When Deficits Matter

Abel Maldonado’s ads portray Lois Capps’s 14 years in Congress as a “failure.” But for ten of those 14 years the House was controlled by the GOP, while for eight the White House was occupied by a Republican president so toxic that the members of his party who stole two elections for him (as documented by Greg Palast, among others) fear to speak his name.

Clinton left office with a surplus substantial enough to fund Social Security and Medicare through the end of this century; Alan Greenspan even testified to Congress that there was a “danger” that we may pay off the National Debt. (Oh, the Humanity!) Ms. Capps voted against both rounds of Bush tax cuts and the trillion-dollar war in Iraq. We’d be better off today if we’d had more representatives like her. If Romney is elected, the House will happily raise the debt ceiling to accommodate another feeding frenzy of tax cuts for the rich, because deficits only matter when a Democrat is in the Oval Office.