'The Only Solution Given is Pills'

The Army has a bit of a problem. Despite efforts to curb suicide among troops, Army suicides continue to rise. "One week after the U.S. Army announced record suicide rates among its soldiers last year, the service is worried about a spike in possible suicides in the new year," CNN reported yesterday. "The Army said it already has confirmed seven suicides, with 17 additional cases pending that it believes investigators will confirm as suicides for January.

"If those prove true, more soldiers will have killed themselves than died in combat last month. According to Pentagon statistics, there were 16 U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq in January."

In fact, the Army has seen a rise in suicide every year for the past four years. To combat the problem, the service has created a "battle-buddy" program, which is basically the buddy system for suicide, but this has turned out to be as ineffective as you might have thought it would be.

In 2005, in testimony to a House Appropriations subcommittee, the Army’s surgeon general placed the blame squarely on the troops. "That’s still part of our culture: Real men don’t see [mental health counselors]…" said Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley. "I would like to see a culture that resets the force mentally." Macho, tough guy culture was killing troops, but it seems a pretty safe assumption that this culture had been with the Army longer than its suicide problem. I don't remember the Army having a previous reputation as being a place for sharing and emotional support. Clearly, this "real men" culture -- which, of course, includes real women -- may be aggravating the problem, but it couldn't possibly be the cause.

For their part, the Army seems at a loss to explain the real cause of the suicides. "This is terrifying," Col. Kathy Platoni, chief clinical psychologist for the Army Reserve and National Guard told CNN. "We do not know what is going on." She speculated that maybe it was winter blahs.

"There is more hopelessness and helplessness because everything is so dreary and cold," she said.

"But Platoni said she sees the multiple deployments, stigma associated with seeking treatment and the excessive use of anti-depressants as ongoing concerns for mental-health professionals who work with soldiers," CNN reported.

Now we're getting someplace.





"Unfortunately, I don't find [the rise in suicides] very surprising," John Soltz, an Iraq war vet and founder of VoteVets.org, told MSNBC's Tamron Hall. He said that, of the some 160,000 troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, "twenty thousand of them are medicated on different things like Prozac and Zoloft."

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD, Soltz said, wasn't considered seriously enough and, if a soldier does complain of mental or emotional stress, Army doctors will "just give you a pill and send you back to combat."

In a June TIME magazine piece titled "America's Medicated Army" journalist Mark Thompson spoke to a service member about his experience in Iraq. "You don't always know who the bad guys are. When you search someone's house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there's little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor -- things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would," said Sergeant Christopher LeJeune. "It's not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they're having over there for a variety of reasons. If they do admit it, then the only solution given is pills." LeJeune says he was given the antidepressant Zoloft and the antianxiety drug clonazepam.

Looking at the warnings, this seems like an insane combination. Zoloft warnings include, "You may have thoughts about suicide when you first start taking an antidepressant, especially if you are younger than 24 years old." Meanwhile, clonazepam users are warned, "People who have underlying depression should be closely monitored while taking clonazepam, especially if they are at risk for attempting suicide."

In May of 2006, the Hartford Courant did an investigation of the military's drug prescription practices and found "a growing number of mentally troubled service members who are being kept in combat and treated with potent psychotropic medications -- a little-examined practice driven in part by a need to maintain troop strength."

Among the paper's findings:

-Antidepressant medications with potentially serious side effects are being dispensed with little or no monitoring and sometimes minimal counseling, despite FDA warnings that the drugs can increase suicidal thoughts.

-Military doctors treating combat stress symptoms are sending some soldiers back to the front lines after rest and a three-day regimen of drugs -- even though experts say the drugs typically take two to six weeks to begin working.

-The emphasis on maintaining troop numbers has led some military doctors to misjudge the severity of mental health symptoms.

If John Soltz's numbers are correct, these conditions are true for 12.5% of troops stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the Army isn't tracking this at all. The TIME article tells us, "At a Pentagon that keeps statistics on just about everything, there is no central clearinghouse for this kind of data, and the Army hasn't consistently asked about prescription-drug use, which makes it difficult to track." In fact, TIME tells us:

Military families wonder about the [Army's reliance on prescription drugs], according to Joyce Raezer of the private National Military Family Association. "Boy, it's really nice to have these drugs," she recalls a military doctor saying, "so we can keep people deployed." And professionals have their doubts. "Are we trying to bandage up what is essentially an insufficient fighting force?" asks Dr. Frank Ochberg, a veteran psychiatrist and founding board member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Given everything we know about the use of psychotropic drugs to medicate soldiers, it seems amazing that few would make the connection with the rising suicide rates. But admitting the connection would've meant an admission of failure by the Bush administration -- something they just didn't do. The military was "completely overextended by the Bush administration," said Soltz, adding that he hoped the Obama administration would do a better job of addressing these issues.

That hope should be shared by most of us, since it seems pretty clear that we're killing our own troops in an attempt to keep them in the field.

-Wisco

The Man in the Iron Bubble

Maybe if we all take up a collection, we can raise enough money to bribe Dick Cheney to just go away. He may be the most politically tone deaf politician in recent history, acting as if everyone agrees that the Bush administration's policies have been dazzling in their genius. You wonder if Dick actually checks any news sources or if he just relies on a circle of fawning sycophants who only tell him what he wants to hear. If Bush was the boy in the bubble, Cheney's may be the model that bubble was based on.

Or maybe "bubble" is the wrong word. More like "armored iron sphere." Not only doesn't truth seem to reach Dick, but it seems to be actively repelled. Nothing sinks in, because no truth ever gets close enough to touch him. There's a certain segment of the population who seem to believe that you can force your beliefs to become fact. All it takes is a sincere and fervent faith that your view of the universe is correct and it magically becomes true, true, true. You see it with creationists, Holocaust-deniers, global warming naysayers, free market moonies, and other various and assorted species of flatearthers. No fact can get in, because facts are the enemy of faith. Every bit of evidence that your position is wrong -- no matter how damning or conclusive -- is rejected immediately. The logic of this illogical thinking is simple; you're right, therefore, any evidence to the contrary must be wrong. That's all the proof you need to keep believing that the Earth is in the thrall of UFO overlords or that Vladimir Putin is really a robot or that Dick Cheney is right.

Of course, it may just be that the former-VP is just slinging propaganda when he pretends to be as ignorant and stupid as he often seems to be. It may just be that Dick's familiar with reality, but uses lies and fearmongering to try to change our perception of it. It may just be that he's not wrapped in a cocoon of yes men.

But, as always when we're talking about neocons, I'll go ahead and take them at their word on what they believe and don't believe. I'll assume that Dick Cheney's not a lying sack, but just a stupid and ignorant man. Honestly, you can't be generous with these people -- it's completely impossible. Your choices are always "they're lying" or "they're stupid." Somewhere along the line, we've established that it's a terrible, terrible thing to call these guys liars, so we're left with stupid. And that's being charitable.





While it's both fun and easy to throw rocks at Dick like this, I do have a reason to revisit the bad old days of a couple of weeks ago, when Dick Cheney and his sidekick (some guy named Bob Shrub or Jimmie Tree or Lennie Asparagus... something like that) worked in the White House, desperately trying to rewrite history in their favor. It was called the "Legacy Project" and the idea was to make a last, Hail-Mary attempt to rehab the neoconservative image after eight long years of nearly uninterrupted disaster.

But there's no reason that the attempt has to stop after the Bush administration (that's the name! Bush) left the White House. As former administration officials, they can still get a reporter or two to come a'runnin' whenever they feel the need drop some whoppers and try to get everyone to wet their pants just one more time.

In this case, it was three reporters; Mike Allen, Jim Vanderhei, and John Harris of Politico. I guess dealing with the sheer volume of horse crap here is a big job that takes many hands.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

That's right, one more pitch for torture. I won't say "one last pitch," because I'm sure it's not. If Dick's as much of a psycho- or sociopath as he seems to be, I'd imagine that it's hard to get him to shut the hell up about torture. I so don't want to know what sites the bookmarks on his laptop link to.

I could go through and point out the problems with Dick's view, but that'd just mean rewriting older posts. Suffice it to say that Dick only knows one song -- "WE'RE ALL GOING TO FREAKIN' DIE!!!" We all know how it goes, it's been stuck in our heads for the last eight years. Dick can come up with nothing new, despite the fact that the mojo wore off this particular spell a long time ago. We're tired of being terrified. It's probably time to give courage a spin.

But Dick's in his iron bubble and it doesn't make any difference whether the bubble is real or he's just pretending it is. Either way, he can't stop behaving as if we're all on the same page, 100% behind the path the mastermind Bush administration laid out for us.

It's almost sad, really. This tired, sick old mental patient babbling away as if anything he said made any sense and as if every word hadn't worn out its welcome a long, long time ago. Like a lunatic on street corner, Dick yells out "The end is near!" to anyone who comes within shouting distance.

Maybe it's time everyone started avoiding that street.

-Wisco

Why the GOP Wants the Stimulus to Fail

A peek in at the progress of the stimulus bill in the Senate.

Associated Press:

Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked Democrats from adding $25 billion for highways, mass transit, and water projects to President Barack Obama’s economic recovery program.

Already unhappy over the size of the measure, Republicans insisted additional infrastructure projects be paid for with cuts elsewhere in the bill.

But the Democratic amendment garnered 58 votes, just shy of the supermajority needed under Senate budget rules, and many more efforts to increase the measure’s size are sure to follow.

Wait a second, I thought Republicans were saying that there wasn't enough infrastructure spending in the bill. First they want more, then there's too much. Yes, that's the distinct smell of obstructionism you're detecting. We know Republicans couldn't possibly be that picky or they never would've nominated George W. Bush.

So, what gives? Don't Republicans want a stimulus package to get the economy back on track?

The simple answer is no, they do not.





Monday, Republicans put out a list of what they said was wasteful spending in the stimulus bill. Some of it could be seen as unnecessary -- a "$246 million tax break for Hollywood movie producers to buy motion picture film" and "$150 million for Smithsonian museum facilities" seem like things that either don't need to be done or that could be addressed in separate bills -- but most of this "wasteful spending" doesn't seem wasteful at all. Here are a few examples of the "wasteful spending" in the stimulus:

- $600 million to buy hybrid vehicles for federal employees.

- $1.4 billion for rural waste disposal programs.

- $1 billion for the 2010 Census, which has a projected cost overrun of $3 billion.

- $200 million for public computer centers at community colleges.

- $500 million for flood reduction projects on the Mississippi River.

- $6 billion to turn federal buildings into "green" buildings.

- $500 million for state and local fire stations.

One example of this "waste" is Constitutionally mandated -- the census. Congress has no choice but to fund it. There's much, much more, but you get the idea. The Republican list of "wasteful spending" is padded.

But I said that Republicans don't want the stimulus to work. It certainly explains why the list is padded -- it's a rationalization for their opposition. But why wouldn't they want this to work?

The last time Republicans found themselves in a similar situation -- an economy in ruins and a Democratic president with a plan to fix it -- they found themselves on the outs with the public for about two decades. The Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal nearly destroyed the Republican party. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and an economic journalist, explains:

[For Republicans, the] lesson of the New Deal policies is that it left the Democrats firmly in power for more than 20 years. The Republicans did not regain the White House until 1952, 20 years after President Roosevelt was first elected.

Imagine how terrifying the prospect of 20 years of Democratic presidencies must be for the current generation of Republican leaders. This would mean that they would not retake the White House until 2028, just 20 years before the Social Security trust fund is first projected to face a shortfall.

In 2028, Newt Gingrich will be 85 years old; Mitt Romney will be 81; Mike Huckabee will be 73 and Senator McCain will be 98. Even Sarah Palin will be a less than youthful 64. In short, if President-elect Obama is allowed to carry through with his stimulus package and the rest of his ambitious domestic agenda, most of current leadership of the Republican Party can expect to spend the rest of their political career in the political wilderness, far removed from the centers of power.

"For this reason, the Republicans can be expected to adopt a strategy aimed at delaying and diluting the stimulus," he tells us. "We can expect their leaders to find every conceivable argument to slow down the spending that the economy desperately needs right now to prevent further job loss." Success for America means disaster for the GOP. No wonder Rush Limbaugh said he hoped Obama fails.

So, if you're a Republican, you draw up a list of items that can -- by an extreme stretch of reasoning -- be called wasteful, then you add up the amount of all this "waste," and go on talking head shows to say that "the Democrats have included $X worth of pork in this bill. We must all freak out now." Cable news shows have segments measured in minutes and seconds, there's no way you'll be asked to itemize everything you're calling pork. If you do it this way, you can get away with it. The people on the TV machine just don't have the time it takes to get to the truth.

The progress of the stimulus bill is coming as close to stalled as it's likely to be. And that's just the way Republicans want it. They don't want a solution, because the problem serves them very well.

-Wisco

Welfare Reform's Failure

In 1996, Bill Clinton signed a bill ending Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). "Today, we are ending welfare as we know it," Clinton said. "But I hope this day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began."

What this began was a change in the way the United States looked at welfare and the poor. Recipients were capped at five years in the program. After that, you couldn't collect anymore benefits, no matter what your situation. There was a "welfare to work" requirement, which put people into job training programs -- regardless of what education they already had. TANF would be funded through block grants, which states would administer and spend as they saw fit.

What had happened was that Clinton caved to pressure created by decades of Republican propaganda. Welfare recipients were lazy, Republicans said, they had kids just to get benefits, they made a lifestyle of AFDC. When it came to slinging BS about welfare and the poor, then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan set the standard in his stump speech:

There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.

Reagan called this woman a "welfare queen" and claimed she -- along with many like her -- were draining America's resources at public expense. Of course, it wasn't true. There was no woman in Chicago. It was all lies.





But this became the public perception of the AFDC recipient. At the time that Clinton signed Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, ending AFDC, researchers with Public Eye ran the numbers and found that just about everything that people had been told about welfare recipients was wrong; the average recipient was in the program for less than a year, had statistically fewer children than the rest of the population, and the vast majority of the children of welfare recipients weren't becoming recipients themselves. What the right had called a "culture of dependency" was their own invention -- it didn't actually exist. Republicans had simply found a new scapegoat to attack and, cowardly as they always are, the group they chose to attack for political gain was relatively powerless. A problem was invented, complete with a fix -- end AFDC.

Later, in looking for signs of success to the new program, people were hard-pressed to find any. Payday loan and rent-to-own stores, both of which charge usurious interest rates for short-term loans, sprung up all over the nation like mushrooms. Despite the rhetoric predicting that forcing people off AFDC would decrease poverty, there was no decrease. In fact, it increased. But this was an ideology-based program, not a reality-based program. No matter how badly it failed, it had to be portrayed as a great success.

"How We Ended Welfare, Together," Bill Clinton, New York Times, 2006:

In the past decade, welfare rolls have dropped substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million today. At the same time, caseloads declined by 54 percent. Sixty percent of mothers who left welfare found work, far surpassing predictions of experts. Through the Welfare to Work Partnership, which my administration started to speed the transition to employment, more than 20,000 businesses hired 1.1 million former welfare recipients. Welfare reform has proved a great success, and I am grateful to the Democrats and Republicans who had the courage to work together to take bold action.

So, a program that required states to kick people off welfare rolls succeeded in reducing welfare rolls. Success! This is like saying a law aimed at clearing streets for ambulances succeeded because it resulted in a lot of traffic tickets. If 60% of mothers leaving TANF found work, what happened to the 40% who didn't? Are we supposed to forget about those families?

"Clinton masterfully blurred [reducing welfare rolls with reducing poverty] in a recent New York Times opinion column, as did most others on the 10th anniversary of the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, writing as if getting mothers and their children off the welfare rolls is the same as getting them out of poverty," wrote Robert Sheer for The Nation. "In the absence of any evidence that poverty is tamed, he celebrates a 'bipartisan' victory, which was good for his image but not necessarily for those it claimed to help."

It's only now that the economy's in the tank that the real consequence of welfare reform is being seen. The New York Times reports that, as the economy sinks, welfare aid isn't growing.

Despite soaring unemployment and the worst economic crisis in decades, 18 states cut their welfare rolls last year, and nationally the number of people receiving cash assistance remained at or near the lowest in more than 40 years.

The trends, based on an analysis of new state data collected by the New York Times, raise questions about how well a revamped welfare system with great state discretion is responding to growing hardships.

Michigan cut its welfare rolls 13 percent, though it was one of two states whose October unemployment rate topped 9 percent. Rhode Island, the other, had the nation’s largest welfare decline, 17 percent.

"Of the 12 states where joblessness grew most rapidly, eight reduced or kept constant the number of people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the main cash welfare program for families with children," we're told. "Nationally, for the 12 months ending October 2008, the rolls inched up a fraction of 1 percent."

The problem? TANF moved the responsibility for dealing with poverty from the feds to the states. And the states are broke. TANF isn't bringing in new recipients because the states can't afford to pay any more. In fact, as the economy continues to slide and state budgets become more and more pinched, they're cutting assistance.

What are the odds that a program that was based on phony assumptions and political scapegoating would fail so badly? As any critic could've told you at the time Clinton signed it into existence, pretty damned good. Clinton claimed the program would be tweaked as time went on, that obvious problems with the bill he signed would later be fixed. Instead, the bill was signed and forgotten.

"What crystal ball does he have that he knows he can fix it," said Deborah Weinstein, an official at the Children's Defense Fund, at the time. "What powerful constituency would be treated that way? If he knew there were problems, why did he sign it?"

To win an election, that's why. It was Clinton's "triangulation" strategy of taking Republican issues away from them by solving them -- or pretending to solve them -- himself. Welfare reform would've been a big issue in 1996, but Clinton knocked that stool out from under Bob Dole. The consequences of this political maneuver continue to reverberate today. The New York Times again:

“There is ample reason to be concerned here,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican Congressional aide who helped write the 1996 law overhauling the welfare system. “The overall structure is not working the way it was designed to work. We would expect, just on the face it, that when a deep recession happens, people could go back on welfare.”

“When we started this, Democratic and Republican governors alike said, ‘We know what’s best for our state; we’re not going to let people starve,’ ” said Mr. Haskins, who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “And now that the chips are down, and unemployment is going up, most states are not doing enough to help families get back on the rolls.”

In fact, it's probably hurting our economy not to increase welfare rolls at this time. Retail sales are down and the best way to get people to spend money is to get money to people who absolutely need it; these are the only people who are guaranteed to spend. This is the reasoning behind extending unemployment benefits.

But we can't, because we've given up control of one of our economic tools. The states can't use it, because they can't afford to, and the feds can't use it, because they don't have it anymore.

The moral of this story is beware Democrats trying to appease Republicans. When you pass laws that don't have a rational basis and instead are based in ideology, demagoguery, and false information, the results can't possibly be good. Welfare reform, widely claimed as a success story, is a failure. It failed because it had no logical or factual basis, only emotional appeal.

That failure should've been as obvious in 1996 as it is today.

-Wisco

Republicans, Iraq, and Santa Claus

A trillion dollars is a terrible thing to waste.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., on the $888 billion economic stimulus package.

Wicker's statement represents the Republican view of the stimulus package. Sadly for him, he's typical of a GOP senator; how he feels about spending depends entirely on which party is doing it. Like most of the remaining Republicans in the Senate, Wicker voted with Bush every time a bill dealing with the occupation of Iraq came up.

$1,000,000,000,000 may be a terrible thing to waste, but $3,000,000,000,000 is just fine. That three trillion dollar price tag is what the invasion and occupation of Iraq will have cost us before we're done -- and that's the conservative figure. Talk about your shovel-ready projects -- we've been shoveling money down a hole in Iraq, while Republicans in Washington shoveled BS on the American people. The difference here is that all that money does nothing for the US, let alone Iraq. It's just a big money-pile we've lit on fire. If it's changed American and Iraqi lives at all, it's changed them for the worse.

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Jim DeMint debated the merits of the stimulus, with DeMint arguing in favor of tax cuts. Because eight years of tax cuts have been so good for the economy. To listen to DeMint, the stimulus is spending money to spend money.





"[D]on't say it's a stimulus when it's a government spending plan. And all of these things, the needs in our society, education, these are things we debate every year..." he said, "But this is the largest spending bill in history, and we're trying to call it a stimulus when it's just doing the things that... You wanted to do anyway." Frank decided that this would be a good time to resort to truth.

No tax cut builds a road. No tax cut puts a cop on the street. No tax cut educates a child...

The largest spending bill in history is going to turn out to be the war in Iraq. And one of the things, if we're going to talk about spending, I don't -- I have a problem when we leave out that extraordinarily expensive, damaging war in Iraq, which has caused much more harm than good, in my judgment.

And I don't understand why, from some of my conservative friends, building a road, building a school, helping somebody get health care, that's -- that's wasteful spending, but that war in Iraq, which is going to cost us over $1 trillion before we're through -- yes, I wish we hadn't have done that. We'd have been in a lot better shape fiscally.

"The problem is that we look at spending and say, 'Oh, don't spend on highways. Don't spend on health care. But let's build Cold War weapons to defeat the Soviet Union when we don't need them. Let's have hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars going to the military without a check,'" Franks said.

Of course, it's easy for Republicans in Washington to attack the stimulus to score cheap political points. But Republicans who have to deal with the real world don't have it so easy. Associated Press reports that "Most Republican governors have broken with their GOP colleagues in Congress and are pushing for passage of President Barack Obama's economic aid plan that would send billions to states for education, public works and health care," because state treasuries are "drained by the financial crisis." Many states have a balanced budget provision in their constitutions, which means that many states are facing an illegal shortfall. Here in Wisconsin we have such a provision and Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle is facing the possibility of "furloughing prisoners, knocking poor children off Medicaid rolls and slashing school aids."

But Republicans in Washington are protected from the real world. They aren't responsible for balancing budgets or paying for programs. This leaves them free to demagogue tax cuts. DeMint's plan to stimulate the economy includes making the Bush tax cuts permanent, cutting the corporate tax rate, cut the capital gains tax, and cutting spending. In other words, the same old Republican same old. If this actually worked, wouldn't we be just fine right now?

At the heart of all of this is a Republican attempt to buy votes with tax cuts. This has been a cornerstone Republican political theory since Reagan. "[A]s the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing the 'Two Santa Claus Theory' in 1974," wrote Wall Street Journal associate editor Jude Wanniski in 1999. "If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts in order to grow the economy -- not to 'starve the government of revenue,' which is Milton Friedman's rationale."

Basically, Democrats had leftover New Deal programs like Social Security and Medicare to run on. Infrastructure spending and aid to states. Republicans could never win if they were just the party of "no" -- which is basically what they are. Democrats gave, Republicans took away. The idea was that no one would vote for someone who promised to take something away from them. Republicans had to do their own giving, thereby buying votes in the same way they thought Democrats were.

So tax cuts became the new Republican give-away. Always cut taxes, no matter what. And, if you cut taxes enough, you'll "starve the beast" and force government to cut spending. We saw it with Bush -- tax cuts were the cure for every ill. If the economy was doing well, as it was when Bush came into office, then you needed tax cuts to keep the economy going. If the economy was bad, you needed tax cuts to get it back on its feet. There is no situation where a Republican won't call for tax cuts. It doesn't matter whether or not it helps, all that matters is buying votes and forcing government to cut spending.

Recent history shows us that Republican economic theory -- deregulate, spend insane amounts of revenue on the military, and cut taxes -- doesn't work. Yet here they are, pretending the last eight years never happened.

"The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work," writes Thom Hartmann. "They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided 'conservative' Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts."

The question for Republicans isn't "what's good for the country?" The question Republicans ask is "what's good for us?"

-Wisco