Truth, Lies and In Between

…are rampant in the House and Senate. Nancy Pelosi being the biggest moron to ever hold a seat in the House, let alone to have been Speaker, is one of the worst. The liberal media isn’t helping because they let these idiots say whatever the hell they want without question.

The Republicans are just as culpable, if not more so.

Fail.

Spending Denialists and the Fiscal Illusion
The late economist James Buchanan predicted our current budgetary impasse. Is there a way out?
Matt Welch

Several weeks before the slow-motion “fiscal cliff” negotiation ended in a giveaway-rich, tax-hiking, 154-page spending bill that senators had all of six minutes to glance at before approving by an 89-8 vote in the wee hours of January 1, President Barack Obama reportedly told House Speaker John Boehner flat out: “We don’t have a spending problem.”

Boehner, in relaying the quote to The Wall Street Journal three days after the House of Representatives grudgingly ratified the Senate plan, expressed astonishment at the president’s words. But he shouldn’t have. Spending denialism—of the literal sort—has become a core progressive value in the age of Obama.

“Spending isn’t the problem,” Steve Benen wrote at Rachel Maddow’s blog in December. “We don’t have a spending problem. We have an aging problem,” seconded Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum in January. “We don’t have a spending problem, we have a military spending problem,” chimed in The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein.

Such confident consensus would be more convincing if not for the fact that federal spending rose from $1.77 trillion in fiscal year 2000 to $3.72 trillion in 2010. If spending growth had been pegged to the rates of inflation and population, Washington would still be doling out less than $3 trillion a year, and the fiscal conversation would be about surpluses, not debt ceilings.

via Spending Denialists and the Fiscal Illusion – Reason.com.