It’s refreshing to see that at least one right- wing pundit, Cal Thomas, has rediscovered the evils of excessive national debt.
Once their loudest battle cry (remember the Tea Party?), Republicans have been oddly silent about the dangers of our virtual insolvency since Trump has blown the roof off the debt.
So, good for Thomas.
Even though all he does is grumble about it, trot out a few reliable quotes from Founding Fathers, and present a couple misleading anecdotes, like JFK cutting taxes to stimulate growth and Saint Reagan’s nostrums about government spending.
Yeah, given that JFK inherited from Eisenhower a system wherein the high end income tax rate was 91 percent, cutting it to 61 percent probably abetted economic growth.
And Thomas’ allusion to Reagan’s aversion to taxes fails to mention it mainly applied to the wealthy folks.
He lowered taxes on the rich but then started taxing Social Security benefits to try, unsuccessfully, to fill the deficit hole.
What Thomas doesn’t do at all, and no Republicans ever do, is identify the real causes of our obscene national debt: spending more than half our budget, north of a trillion dollars a year, on defense; giving huge bailouts to big corporations (and Trump’s cronies); and relentlessly lowering taxes on the super rich.
And now they’re talking about defunding Social Security and cutting social welfare programs to be able to continue their ruinous, disingenuous, anti-egalitarian policies.
Brian Langston
Sequim