April 11, 2023
Possibly feeling a little heat on the issue, last Thursday Jim Himes released a video in an attempt to inoculate himself for his role in voting to increase the national debt by some $20 trillion over the past 14 years. See video here: https://youtu.be/l-QaUjMs_a8
In his customary dissembling posture, Mr. Himes pleads to us that the national debt is everyone’s fault but his. So, let’s take apart his three-minute pretentious lecture, to separate calculated deception from the reality within which his constituents reside.
First, he notes the only couple years of budget surpluses in the last half-century occurred during the late 1990s. He boasts this was under a Democrat, Bill Clinton. Reality is that everyone alive at the time knew that accomplishment was driven by the conservative Republican congress, famously led by Newt Gingrich. Bill Clinton merely signed the bills, (he virtually had no choice) and of course, took credit for it all.
Next, Mr. Himes muses that although deficits can result from too much spending, they also result from “taxing too little,” revealing his mindset that there’s always room to tax some more. Then he runs a misdirection play saying that the Republican proposal to cut taxes $2 trillion over the next 10 years will add massively to the deficit, without mentioning the proposed spending cuts which would neutralize the impact on the national debt.
He then rolls out one of the most popular canards in the Democrat rhetorical arsenal – that if the Debt Ceiling is not raised, the U.S. will default on its obligations, and Republicans will irreparably damage the U.S. economy and its world standing. Reality is that the Debt Ceiling does not ever have to be raised to satisfy our debt obligations. The U.S. Treasury takes in $366 billion per month in tax receipts and pays $40 billion in interest on the debt. We actually have the debt service covered by nine times cash-flow...a 'AAA' assessment according to Wall Street metrics.
Moving along, he blames Republicans for not publicly recognizing the impact on the debt at the time spending bills are passed. Maybe that’s because Republicans were usually at home, asleep with the rest of America, when Himes’ boss, Nancy Pelosi, dropped her favorite 3,000-page monstrosities on their desks at midnight...then requiring a deadline vote by 3pm the next day.
Next, he drops his biggest deception stink-bomb, one in which he is hip-deep, and asserts that Trump was responsible for 25% of the total national debt at the end of his presidency. Himes fails to mention that misleading characterization was largely $5 trillion of emergency COVID funding which Himes and the vast majority of congress voted for in its entirety before it got to Trump’s desk! This man is insulting and simply takes us, his constituents, to be fools.
For the finale, Himes claims Republicans are risking the “full faith and credit of the U.S. government” (a plain lie) just to “make Biden look bad”. Really? THAT is the one feat Joe Biden is unsurpassed in accomplishing all on his own!
Jim Himes is 'The Great Dissembler'
Please re-circulate this message to any and all who are interested...or should be.
Help is on the way,
Bob MacGuffie
Candidate for Congress
