If you think anything is going to change in Washington, think again.
The utter bankruptcy of Republican conservatism can be seen in this brief report on Senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) called for Republicans to embrace ‘a humble and honest populism’ as they consider changing immigration law and writing a budget that will balance in ten years.
Populism was a far-Left political movement of farmers and radical urban union members in the late 19th century. Their candidate was William Jennings Bryan, who lost his race for the presidency three times: 1896, 1900, and 1908. Populism was replaced by Progressivism, which has run the country ever since. The Progressives enacted into law almost the entire Populist agenda.
As for the balanced budget, it is the Republican Party, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, that launched the fiscal insanity of massive deficits: $200 billion annual deficits, beginning in fiscal 1983. This is the inflation-adjusted equivalent today of almost $500 billion – exactly where the federal deficit is today. Never before in peacetime had anything like this happened. Reagan was the godfather of today’s deficits.
Who was it who balanced the budget? Bill Clinton – of course, only by counting Social Security debts as off-budget.
Now Sen. Sessions calls for a balanced budget . . . in a decade. This is his hard-core stand. His peers in Congress are unable and unwilling to threaten anything like a balanced budget today.
The political rhetoric of a balanced budget is sheer fantasy. Any voter who believes it does not understand American ‘populism.’ The middle class, which gets most of the welfare payments – Medicare and Social Security – cares nothing about deficits, if the cost of eliminating them is the revocation of Medicare and Social Security, which is in fact the cost.
This post was published at Tea Party Economist on November 13, 2014.
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