Quick note here: Republicans are going to counter the President's proposals for tax increases by saying that tax hikes would remove money from the economy, from the job creators.
Okay, so what's the counter to that? Well, the Republican's spending cuts represent essentially the same idea. The money's going to come from somewhere. It's going to come from the literal killing of jobs, namely government jobs. It's still people who are going to be on unemployment, competing with others for private sector jobs, and most importantly, not contributing the vast majority of their paycheck to the economy.
If Republicans were really opposed to removing money from the economy, they wouldn't have started this austerity kick in the first place. If they really wanted to oppose taking money out of a weak economy, tackling the deficit with such inane timing would have been the last thing they should have done.
Democrats, at least, are aiming austerity at those who can afford to lose a few inches off their bottom line, at tax cuts which altogether failed to create jobs in the last decade. And if Republicans come back by saying Tax cuts are good, and Keynesian economics are bad, pull out this argument: Tax cuts in a time of deficits are by definition Keynesian, when they are not offset. They are also extraordinarily inefficient.
Keynesian stimulators like aid to states, aid to the unemployed and disadvantaged, and infrastructure spending, though, return more than a dollar in stimulus for each dollar spent.
If they say that the stimulus didn't work, come back with evidence they did work, which is plentiful, especially coming from the CBO. If they draw the 8% prediction on unemployment, take out the fact that such a prediction was based on the estimate that the recession had created 3.8% negative growth, when when the real decrease was something more like 8.9% in that quarter alone.
If people then ask why we didn't get a second stimulus through, say "look at the conservatives." If somebody draws the jobs bill card, say that the Stimulus itself was the first jobs bill, that it passed in the first two months of the Obama Administration. It was the other side that kept it from getting through.
It's a bit less violent than the quotes that the title comes from, but you get the idea: when they attack, don't bemoan your imperfect circumstances, respond, because you got the better rhetorical weapons.