unscriptured

Posted in unscriptured, by Toby T, Friday, April 29th, 2011 at 12:01 am.

One of the things that God hates is hypocrisy. I asked why she singles that out above so many other things and she told me it’s because so often the biggest hypocrites are also her biggest boosters. That is, the people that most like to get in our face and tell us what it is that god wants us to do or not to do are also the most likely to say one thing and do another.

And don’t think I don’t recognize the danger of telling you that God has a special problem with people that go around telling you what God wants. But what can I do?

Anyway, you’re probably aware that some of the biggest boosters in the United States of what they claim to be God’s desires are our elected Republicans. There’s the “family values” politicians whose histories are loaded with divorces, affairs, and gay shenanigans, but they’re not the ones that God was pointing out to me this week. This week she pointed out the so-called budget-hawks that can never seem to reduce spending but manage to pull out all the stops when it comes to curtailing our government’s income. It’s the budgetary equivalent of gorging on candy and calling it a diet.

There’s actually an official strategy behind this, what the Republicans call “starving the beast.” Their theory is that if they keep the government from having any money, the government will be forced to shrink and forced to reduce its spending. They’ve said as much. What they haven’t said, or at least not where I’ve heard it, is that they expect this reduction in spending to happen when the Democrats are completely in power. They know that the voters don’t actually want most spending reduced and will punish whoever is in office when it happens. They also know that when it comes to actually being fiscally responsible the Democrats are the ones to count on. So they assume that when the Dems get fully in power, they will reduce the spending like the Republicans want and take all the blame that the Republicans don’t want.

So far, the problem with this plan is that the Dems have largely noticed that reduced spending is not the only way to balance the books, you can also increase income. Which they’ve done when in power.

So the next time you hear the Republicans talking about being the “adults” in the fiscal conversation, remember that far from being the ones that can fix our long term budget problems, the truth is that the Republicans are our long term budget problem.