Senator Fritz Hollings: Ashamed

[Wetzelbill]

ASHAMED

I'm saddened. Here comes "the best of the best" scaring the daylights out of everybody in a two-full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times on September 7, 2008, with a $53 trillion hole in the federal budget supposedly caused by Social Security and Medicare entitlements. This financial group must know of the CBO study of the cause of the increase in the national debt the first four years of President George W. Bush's term. The CBO finding: 48% due to tax cuts, 37% due to war and security costs and 15% due to increased spending. The devastating affect of Bush tax cuts over the past eight years have added over $4 trillion to the debt. But averaging a $500 billion deficit each year for eight years hardly a peep out of the eminent Peter G. Peterson or Concord Coalition. I have the highest regard for both. I've worked with them. And now there is the Peterson-Walker initiative on the budget. But somehow they get lockjaw when a Republican president takes over, and only surface when a Democrat might take over.

None other than Alan Greenspan set the scene for tax cuts on January 25, 2001, when he testified that we were paying down too much debt. At the moment of his testimony, the Secretary of the Treasury reported that we were $65 billion in the red. But the Secretary of the Treasury was soon to be given his walking papers and the idle rich got a tax cut causing us to go from surpluses as far as the eye could see to increasing the debt by $4 trillion. Addressed To the Presidential Candidates and the American People, the ad states: Federal office-seekers cannot realistically be expected to propose detailed plans for Medicare, Social Security, health care, and other spending and tax reforms during campaign season......


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-ernest-frederick-hollings/ashamed_b_125455.html

[Cooley Hurd]

1. Recommended - great to hear from Fritz again!

:thumbsup:

[Wetzelbill]

2. I know I was glad to see that he wrote this

[Wetzelbill]

3. kick

[flpoljunkie]

4. Give 'em hell, Fritz!

[Psst_Im_Not_Here]

5. Awesome

Kicked, rec-ed and I BUZZED the article

[midnight]

6. It sounds like George had to buy some of his votes.

[blm]

7. Thank you Fritz. He's always been a great voice for common sense on the economy.

.

[invictus]

8. How can we be paying down "too much debt?" n/t

[Wetzelbill]

9. I know that doesn't even make sense

[crickets]

10. That was my immediate question as well. -nt

[Wetzelbill]

11. I think that's the kind of thing Republicans just make up

so they can do something that is irrational and reckless.

[Usrename]

12. Fritz has nothing to be ashamed of.

Except, maybe, for letting Lieberman whitewash the Enron investigation. But that wasn't really his fault.

[Waiting For Everyman]

13. Hollings was right on free trade from the gitgo.

He tried like hell to get a global minimum wage included. But Repubs had the votes.