Republican Party Hypocrisy

It seems convenient that now the Republican Party is ranting and raving about how job creation is the top priority in order to help restore the economy. Yesterday, it seems deficit reduction was the top priority. So what gives?

Let’s think. Lately we’ve been discussing the expiration of the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy… oh… now we understand. Back to the ‘me-first’ mentality and how they can line their own pockets most immediately and justify it by some 99 cent slogan. The plan now is to act as if they (Republicans) have always championed job creation over deficit reduction and after they say that over and over again, eventually people will just agree.

It looks as though their argument is to extend the tax cuts to help create jobs. However, their logic is far from sound as the non-partisan Tax Policy Center states:

“The Bush tax cuts of 2001 to 2003 provided much less stimulus to the economy than other policies of equal cost would have. The underlying reason is that although the tax cuts were well-timed to provide a short-run economic stimulus, they were poorly designed for this task.”.

Meanwhile as they champion the wealthy tax cuts that evidently do not provide any kind of benefit for the economy, they are consistently denying that extending unemployment benefits would help the economy. Help the rich, deny the poor. The one problem with that is that extending unemployment has shown to be one of the top economic jump starts. In 2008 Mark Zandi reported that for every dollar spent in extending unemployment benefits the economy boosted in growth by $1.61.

“No form of the fiscal stimulus has proved more effective during the past two years than emergency UI benefits.”

Their facade of being the voice of America is quickly fading to the voice of self interest. My suggestion to the GOP is to meet up again at Voyeur and re-think their strategy.