Debt in foreign hands, as tracked by treasury, doesn't make China the largest holder. I'm not even certain if they are the largest marginal buyer, although they do have the largest bilateral trade imbalance (or second largest).
The Dish on patrol.
Sadly, AS thinks that "conservative" is a label that applies to fiscal balance. Reminder: it is the conservatives in this country that threw away fiscal balance with both hands. Not a little bit, not due to circumstances or prudence, but with both hands, when they dropped pay-go in favor of creating a "Mankiw moment" or whatever.
The true measure of a fiscal conservative, maybe, is whether they have the guts to balance the budget at the top of the cycle, i.e. not this week's Tories. As we know, it was the conservatives in this country, again, who threw away that discipline with both hands. Just as soon as the budget went into surplus, briefly in Clinton's last years, they started to holler for a tax cut.
And, the truth is that Reagan conservatives weren't fiscal conservatives firstmost, either. They decided, quite consciously, that other "conservative priorities" were so important that fiscal balance be damned, thrown away with both hands.
It's a failure of historical proportions that the Democratic Party have failed to capitalize on these events. Instead, I see ad after ad today blaming Democrats for "spending"...
Friday, October 22, 2010
File Under GOP Leadership = Lies you can get away with
