The GOP continues to skim cream and destroy the US economy with/without Agent Orange.
These macro issues seem abstract to those of us probably more easily identifying with the struggles of everyday life but these are indicators of how there are massive national effects.
2018 can make some inroads to reversing this continuing attempt to crater the US economy.
Contrary to what it still wants you to believe, the GOP -- the political party that once supported "pay-as-you" go rules and balanced budget amendments to the U.S. Constitution and still routinely excoriates Democrats for what it says is their profligate ways -- today is not the political party of fiscal responsibility and reduced deficits.
Actually, it's not at all clear this is anything new.
More than three decades ago, former Representative Jack Kemp (NY), who at the time was one of the GOP's budget gurus, was widely quoted saying the Republican Party "no longer worship(s) at the shrine the balanced budget."
About 20 years later, when he tried to warn the George W. Bush White House about the government's rising red ink, Republican Vice President Dick Cheney infamously told Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that GOP icon Ronald Reagan had "proved deficits don't matter" so there was no need to worry about them.
And the budget surpluses during the last 4 years of the Clinton administration were turned into 7 consecutive years of deficits ($2.1 trillion in total) by George W. Bush when he passed up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pay-off most of the national debt and instead used an imaginary projected surplus for a huge and very real tax cut.
But it's hard not to look at the past as the warm-up to the the enormous budget deficit and national debt increasing efforts Republicans are willfully...and obviously joyously...doing now.
www.forbes.com/...