{"id":2174,"date":"2011-06-02T17:15:41","date_gmt":"2011-06-02T17:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=2174"},"modified":"2011-06-02T17:15:41","modified_gmt":"2011-06-02T17:15:41","slug":"because_its_been_a_while_since_i_chucked_a_grenade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2011\/06\/02\/because_its_been_a_while_since_i_chucked_a_grenade\/","title":{"rendered":"Because It&#8217;s Been a While Since I Chucked a Grenade&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/motherjones.com\/kevin-drum\/2011\/06\/five-things-im-tired\">Kevin Drum<\/a> says what I&#8217;ve been thinking lately:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Republicans didn&#8217;t care about the deficit when Reagan was president, they didn&#8217;t care when Bush Sr. was president, and they didn&#8217;t care when Bush Jr. was president. They only get religion when a Democrat is president and they need an all-purpose reason to oppose everything Democrats want to do. Is this really too complicated to understand? It&#8217;s a political tactic &#8212; and a good one! &#8212; not a genuine reaction to anything in the real world. In the real world, stimulus spending is winding down, Medicare was reformed a mere 14 months ago and is solvent for at least another decade, Social Security is solvent for two or three decades, and the deficit is very plainly <em>not<\/em> a domestic spending problem. It wasn&#8217;t a problem <em>at all <\/em>until 2001, and after that it was caused by two gigantic tax cuts, two<br \/>\nunfunded wars, and a finance-industry driven recession. If we just let the tax cuts expire, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and get the economy moving, the medium-term deficit will disappear.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>No comments please. I&#8217;m not in the mood to argue about things that ought to be self-evident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kevin Drum says what I&#8217;ve been thinking lately: Republicans didn&#8217;t care about the deficit when Reagan was president, they didn&#8217;t care when Bush Sr. was president, and they didn&#8217;t care when Bush Jr. was president. They only get religion when a Democrat is president and they need an all-purpose reason to oppose everything Democrats want [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}