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Perilous times; Editorial; Beaver County Times; December 2, 2010.
The editorial leads off with “Nation needs compromise and moderation more than ever before.” I could be mistaken, but I don’t recall reading anything like this when Democrats held the majority in the House and had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. You may recall the Times had no problem when Democrats used their majorities to force through things like Obamacare without a single Republican vote. The day the Times published this editorial, House Democrats pushed a vote for extending the Bush-era tax rate cuts only for those families making less than $250k/yr ($200k for individuals) and prohibited Republicans and opposing Democrats from offering amendments. Let’s see if the Times publishes an editorial critical of this move.
The editorial quotes opinion writer David Brooks as writing, “For centuries, American politicians did not run up huge peacetime debts. It wasn’t because they were unpartisan or smarter or more virtuous. It was because they were constrained by a mentality inherited from the founders.” The remainder of the quote is gobbledygook.
For the “For centuries” portion of the comment to be accurate, the first “huge peacetime debt” would have to come after either 1976 or 1988. In any case, for the 10 years prior to World War II, we ran up huge deficits.
Here’s the bottom line the editorial doesn’t acknowledge. “American politicians did not run up huge peacetime debts” until we started implementing so-called “progressive” programs and policies in a big way during the FDR administration in the 1930s.
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