The day America made a wrong turn.

The government is on the verge of shutting down because of budget difficulties. It didn't have to be this way.

The day that Bill Clinton left office, he handed a surplus to George W Bush of over $200 billion dollars. The projected surplus was to be about $5 trillion dollars by 2011 and the debt paid off in entirety.

But 9/11 happened. George W Bush pushed through a taxcut of $1.3 trillion dollars and soon we were in two wars that he refused to pay for. In little over two years, the surplus was gone and we were running deficits again. Instead of a $5 trillion dollar surplus, George W Bush added $5 trillion more to the national debt.

If that was all that had happened, we would be able to dig out of the hole. However, with his penchant for no regulations, he drove our entire economy off the cliff. We have been trying to recover. But now, the Repubs say that Obama has ruined our economy. The stupidity hurts and ignorance will kill us all.

For years, Grover has been against all social programs of any kind. But he concluded that the American people would never vote to get rid of them because they work.

So his plan, adopted and extended by the GOP over the last 30 years has been to increase the deficit as much as they can any time they are in power. Not just through the existing social programs which they can't easily kill, but by subsidies to their corporate bosses, and large tax cuts to reduce revenues. They see recessions as helpful because people lose their jobs, and the tax base shrinks, government revenues shrink, and the deficit grows.

Then when they are in the minority, they scream about the deficit and demand that the Dems spend absolutely nothing. As the deficit grows, the GOP begins to claim that it is the social programs that create the deficit and argue that the only way to "save" the country is to end the social programs.

Basically, the drive up the deficit as a mechanism to claim we can't afford any social programs. And then if they get back in power, they start cutting social programs more and more ... but they also keep cutting taxes. Keeping the deficit high. They'll continue this until the kill all social programs. Or until we stop them.

Seen any new social programs lately?

He told the country a bunch of pretty lies (such as "You can
continue to get everything from the Government that you're
used to and still pay less taxes") and we, being greedy and
stupid, ate it up.

And that single event set in motion everything that has
happened since that evil day.

Tesha

Ain't that the truth.

Yet take a look around here. The repubs get lots of help on a daily basis.

using the CIA for domestic espionage and the IRS to harass opponents, then Reagan illegally selling weapons to terrorist states and using the money to fund secret wars run from the Whitehouse basement, and also using intelligence agencies to harass political opponents. Bush I covering it all up by snagging Noriega who had the goods on drugs for guns and the secret wars, because the operations were run from his airbases with his cooperation. A brief respite during the Clinton Admin, with the conspiracy outside the Whitehouse conducting a spanish inquisition to find something, anything to impeach him over.

Then you get to Bush II, who trashed the surplus for no discernable good reason and invaded a country on a whim with made up evidence. Then proceeded to violate the Geneva Conventions, demanded to know what books you are reading, and sat back to leave thousands to die, many of them infirm in hospitals no less, during a hurricane when simulations run only months before told them the flood walls would breach.

You can't overstate this stuff. Now we have a crew that will cut health benefits to the elderly to give the top 2% another tax break.

Bush paid for his wars through a supplemental payment plan.

I wondered what it was like for Romans living during those times. I thought that I'd never see that happen to America, but that was before Reagan and the Bushes and their ilk hit the fastforward button on our society's decline and collapse.

A good historical fiction series that covers this time period is Colleen McCullough's "Masters of Rome." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Rome