Peter Beinart The GOP's New Tax Cut Hypocrisy: Cheney’s famous words, that “deficits don’t matter.”

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The GOP's New Tax Cut Hypocrisy
Peter Beinart

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-27/bush-tax-cuts-and-the-gops-deficit-hypocrisy/?cid=hp:exc

Five years ago, Republicans backed tax cuts—but said deficits didn’t matter. Today, they say deficits are all that matters, but still like tax cuts. Peter Beinart on the party’s economic time warp.

What do the debate over the Afghan war and the debate over extending the Bush tax cuts have in common? They could both be taking place in 2005. The financial crisis has changed the world. But in Washington, the arguments have barely changed.

...On the tax cuts, it’s much the same. During the Bush years, Republicans mostly insisted, in Dick Cheney’s famous words, that “deficits don’t matter.” Now they say deficits are virtually all that matters. Their rhetoric has shifted radically, but their policy prescriptions haven’t changed one bit. You might think that people terrified of deficits would be concerned about permanently extending tax cuts that will add at least $2 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Nope. The Republicans were for cutting taxes when they didn’t care about deficits and they are for cutting taxes when they do care about deficits, which is another way of saying that they don’t really care about deficits. For their part, most Democrats are as adamantly opposed to upper-bracket tax cuts as they were in the Bush years, even though if you really believe in Keynesian economics, as the Democrats supposedly do, raising taxes during a recession makes a lot less sense than raising them when times are good....

There were plenty of problems with American politics in the early Cold War years, but at least each party had a coherent view of deficits, a view that guided the policies it espoused. Today, everyone pretends that they’re worried about the deficit—and then pursues basically the same agenda they would pursue if they weren’t worried. “There’s another elephant in the room—the budget deficit,” declared Max Baucus recently. “And that elephant is growing.” It may not be the world’s most elegant metaphor, but Baucus is on to something. An elephant in the room, after all, is something that doesn’t interrupt your normal routine, no matter how large it gets. Until it tramples you, that is.

(more at link)

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Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

I feel this states a lot of great facts that show the GOP hypocrisy to its fullest! It is almost laughable if it wasn't so tragic that those that are looking at the deficit are thinking of cutting SS, Medicaid and Medicare instead of cutting tax cuts to the wealthy!

Thanks to Peter Beinart!

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1. is there legitimate video of cheney saying deficits don't matter? nt

[1776Forever]

2. Here is the report that this quote came from:

Cheney to Treasury: "Deficits don't matter"

http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dick_Cheney_Budget_+_Economy.htm

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was told "deficits don't matter" when he warned of a looming fiscal crisis.

O'Neill, fired in a shakeup of Bush's economic team in December 2002, raised objections to a new round of tax cuts and said the president balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from "the corporate crowd," a key constituency.

O'Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits-expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone-posed a threat to the economy. Cheney cut him off. "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: "We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due." A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired.

The vice president's office had no immediate comment, but John Snow, who replaced O'Neill, insisted that deficits "do matter" to the administration.

Source: Adam Entous, Reuters, on AOL News Jan 11, 2004