The "Miracle" Is That Marco Rubio Managed To Make It To The U.S. Senate
The Tea Party grifter wing of the Republican Party still hasn't learned that a majority of the country views them as a walking, talking disaster waiting to happen, and now helping to lead the charge is Florida's own "Sen. Duh," Marco Rubio.
Fresh from his "no" votes on Hurricane Sandy relief and the fiscal cliff, cheered on only by the uniformed voters he and the party do their best to manipulate, it seems Rubio has found another way to capitalize on misinformation:
Help to create a manufactured crisis, play the false "both sides" blame game, then fundraise off of it.
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, Tuesday sent out a fundraising email citing “manufactured crises” as a reason people should give to Reclaim America, a political action committee he started in 2011.
“Whether it’s a "cliff," a "ceiling" or a "sequester," Washington politicians in both parties are guilty of using manufactured crises to force through bad legislation, often with loads of pork-barrel spending hidden inside the bills,” the email reads.
Manufactured crisis you say? Well, at least on that note, Rubio is being honest. The fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling are each indeed a "manufactured crisis," in that they were created by the Republican Party. There is no "both sides" there, and not surprisingly Rubio cites no examples for the statement in that fundraising letter. He just throws "both sides" and "pork" in there because it makes good grifter-speak.
You can read the Rubio fundraising letter here.
To be clear, the fiscal cliff came about in part when the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires were about to expire, a Republican imposed deadline. Those tax cuts have devastated our economy, but rather than raise taxes on the rich, Rubio and the GOP wanted to use the cliff to make more cuts to Medicare and Social Security, among other things. (More about that in a minute.) In short, they wanted to throw grandma and the poor off the cliff rather than Rubio's rich donors.
Rubio also used that tired old grifter fairy tale "we can't raise taxes on the job creators" nonsense as an explanation for his vote. To Rubio, small businesses are the likes of Koch Industries and AT&T, which each gave Rubio's Reclaim America PAC $10,000 in 2012.
During the negotiations over the fiscal cliff, it became well known that one of the not so secret plans the GOP had up their sleeves was to not only make those cuts to entitlements like Social Security (yes, they are entitlements because you've paid into them, and Republicans want to rob you of them) but to do so in a way as to place the blame on President Obama. It didn't work, of course, but Rubio was deep into grift mode there as well, as Paul Krugman pointed out in the New York Times. Rubio, Krugman says, flat out lied on the proposed changes to Social Security.
Now let's move on to the next "manufactured crisis," the debt ceiling. As Steve Benen explains, the debt ceiling basically boils down to this: Congress "bought things," or rather approved federal spending, and now we must pay those bills. That means President Obama has to borrow the money to pay for what Congress "spent." It's a simple concept, but Republicans again are attempting to muddy the waters and mislead the public about what's really going on. While much of that misinformation is intentional, there's also a good chance that many members of the GOP really don't understand what the debt ceiling is, and what it will mean if it isn't raised. (If I were a gambler, I would place money on Rubio for being one of the latter clueless members. But either way, facts don't matter much to Rubio.)
Facts aside, here's another clue the debt ceiling crisis is another GOP grifter tactic. Before they threatened not to raise the debt ceiling in 2011, Republicans currently in Congress at the time had raised it 19 times under President Bush, no questions asked. Think Progress has the details here. Bush kept increasing the debt, and GOP leaders said no sweat, here you go. Ka-ching! But suddenly last year the GOP decided they could no longer do that, because President Obama was at the helm. Instead they held the country hostage, and in doing so nearly crashed the economy, and cost us a credit downgrade.
You're welcome. Love, The GOP.
Now here we go again. No matter what the GOP implies, one fact is clear: If the GOP forces the country into default and the debt ceiling isn't raised this time around, it's going to be worse for our economy than it was the last time around. A LOT worse, as Ezra Klein explains:
Imagine we hit the debt ceiling Feb. 15. The BPC’s analysis suggests that federal spending over the next month will be about $450 billion. Federal revenues will be nearer to $277 billion. That means that the government will have to default on about 40 percent of its obligations.
The choices it will face quickly become stark. It can cover interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending, education, food stamps and other low-income transfers, and a handful of other programs, but doing all that will mean defaulting on everything — really, everything — else. The FBI will shut down. The people responsible for tracking down loose nukes will lose their jobs. The prisons won’t operate. The biomedical researchers won’t be funded. The court system will close its doors. The tax refunds won’t go out. The Federal Aviation Administration will go offline. The parks will close. Food safety inspections will cease.
This is the difference between a debt-ceiling shutdown and a government shutdown. As Shai Akabas, a research at the Bipartisan Policy Center, puts it, “in a government shutdown, the government is shutting down future obligations. With the debt ceiling, They’ve already obligated the money. They owe these people the payments now, and they can’t make them.”
So much for the claim of fiscal responsibility on the part of the Republican Party. They claim they're willing to crash the economy, and hold us hostage, with disastrous, long term effects merely because Obama is in the White House. It's not much of a stretch to say it's a sick sort of revenge against him and those who dared to reelect him.
That brings us back to Marco "Fiscal Conservative" Rubio, and his "manufactured crisis" fundraising scheme. As I said, there is no "both sides" to this fiasco. Republicans have manufactured this crisis all on their own. It was never a "crisis" when Bush wanted the debt ceiling raised while he spent money like a drunken sailor for eight years. Rubio may not have been there then, but it's a fact nonetheless.
Just imagine you're one of those $10,000 donors who receive this latest plea for big bucks from Marco, as he and his colleagues pop up in front of any camera they can find to make their bogus threat not to "give Obama a blank check" by raising the debt ceiling. Then consider this:
Then, of course, there’s the financial-market chaos. Trillions of dollars in derivatives and other financial products are based on the interest rate that the federal government pays when borrowing. U.S. government debt is, after all, supposed to be the safest investment in the world, and so it’s used to “benchmark” all other sorts of debt. A spike in the Treasury rate would mean a spike in credit card rates and mortgage rates, not to mention all manner of more esoteric financial derivatives. The damage to the economy would be tremendous, and it would occur at every level, from individuals looking for a loan to buy a house to hedge funders trying to play the markets.
“Think about what we’re talking about here,” says Steve Bell, director of economic policy at the BPC. “We’re talking about the reserve currency of the world. We’re talking about the deepest and most liquid markets in the world. And we’re sitting here wondering if we’ll cover our obligations?”
If Republicans were to make good on their threat and they did crash the economy, how would those rich donors of Rubio's feel about the potential for their own portfolios to go up in a puff of smoke? After all, it would no longer be just a matter of the poor "moocher" class who must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. We're talking the potential to lose more than a million here or a million there. So imagine if one of those big donors gave to Rubio's Reclaim America PAC in honor of that "manufactured crisis" letter? Are they willing to donate even more to enable Rubio and his party to potentially cost them a lot more than a $10,000 check in the debt ceiling crash later?
Give money to Rubio's PAC now and enable him and the Republicans to cost you everything else in the future? Really? Nice grift work if you can get it, huh?
Something tells me Sen. Duh hasn't thought this one through. But then the days when we had Republicans in Washington who actually knew something about governing and the economy are long over.
Manufactured crisis, indeed.
