Vote with your Brain

There is so much disinformation and misinformation out there.

The current conservative talk about deficit presumes as if the deficit sprung full grown from the head of Democrats in January 2008. Look at the graph at left. This is a flat out bald faced lie. (Picture from here.)

There's another lie circulating around. That the debt is exclusively the problem of the Democrats and the Republicans have nothing to do with it.


See graphs at left. (From here. Another one here.)

The pink (Republican) and blue (Democrat) background colors indicate what presidential administration is in power. Two things should be immediately apparent to anyone whose brain is still consuming oxygen. 1) Debt slope crosses administration boundaries and 2) it accelerated the most under Republican administrations.

This is not, most emphatically not, a defense of Obama. You can make all sorts of arguments against what he's been doing in the last couple of years. But the current rhetoric about deficits and debt by Republicans is at best disingenuous abut more likely an outright lie.

Remember that when Clinton wanted to reduce the deficit and pay down the debt the Republicans lined up and voted against it. (See here.)

Okay, people are pissed. The economy is in the tank. A whole f*load of jobs have been sent overseas to the point that most of what we buy is made in China. It's not clear how we're going to get free of this mess-- especially since a lot of the jobs we exported to China were jobs that helped bring us out of past recessions. If you want to say that thirty years of crap didn't happen and Obama is responsible for it since he's right there now for the last 18 months, you can do so. It's a free country. You can vote with your adrenal glands if you want to.

Me, I'll vote with my brain.