Senator John Thune must think Joe Biden is going to be President next year. After four years of ignoring the unabashed deficit spending of his Dear Leader Donald Trump, South Dakota’s senior Senator is switching back to warning that more debt is bad:
It was just reported recently that, in 2021, the United States will exceed 100 percent debt to GDP. That puts us in the elite and rare company of Italy, Greece, Japan, countries around the world that have gotten dramatically overextended when it comes to their sovereign debt. When you get to the debt to GDP which is in excess of 100 percent, that is pretty dangerous territory.
Everybody says we are the best economy in the world, we are the world’s reserve currency, and people are going to continue to want to invest here in the United States. Well, at some point there are consequences. The chickens do come home to roost. You cannot continue to borrow without eventual consequence. At some point, interest rates will start to normalize, at which time these countries that invest in the United States are going to demand a higher return. Interest rates—when they go up, it means the amount we have to pay to borrow money goes up, and when our interest gets north of $1 trillion, it will exceed every other item in our budget, including the amount that we spend for national security.
So that is the other part of the de-bate which the other side never references; that is, what are we doing to the long-term future of this country, to our children and grandchildren, all of whom are going to be responsible for this debt? We are essentially doing everything we do right now—putting it on the credit card and handing the bill to our children and grandchildren… [Senator John Thune, floor speech, U.S. Senate, 2020.09.09].
Thune has been happy to swipe the credit card for Trump’s tax cuts, Trump’s military budget (which Trump now admits was filled with unnecessary sops to the military-industrial complex) and the first round of coronavirus relief and hand that bill to our children and grandchildren. He voted last year to raise the debt ceiling until after the 2020 election. Now that the election is closing in and Trump is swinging the odds back in Joe Biden’s favor, Thune apparently senses that he needs to get deficit spending back in our heads as a big bugaboo.
Republicans, and all elected leaders, are supposed to help educate the public with consistent public statements and policy votes. If Senator Thune were truly concerned about the national debt, he’d have taken advantage of the Republican Presidency and Republican control of the Senate to do something about the national debt. Instead, Thune allowed the federal government to rack up a trillion more in debt in Trump’s first three years than it did during President Barack Obama’s last three years, in the midst of a growing economy, and before the coronavirus recession hit. Instead of consistently drawing public attention to the real problems of national debt and taking action to reduce it, Senator Thune has ended up supporting more deficit spending when we don’t need it and now starting to oppose more deficit spending when we do need it.
But maybe that’s the bright side for Republicans about the Presidency of Joe Biden: electing the man from Scranton to lead our nation will help Republicans rediscover their professed fiscal discipline… a principle Joe Biden and the Democrats have consistently followed.
Vladimir Thune knows his boy is gonna get thumped and so it’s back to the same playbook the same scumbags had when President Obama was in office. Choke off growth and anything that will help the economy and our people. Anything to toss a wrench in this country for the benefit of his patron’s, the Russians. I think he even went to Russia to pick out a location for some investments on a Fourth of July junket…paid for by US taxpayers. What a guy.
Stifle economic growth just in time for a Democratic President to take office, then play deficit hawk and partisan obstructionist to block that Democratic President’s efforts to boost the economy: that’s Thune’s play. That’s why it’s all the more important we replace Thune’s GOP seatmate with Dan Ahlers, help Dems in other seats oust Republican incumbents, and take a majority in the Senate, so President Biden can follow the Obama playbook of achieving all we can in two years, before Noem revives the Tea Party and tries to retake Congress in 2022.
Tax cuts eh pay for themselves hey Johnny .What a poor excuse for a senator.
I know, I know. This doesn’t fit here, but I don’t see a place handy where it does. I’ll just drop it off here for y’all to copy the link and read at your convenience.
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“The vast majority of the thousands of Black Lives Matter protests this summer have been peaceful, with more than 93% involving no serious harm to people or damage to property, according to a new report tracking political violence in the United States.”
But cops attack BLM protests more often and more violently than any others.
is.gd/ma9fMU