The Problem with the Republican Party in Two Tweets
I follow two Twitter accounts that just retweet all the tweets of every Congressperson (one for the Senate and the other for the House). What I’ve learned from this is that 90% of tweets from Democrats are just virtue signaling (neither true nor false but just signaling “hey, I’m one of the good guys”) whereas 90% of tweets from Republican politicians are outright lies and misinformation.
Now, keep in mind that I am not a Democrat and actually despise both the centrist and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. I don’t much care for Pelosi, Manchin, and Sinema but also dislike Bernie Sanders and AOC. My politics more closely align with F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman than with the platform of the Democratic Party, though I am much more socially libertarian and economically oriented towards functional finance so I certainly differ greatly from Hayek and Friedman too. And I’m constantly stuck in this position where I have to view a party that I absolutely despise as the lesser of two evils — not because the Democratic Party isn’t total shit but because it is the only viable party that isn’t actively trying to wreck the global economy and collapse the entire American system while constantly spreading lies and misinformation to the American people.
While I do substantially agree with liberal-socialism and libertarian socialism (AKA anarchism) when it comes to ethical philosophy and the critique of modern capitalism, I end up agreeing much more with traditional conservatism and classical neoliberalism on many policy issues (though notably not on the question of tax cuts and privatization). And this leaves me in a very awkward position politically — as I’ve only ever actively supported outsider candidates like Ron Paul, Justin Amash, Jill Stein, and Andrew Yang (though I do regret my support for Ron Paul in light of some things that have come to light and because my knowledge of economics has grown a lot over the last decade so I now see a lot of the problems with Austrian School economics). Hopefully, Andrew Yang’s new Forward Party, which is focusing heavily on democracy reform and pushing for ranked-choice voting and open primaries, will change the political landscape in a way that will give people like myself some home in politics. As some sort of neoliberal civic-republican libertarian-distributist conservative social democrat (for lack of a better way to describe my eclectic politics that draws on everything from Burke, Jefferson, and George to Paine, Marx, and Kropotkin), I don’t really have a place in the American political landscape. I don’t align with the Democratic Party but I sure as hell don’t align with the Republican Party either. And I’ve come to realize that the Republican Party is absolutely bad and really lacks any redeeming qualities at this point.
Anyway, to get to the point, here are a couple of tweets from today that reveal the absolute lack of intellectual honesty and integrity on the part of Republican politicians that is so typical of GOP congresspeople. After showing you the tweets from these Republican members of Congress, I will explain why they are total bullshit — like every other tweet that I see from GOP members of Congress, they are intentionally spreading lies and misinformation in order to deceive the American people and also to spread hatred and division politically because they want their conservative constituents to be outraged at things that either aren’t outrageous or aren’t even true.
Here’s the first tweet:
I’ll start by saying that I’ve actually been a staunch opponent of Bernie and AOC’s Green New Deal plans — not so much because of the price tag as because of the fact that it’s an idiotic climate policy. Bernie’s plan ruled out any reliance on carbon pricing or nuclear energy even during the transition to a green economy, which is totally absurd and guarantees that the plan could not possibly actually succeed in reaching its goals. Both Andrew Yang’s and Joe Biden’s climate policies were much better proposals. The problem with Rep. Stefanik’s tweet here is that the “radical spending package” she is alluding to is a reconciliation bill that bears absolutely no resemblance to the Green New Deal (GND) at all. For one thing, the GND is a climate package that would cost $1-trillion per year for 15 years. The reconciliation bill is (1) not a climate package and (2) would cost $3.5-trillion over 10 years (likely already cut back to $1-trillion over 10 years), meaning that the cost is minuscule in comparison to the GND!
The yearly spending on the reconciliation bill (if the higher amount version passes) is about one-third of what we currently spend on Social Security per year and much less than half of what we currently spend on defense per year. Furthermore, the bulk of the spending would be on things that are widely popular across the political spectrum (things like infrastructure that even most conservatives would support!). Drawing a comparison between these two bills is downright dishonest, disingenuous, and little more than an attempt to deceive Americans and divide people against their neighbors by spreading blatant misinformation.
Here’s the second tweet:
Now, this here is exactly why I don’t trust anything that Republicans say. This man is a snake, a liar, and a crook. He’s comparing a 10-year price tag for a federal reconciliation bill to a 1-year price tag for all local and state government spending. Oh dear God! The federal government will spend more in the course of a decade than state and local governments spent in a single year? Say it ain’t so! Holy shit! This is the most dishonest and deceptive comparison! As I said before, the yearly cost of the reconciliation bill would be much smaller than Republicans are telling their constituents (it would be like 1% of GDP or less) and the bill appears to have already been cut down from $3.5-trillion to $1-trillion over 10 years, which means that the yearly spending is likely going to be closer to one-tenth of what we currently spend on Social Security and not really going to be a significant portion of federal spending in the grand scheme of things.
At the same time, fiscal conservatives are threatening to not raise the debt ceiling — something that would collapse the global economy and ensure that China becomes the world’s only super-power! To understand the absurdity of this, you need to realize that the spending has already been authorized by Congress, much of it by conservatives in Congress under the Trump administration and the preceding administration. They’re not proposing to balance the budget here but to renege on promises already made. They’re literally threatening to break all federal contracts and refuse to pay companies for work that they’ve already done. This would likely ruin the global credibility of the United States and guarantee that no one would ever agree to do business with us ever again. It could also potentially force the world to reject the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency and would tank the global economy too. It would also require massive tax increases on all Americans just to keep the American government running as a mere shell of its former self. But, since the GOP also won’t support tax increases, it would likely mean the wholesale collapse of the American system. Our economy and government would both stop working!
Now, they’ve made these threats forever but this is the first time that a real government default seems to be likely. But the fiscal conservatives aren’t economists and don’t understand economic policy (or really even understand how government finance works, for that matter), so they may just wreck the global economy and destroy America altogether because they’re too ignorant to know any better. The only thing that makes the U.S. dollar worth anything is the fact that the American government honors it. If the U.S. government no longer honors debts denominated in U.S. dollars and refuses to pay its bills, those IOUs from the government (which we call “dollar bills”) will become totally worthless. And that’s really what the Republican Party is threatening right now.
And the irony is that it’s the same fiscal conservatives that continuously run up the debt by authorizing more government spending while cutting taxes who routinely turn around and threaten to force the United States to default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. Seriously, every GOP administration results in the debt growing substantially because they always spend more and cut taxes at the same time and the Democrats are the only ones that have ever paid down the debt. But these hypocrites want it both ways. If you thought 2020 was hard, brace for impact because the fiscal conservatives may just be about to cause the biggest economic crisis in human history and destroy the American republic in the process.
