Budget peacock is a term coined by the Center for American Progress. It’s a term to describe that unique species of legislator that likes to talk about the deficit but doesn’t want to actually do anything about it. It’s all about looking good.
And then there is another species of deficit bird all together: the deficit peacock. Deficit peacocks like to preen and call attention to themselves, but are not sincerely interested in taking the difficult but necessary steps toward a balanced budget. Peacocks prefer scoring political points to solving problems.
How can you tell the difference between deficit hawks, those who are serious about the dangers posed by persistent, large deficits and deficit peacocks, those who only use those dangers to preen and score political points? It’s actually fairly simple. Here are four easy ways to tell when someone isn’t taking our budget problems seriously.
1. They never mention revenues.
2. They offer easy answers.
3. They support policies that make the long-term deficit problem worse.
4. They think our budget woes appeared suddenly in January 2009.
So, the budget peacocks have been tut-tutting over our deficit. They’ve gone so far as to deny unemployment benefits to unemployed workers during one of the worst downturns in history. The cost of the unemployment insurance extension – $33 billion. The deficit right now is $1 trillion. The major contributing factors to the deficit are the Bush tax cuts, the economic downturn and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
All of this is why this clip of John Kyl is completely insane. At least he’s being honest – he has absolutely no concern for the deficit. His concern is only for tax cuts for the rich.
Kyl has no idea how to pay for $679 billion in tax cuts and he has no plan to. Tax cuts are magical! Just like wars, they are actually free!
WALLACE: We’re running out of time, so how are you going to pay $678 billion just on the tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year?
KYL: You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. Surely congress has the authority and it would be right, if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.
The GOP economic plan is a big dose of Herbert Hoover, mixed with Marie Antoinette. The sad thing is the GOP will probably make big gains and will help to drag out the economic pain.