Cantor’s Cant, Kabuki Dept. 0
You can’t put your money where your mouth is if all you have is mouth. In the debt ceiling discussions, Republicans are all mouth.
From TPM (emphasis added):
With me so far? Good, because here’s the rich, hair-pulling, you-got-to-be-kidding-me part:
When the parties sat down yesterday at the White House for another round of hashing out a deal, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) laid out the spending cuts House Republicans hammered out in earlier failed talks with Vice President Joe Biden aimed at a grand bargain on the long-term budget. Now set aside that there’s an open question as to whether Democrats ever did or ever would agree to those cuts Cantor laid out. And set aside that the deal Cantor is proposing doesn’t offer any compromise to Democrats on the tax side (it’s still spending cuts only).
Set all that aside and guess what?
Cantor’s own numbers don’t add up to $2 trillion!
Jonathan Bernstein discusses the emptiness of Republican fiscal posturing (I nearly wrote “policy”) at his blog:
But it’s wrong for objective observers to describe Republicans as fiscal conservatives, when in fact it’s Democrats, for better or worse, who appear through their actions to actually care about reducing budget deficits.
For Republicans, the debt ceiling is not the issue; they happily raised it seven times under President George the Worst.
The debt ceiling is a Trojan Horse for making the rich richer and the poor poorer. It’s what they do.
