This past week,  Republican Representative Peter Roskam issued a statement declaring August 4th as “Debt Dependence Day“:

Debt Dependence Day should be a stark wake-up call to the American people that Washington is on a collision course with fiscal disaster. For the rest of the year, the federal government is spending borrowed money. Government spending is out of control and it is holding back our economy and piling up a mountain of suffering for future generations.

This year, the government is borrowing 41 cents of each dollar it spends. With 41% of the year remaining, we have now spent every penny of tax revenue for the year, forcing us to borrow all of the money the government plans to spend for the remainder of 2010.

Expert economic testimony before the President’s own debt commission has shown that this level of debt is costing our economy one million jobs a year, and the American people know it is past time to stop the spending madness.

Got that? Debt is bad and kills jobs and it is time to “stop the spending madness”. We’ll come back to “spending madness” in a minute.

Here’s video from an appearance Roskam made on August 4th on CNBC discussing the debt together with Democratic Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey’s 6th District:

It was a pretty balanced exchange but Roskam, as usual, was able to squeeze quite a few whoppers into a short interview. Lets do a little fact-checking:

1. “This majority has sort of slinked out of Washington and hasn’t passed a budget” – Roskam use of the word “slinked” is, of course a deliberate perjorative, implying fear, cowardice or shame. More important, it has been very difficult for Democrats to get anything at all done in this Congress with the level of Republican obstruction being what it has. The Republican minority hasn’t merely voted against Democratic proposals at almost every turn. They’ve waged a vicious and deceptive media campaign against them, the GOP campaign against health reform being a prime example, and have done everything in their power to block or delay crucial votes. The level of obstruction has limited time available for debate on and passage of a budget and the GOP has not cooperated with negotiations on that front.  Without any reason to believe that Republicans would ever negotiate in good faith, Democrats announced publicly in June that they would not seek to pass a budget blueprint in 2010, instead awaiting for the report of recommendations from the President’s non-partisan deficit commission due in December. In the meantime, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer stated that Democrats would adopt lower spending limits than those requested by President Obama.
2. “The nature of this spending is having a huge drag on the economy” – Presumably, the spending Roskam is referring to is not that related to the ongoing wars in Afghanistan & Iraq, which were inherited from the previous administration and were enthusiastically promoted by Roskam and his party. Rather what Roskam refers to must be the spending begun under President Bush and continued under President Obama to deal with the economic crisis, which also began under the Bush administration. That spending -the bank bailouts, the auto industry bailouts, the stimulus package- far from being a drag on the economy, were responsible for saving the country from imminent economic collapse. According to a recent analysis by economists Alan Blinder, a former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman, and Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics, the program of interventions undertaken by the Bush and Obama administrations probably saved the country from a second Great Depression, ended freefall in the housing and auto markets, prevented deflation, and saved about 8.5 million jobs. U.S. auto companies are now showing a profit, have rehire 55,000 workers and will repay all of the bailout money. The banking system has not collapsed and TARP repayments are proceeding, having topped oustanding payments in June. Total TARP investments are expected to return a profit thanks to sales of bank stocks received. While many jobs have been created & saved due to this spending, unemployment continues to be problematic with rates above 9%. This is probably related to the stimulus spending having been too low rather than too high. A $775 million dollar stimulus package should never have been expected to make up for what CBO forecast in January 2009 as $2.1 trillion of lost production.
3. [Debt Dependence Day] is a pretty sobering reminder about the lack of leadership coming out of Washington, D.C. right now. – First off, let’s remember that Peter Roskam inhabits Washington. D.C. for a good portion of each year. He is not an outsider. He is a member of the Republican leadership team in Congress. Democrats have exhibited a great deal of leadership, as befits a majority party, and have advanced an ambitious program of legislation aimed at improving the lives of working people in America while at the same time reducing the deficit. We’ll catalog some of these in bit. But Republicans have fought against every single Democratic initiative, blocking most of them with repeated filibusters in the Senate. There is no crisis of Democratic leadership. Rather there is a concerted effort on the part of Republicans to make the Democrats and the President fail, in hopes of electoral victories, no matter what the cost to the nation.
4. “On defense spending, by and large, Republicans in Congress are supporting President Obama and what he is trying to do, and trying to not turn this into a partisan issue.” – Peter Roskam and Republicans in Congress have supported next to nothing of what the President has tried to do. Roskam and many other Republicans in Congress voted against cutting funding for the F-35 fighter engine which the Department of Defense called costly and unnecessary and the president opposed, at a minimum cost of $458 million but likely much, much more over the life of the program. And they have opposed the President in other areas – such as in the closure of the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay and the Nuclear Posture Review with its renouncement of new nuclear weapons systems development. Neither Roskam nor his Republican colleagues have shown any willingness to embrace the recommendations of the non-partisan Sustainable Defense Task Force led by Representatives Barney Frank and Ron Paul that has suggested $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years to the nation’s bloated military budget.
5. “We’re seven months into the year and there is complete ambiguity about what the tax code is going to be.” - Wrong. There is no ambiguity. President Obama has stated his intention to allow the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans to expire while those for the middle class to continue. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi have echoed that same plan and both Reid and Pelosi are committed to bringing the matter up for a vote well before year-end. Any ambiguity that might remain is a product of Republican efforts to preserve tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans through continued obstruction of Democratic legislative efforts.
6. “Middle class and lower economic voters are looking at the possibility of tax hikes.” This is the GOP lie-of-the-week. As noted above. The President and Democratic leadership in Congress have ruled out middle class tax hikes in the near-term. Their intent is to extend the Bush tax cuts for all but the wealthiest Americans. The only open question is whether the GOP will let them. We would add that it has never been part of Roskam’s make-up to worry about the how anything would affect lower economic voters.
7. “Look, they’ve got super-majorities in both chambers, in the House and in the Senate. There’s no ambiguity about who’s in charge.” Well, that’s no longer true. With the death of Senator Kennedy, before health reform legislation could be passed, and the subsequent election Of Senator Scott Brown, the so-called Democratic “super-majority” in the Senate ended, and Republicans have blocked virtually everything from the extension of unemployment benefits to climate legislation with the threat of filibuster. When the the Democrats acted to pass health reform legislation through the reconciliation process by the simple majority required under the Constitution, Republicans, including Peter Roskam, screamed about tyranny. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell has frankly stated his intent to block the entire Democratic agenda. So, no, the Republicans have hijacked Congressand are engaged in minority rule. They have almost brought Congress to a standstill.
8. “When you look at the entitlement spending in the Obamacare bill it is absolutely enormous.” Health reform will reduce the deficit by $143 billion over 2010-2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
9. “It [health reform bill] is 7 years of taxes and 10 years of spending. “ – Roskam got his GOP talking point backwards. Ezra Klein refutes it here.

So Roskam, as you can see, is pretty weak on facts surrounding the debt. But let’s grant him that, at least in the long-term, debt is a problem. How does he want to fix it? By doubling-down on one of the biggest factor in creating the debt in the first place: the Bush tax cuts.

Bush entered office with a budget surplus and left with a huge deficit, due largely to starting two wars and simultaneously giving huge unfunded tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. Of course the economic downturn, related to Republican deregulatory policies and their consequences, also played a role by reducing revenues. And the cost of responding to that crisis have contributed to short-term deficits. But if you look at what’s driving long-term deficits, it is war spending and the Bush tax cuts. The Bush-Obama recovery measures have minimal impact on long-term deficits.According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Some commentators blame recent legislation — the stimulus bill and the financial rescues — for today’s record deficits. Yet those costs pale next to other policies enacted since 2001 that have swollen the deficit. Those other policies may be less conspicuous now, because many were enacted years ago and they have long since been absorbed into CBO’s and other organizations’ budget projections.

Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. (The prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 accounts for further substantial increases in deficits and debt, which we are unable to quantify due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers.

Without the economic downturn and the fiscal policies of the previous Administration, the budget would be roughly in balance over the next decade. That would have put the nation on a much sounder footing to address the demographic challenges and the cost pressures in health care that darken the long-run fiscal outlook.

Despite this fact, Roskam and the deficit peacocks in the Republican want to press ahead with extending the Bush tax cuts on wealthy Americans and they don’t want to offset the cost – a projected $830 billion over 10 years (if debt-servicing costs are included). $830 billion in unfunded taxcuts to the richest Americans! And they had the nerve to complain when Democrats wanted to spend a mere $33 billion to extend benefits for the unemployed. (An extended version of Roskam’s August 4th remarks calling for the tax cuts can be found here.)

But, there’s more. Not only would Roskam and the Republicans extend the Bush tax cuts. They also are planning to eliminate all individual and corporate capital gains taxes, reduce the corporate income tax rate to 12.5 percent, and permanently eliminate the estate tax. All told, they are proposing over $10 trillion in tax cuts without any way of paying for them. The plan would be great for the huge corporations and for a tiny number of very wealthy Americans. It would be extremely bad news for the rest of us, putting us at risk of a financial crisis that make the recent recession seem mild.

It is time to call “bullshit” on Peter Roskam when he tries to use debt as an excuse for not doing anything to help ordinary working Americans. PeterRoskam cares nothing about the debt…and nothing about working people.