Dems Convention: “Prime Minister” Bill Clinton Teaches Paul Ryan Some Budget ‘Rithmetic
Former President – presently “Prime Minister” – Bill Clinton rode into the convention hall last night gunning for not merely the Romney/Ryan ticket, but for the entire 21st century version of the GOP, that Luddite Republican party that hearkens back to the 13th century, that time before double entry accounting. . . Clinton accomplished much during his time at the podium, but his full-throated reminder that budgets have two foundational components, spending and revenue, was, for me, one of his finer moments:
“I mean, consider this. What would you do if you had this problem? Somebody says, ‘Oh, we’ve got a big debt problem. We’ve got to reduce the debt.’ So what’s the first thing he says we’re going to do? ‘Well, to reduce the debt, we’re going to have another $5 trillion in tax cuts, heavily weighted to upper-income people. So we’ll make the debt hole bigger before we start to get out of it.’
Now, when you say, ‘What are you going to do about this $5 trillion you just added 
on?’ They say, ‘Oh, we’ll make it up by eliminating loopholes in the tax code.’ So then you ask, ‘Well, which loopholes? And how much?’ You know what they say? ‘See me about that after the election.’
I’m not making it up. That’s their position. ‘See me about that after the election.’
Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: arithmetic.”
Many have tried to educate the Republican party about this arithmetical fact, yet they pretend they’ve found a kind of Einsteinian way to raise massive amounts of revenue from a single atom called tax cuts, the so-called supply side theory. Huge amounts of energy can indeed be unleashed from a nano-sized atom in the physical universe, but this simply does not work in the human economic sphere – less tax revenue = less governmental revenue, period, paragraph. If enacted in a Romney administration, GOP budget “proposals,” particularly Paul Ryan’s, will indeed cause an explosive event to be sure: a rocket strength takeoff in the budget deficit and national debt.
So I hope independent/undecided voters were listening to Clinton’s simple and correct words last night about ‘rithmetic. Was Paul Ryan tuned in?
