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Thursday, January 06, 2011

Griper Blade: The GOP's $100 Billion Lie

Boehner
Yesterday, I mentioned that Republicans began their first day of their new House Majority by breaking one of their oaths made in their Sacred Pledge. Where the party had sworn in their "Pledge to America" to make cuts that "will save $100 billion in first year alone," they now say the number -- which they'd apparently reached into their pants to retrieve -- was merely "hypothetical."

But words mean things. The only way that number could be hypothetical would be if the GOP had asked voters, "If we promised you an insanely large, made-up number -- say, $100 billion -- in spending cuts, would you elect us?" But they didn't. At least, not straight out like that. "Will save" means "will save," not "could save." It's a definite statement and, when written in the body of a signed document with the word "pledge" in the title, constitutes a concrete promise. Once again, Republicans -- with the help of a credulous and/or uncritical media -- lied to the American people. Clearly, there was no math behind the figure, no one sat down at a ledger book and added up all the savings. It was merely an impressively large number that could be used for a bait-and-switch.

If you doubt that $100 billion was an invented number, consider that the new House Republican Budget Czar, Paul Ryan, has no idea what they're planning on cutting. "That is what is gonna happen in the appropriations process down the road," he said when asked for specific cuts. "So I can't tell you the answer to that because, as a budget committee person, we simply lower the cap and then those things go down. We're gonna be reducing all domestic discretionary spending. I can't tell you by what amount and which program, but all of it is going to be going down, and the aggregate amount will be back to 2008 levels before the spending binge occurred."...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

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