As the Big Ugly is debated in Congress, I keep hearing a set of assumptions thrown around as if they're truths.
In each case, there's no reason to believe that they are.
The first one is that "the government is too big"? Oh? What's the right size government.
Republicans like to claim that the best government is the one that governs the least, but they've never put that into practice. They aren't right now. If you have masked Geheime Staatspolizei running around, you are definitely trying to govern.
They'd reply, as Mike Lee did the other day, that they're against faceless bureaucrats who are responsive to elected officials, which is pretty rich for a guy acting like he's the Senator from Deseret rather than Utah.
Anyhow, for a country of 300,000,000 what is the right size government?
Nobody seems to have an answer.
It's likely one, fwiw, that not only has more immigration officers, but more social security employees, and more IRS employees. The military, which nobody is proposing to shrink, probably doesn't need to be anywhere near its current size.
Speaking of the IRS, we also hear that "Americans are overtaxed". This is actually complete crap.
The big problem in the US economy today is that Americans are grossly undertaxed but still want a government that would have to be funded by a lot more taxes. Still, Americans believe they're heavily taxed.
I once had a die hard GOP Trumpee tell me that Americans paid the highest income tax rate in the world. When I challenged him on it, he looked it up right then on his computer and was stunned.
Frankly, the wealthy should pay a lot more taxes than they do.
An outright myth is the trickle down economic theory that Republicans have revived. Tax breaks for the wealthy don't trickle down. It's well demonstrated.
Another one is that you can grow your way out of a budget deficit. We know that you can't. And yet I heard Mike Johnson claim that we surely would do just that if the Big Ugly was passed.
Johnson is a smart man. He knows better, which either shows that he's sipping Sazerac with his coffee, willfully deluding himself, or flat out lying.
A secretly held one that causes people like Grover Norquist to wake up in the middle of the night cackling is that you can starve the government into being smaller. Newt Gingrich believed that. It just doesn't happen.
The rude truth of the matter is that the deficit has been too high for many years, but it really started ballooning during Trump I. Yes, it ballooned further during Biden's presidency. The Trumpites plan to balloon it to the point that will cause a fiscal crisis, there's no doubt about it.
The Republicans voting for the Big Ugly know this. They'll either be dead before it matters, or are just hoping somebody else will come around and fix the budget after they've killed the government back to 1914 levels. Why?
Well, um. . .the government is too big. . . and taxes are too high. . . and 1914 was a perfect year. . .
