Another Titanic cartoon. Hey, we only get the centennial of the sinking once. The Ryan budget, now the official budget of the Republican Party and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, is certainly bold. It’s also radical. Over time, it would essentially limit the federal government’s spending to defense, Medicare and Social Security, and it would drastically  cut the latter two. It would further reduce tax rates, especially for the wealthy (big surprise), paying for the loss of revenue with the social safety net. The wingnuts who now dominate the Republican Party long for a fictional past where American flourished with the citizenry fending for themselves without government help, businesses and Wall Street enriched us all without any pesky regulation, and all was right with the world. The only problem with this scenario is that this country became a stable economic power only when government stepped in during the Great Depression and put in place the social safety net, regulated the financial sector and promoted a progressive tax code. After the Depression, the income inequality that created so many economic imbalances declined, the middle class grew, and  the nation boomed. Now we are back to pre-depression levels of income disparity, the deregulated banks that almost destroyed the economy are still at it, and the middle class has suffered an unprecedented loss of wealth. None of these facts, however, matters to the economic quacks of the Right, who persist in peddling the same prescription that almost killed us.

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