I'l give Joe Scarborough a little credit at just after 8:00 in the segment, when he describes the proposed Republican tax plan as "the most, just nakedly pro-corporate, [pro]-rich tax cut at the expense of working class Americans that I've ever seen in my life."
But this peroration leads him to ask, "What the hell is wrong with the Democratic Party?" Say what?!?
The Republicans don't care about the deficit. And haven't since 1980 or so. They pretend to care when they want to cut money from something. But this corporate tax cut is based on creating a gigantic increase in the federal deficit.
Sadly, the Democrats actually do seem to care about the federal deficit. They need to cut it out. They need to take the advice in the title of Jamie Galbraith's 2008 book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. A large part of his point is why worrying about the federal deficit in the US is a sucker play that the Democrats should keep falling for. Sadly, the Democratic President elected that year took the deficit way too seriously. Which led him to frame economic policies in ways that fit nicely with the Republican narrative, even for ones like the stimulus bill and the auto company bailouts that the Republicans opposed.
Our star journalists and commentators, though, have adopted concern about the deficit as one of those essential pieces of the narrative to which they are so committed, regardless of empirical reality.
But it's sloppy economics. And that's putting it very generously.
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