That was then, this is now - InvestingChannel

That was then, this is now

Consider the following:

Last year they [older evangelicals] flipped from being the voter group most likely to say personal morality mattered in a president, to being the group least likely to say that.

I wonder why?

Or consider this:

Negotiations were still under way on Capitol Hill early this week as Kevin Brady, chair of the House ways and means committee, spearheads work on complex calculations to stay within the limits Congress set for the legislation — an increase in the deficit of no more than $1.5tn over 10 years.

So let me get this straight.  We had a deficit of $666 billion in FY2017 (the work of the devil), and we are in the 9th year of an economic expansion, and consumer confidence is at a 17-year high, and unemployment is 4.2%, and demographics point to rapid growth in the national debt in future decades, and the GOP in its infinite wisdom has decided that now is a good time for another $1.5 trillion expansion in our national debt, on top of the currently unsustainable trajectory?

Remind me about how awful the Obama deficits were?  Freedom Caucus?  Tea Party?  Anyone?

We need tax reform, not tax cuts.

PS.  I enjoyed this—thought you might too:

In a speech, John McCain said the following:

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain “the last best hope of earth” for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”

That’s a mouthful of a sentence — and an excellent one. But not according to another Arizona Republican, Kelli Ward. John McCormack of The Weekly Standard reported on a campaign event of hers. She said she would Make America Great Again by serving “as a conservative, as a populist, as an Americanist, as a scurrilous nationalist.”

John McCain and Jeff Flake are the old GOP.  It look like scurrilous nationalists such as Kelli Ward are the new face of the Republican Party.  I wonder what Lincoln would think of the fact that it’s now Republicans that view people like Robert E. Lee as patriots.

And let’s not forget Alabama’s embarrassing Roy Moore, who is being endorsed by the so-called “libertarian” leaning GOP senators such as Paul, Cruz and Lee:

“Moore’s attitudes toward homosexual citizens goes far beyond merely not wanting them to have ‘special rights,’ ” wrote Reason’s Brian Doherty, a biographer of the Paul family. “Moore, as he declared from the bench in the that 2002 case, believes all American homosexuals who have a sex life in line with their preferences are for that very reason criminals. The Paul endorsement is a depressing sign of how much personal liberty America’s political class, even the supposedly freedom-oriented ones, are willing to give up in exchange for lip service to tax cuts.”

A GOP that fails to do tax reform, but embraces bigots like Moore is not a pretty sight.  But that’s where we are today.