where's the economic growth and jobs creation? Why did Republicans time and time again filibuster jobs packages, unemployment benefits, and other economy stimulating bills?
Now, let me add some more explanatory info on the deficit/debt issue:
- In general, government should (with very few exceptions) maintain a balanced or surplus budget. So, why were Republicans so happy to spend money the government didn't have when they were in control? Because they really don't care - it's simply a piece of BS that they reiterate to have something to campaign on.
- One of those few exceptions is during times of recession and high unemployment (Hey, that's now!). Again, the debt wouldn't be that bad if Republicans didn't rack up huge deficits during the Bush years. In a down economy, an increase in government spending (and an increase in private sector spending via unemployment benefits and other stimuli) goes into the economy to make up for lower spending in the private sector. More revenues for companies, means customers are demanding more output, which requires more labor, which means job creation- that's a stimulus. That's how Bill Clinton did it just a decade and a half ago when we were trying to extricate ourselves from a prior recession.
- And just like Clinton did, when the economy rebounds and becomes self-sustaining, tax revenues go up (since more people are working and paying taxes). With responsible taxes and budgets, this means the budget goes back to a surplus (just like it did under Clinton), and the surpluses can be used to pay down the debt created during the sour economy (like Clinton did until the end of his term, but Republicans undid and started creating deficits before the current recession/depression began. (That's just totally financially irresponsible!)
So why Give the Democrats more time? Because growing the economy simply takes time. Republicans, particularly with the new Tea Party influence, have no intention of working on the economy, education, Wall Street reform, and other things we forgot about like stem cell research. In fact, the main stated goals of Republicans is to do nothing - just sit back and enjoy the nice Congressional paychecks and healthcare and do nothing.