Jon Stewart on the fiscal cliff

Amusing as usual, and probably not safe for work, also as usual:

 

One thing that gets sailed right over: Obama’s proposal would cut the cumulative budget deficit over the next 10 years by $4 trillion. The Republican proposal would cut it by $2.2 trillion. This isn’t all that surprising. A proposal a year or two back by a large subset of Congressional Democrats would have eliminated the deficit entirely in a decade, while the Paul Ryan budget with overwhelming GOP support would not have balanced the budget for a quarter century, and even that was making implausibly optimistic assumptions. For that matter, that last two presidents to preside over budget surpluses were Democrats — Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson, the latter at the height of the War on Poverty, the Vietnam War, and the Apollo program.

And as I keep reminding people, the ratio of national debt to GDP shrank under every president of both parties, moderate Republicans as well as Democrats, until a conservative Republican — Ronald Reagan — took office, at which point the the debt-to-GDP ratio soared. It rose under both Bushes as well, though it declined under Bill Clinton.

Obama’s deficits have been large, which is not surprising given his inheriting the worst economy since the Great Depression, but did you realize that the ratio of deficit to economy has fallen faster for the last three fiscal years under Obama than over any three-year period since the end of World War II?

And yet a remarkable number of people think Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility.



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