Republicans have run their campaigns for years touting their financial savvy. They claim to be the antidote to "tax and spend liberals", and advocate for lower deficits and sound fiscal policy. Their track record, however, tells another story. The reverberations of an economy based on a house of cards rather than a solid foundation eventually become clear over time. Those reverberations are getting louder, and it is not a pleasant sound.
At the end of the Clinton presidency, we did not have budget deficits (yes, we still had debt - those are two different things). We were actually beginning to pay off some of the national debt. The economy was booming, and the middle class was still on good footing (not thriving, but doing okay).
Enter President George "Dubya" Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress. Bush thought it was a terrible thing that the federal government was taking in more money than was being spent by the government, and decided to "give it back" to the taxpayers. The infamous Bush tax cuts carved a huge hole in the budget and put the country back on track to accumulating and increasing the national debt. Add two wars and a housing collapse that put millions of taxpayers out of work (thus depressing the feeble tax stream even further) and the national debt ballooned.
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