Long, wonky, nerdy, tangential post on why Republicans are wrong

Back to nerdy posts! Alright, this chart basically shows the fallacy of the Republican diagnosis of what ails the economy. Republicans in general decry 1) all government spending 2) the size of government. These are not the same things. The size of government is (basically) all the people the government employs. Government spending IS a real problem in that it is unsustainable. But the causes of its instability are entirely divorced from what Republicans say the problem is.

Deficits 101: all a deficit means is that the government is taking in less money than it's spending. It's like if you make $40,000 a year but spend $45,000. That's it. So if that happens, you'd probably want to check out where your costs are coming from and cut them where you can. Oh good more charts:
 
 Charts are great. Anyway, a few things should stick out to you here. Two costs are flat -- "other spending" (things like the military, education, etc. etc.) and "social security" will cost basically the same now as the always will. The driver of the future deficit is almost completely health care costs. In other words, if you want to be serious about the deficit you should focus on health care reform.

Oh wait. Didn't Obama do something like that? I seem to remember something about ObamaCare cutting about $450billion in medicare costs over the next ten years? Wow! That is actually a lot money. By comparison, the House Republicans right now are debating about cutting between...$66million and $100million in cuts. If you extend that by ten years, that's still about 1/50th the amount of cuts Obama passed in health care reform. And that's exactly where we should be focusing.

Sorry, that was a huge tangent, but it's important. The cuts the Republicans want are utterly superfluous to our long-term fiscal condition, and hurtful in the short-term. They're cutting programs like Pell Grants so middle class kids can go to college, Head Start so poor kids can get pre-school education, heating subsidies for people who can't afford it in the winter, and great programs that are demonstrated to work, like Teach For America. They are NOT cutting Medicare/Medicaid, and they actually criticized Obama for making those cuts (they also just claim without any basis that the cuts won't happen. I don't understand that argument at all...they're in the law.)!

The takeaway is this: look at the chart at the top of the page. In the last year, the percentage of private sector people being hired has gone steadily up, while the number of people in the public sector (people employed by the government) has gone down. The Republicans are now proposing cutting MORE people from the public sector. How will this strengthen our economy in the short term, and how will it help cut the deficit in the long term? Public sector employment has next to nothing to do with the deficit.

OK.