Monday, August 8, 2011

A Tea Party Downgrade? Not Hardly!

Once again, this President and his groupies have decided to use the S&P downgrade as a political tool for the 2012 elections instead of accepting what has happened and, then, stepping up into a leadership role to regain our triple "A" credit rating.

All weekend, the likes of David Axelrod, John Kerry, MoveOn.org, and a variety of other Democrat bloggers have all "parroted" the current Democrat "theme" of "It was a Tea Party Downgrade". As usual, the Dems want you and I to believe that they were completely blameless in the downgrade.

Here's the facts:

S&P warned of a downgrade if a $4 trillion reduction in the national debt was not achieved as a result of the debt ceiling negotiations. The final debt ceiling deal fell well short of that goal. We had been well warned and the downgrade should never have come as a surprise. Actually, it was the Tea Party who proposed "Cut, Cap, and Balance" which would have achieved that $4 trillion goal. But, Harry Reid wouldn't even allow the Senate to vote on it; instead, he "tabled" it.

Meanwhile, there was never any on-paper proposals from either Harry Reid or any other Democrats or from this President to achieve a $4 trillion debt reduction. Instead, we just got a bunch of "conceptual" and "political" speeches. In fact, back in mid-April, the House Democrats submitted legislation that was intended to meet the President's goal of a "clean" debt ceiling increase with zero cuts in spending or any increases in taxes. If that legislation would have passed, my guess is that it wouldn't have just been S&P who downgraded our credit worthiness.

The truth is that we can thank the Tea Party's persistence in finally getting this government to make some spending cuts. If it weren't for the Tea Party, the Democrats and this President would have let the Bush tax cuts expire last December and they would have automatically raised the debt ceiling without a single spending decrease. If that were true, I believe that we certainly would now be in the throws of a double-dip recession and, most likely, would have been downgraded by all the ratings agencies.

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