America's Tea Party Fraud

by Peter Beinart
The Daily Beast

The British just showed how real conservatives behave—with the biggest cuts in government spending since World War II. Peter Beinart on how pathetic U.S. Republicans look by comparison.

This fall, a group of kamikaze conservatives, terrified by mounting debt, outraged by excessive government spending, and unafraid of hard truths, are rallying to save their children and grandchildren from a future mortgaged to the central bank of China. Too bad they live in England.

I have my philosophical differences with British Prime Minister David Cameron, but give him this: He is what he says is, a man who hates debt. His new budget, unveiled this week, cuts government spending by a whopping $130 billion over the next five years. He’s proposed brutal cuts in pensions, welfare, and government employment. And more remarkably, for a conservative, he also wants to cut the defense budget by 8 percent and raise both value-added and capital gains taxes. To cut the deficit, he’s transgressing the ideological taboos of both left and right. He’s even slashed funding for the upkeep of the palaces of the queen.

The contrast with our supposed deficit-haters in the GOP could not be starker. Cameron started attacking his country’s budget problem within weeks of taking office. Republicans held the White House for eight years and did exactly the opposite. Tea Party types are quick to say it’s not just Barack Obama’s deficit spending that bothers them; they were outraged, outraged by the Bush deficits too. Really? Where were the folks with flags, muskets, and mutton-chops when Bush masked the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars, year after year, by funding them through supplemental appropriations that fell outside the normal Pentagon budget? Where was Rush Limbaugh when a Bush appointee threatened to fire Medicare’s chief actuary if he disclosed the true cost of Bush’s prescription drug plan, which according to the Congressional Budget Office costs more over 10 years than Obama’s bailouts, economic stimulus, and health-care reform combined? Where were the tears for America’s debt-saddled grandchildren when Bush pushed through tax cut after tax cut without any corresponding spending cuts? Oh yes, I remember where the Republican base was in 2004, when the prescription drug bill passed and the wartime spigot was going full blast—they were reelecting Bush with the largest grassroots conservative turnout in American history.

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