Why Progressives Keep On Losing and the Right Keeps On Winning

By Richard Eskow

Created 04/09/2011 - 1:45pm

Congratulations! The "grand compromise" will cut nearly thirty nine billion dollars in needed government spending, which proves how "serious" everyone is about reducing the deficit. The grand compromisers could have cancelled the next ten years of tax subsidies for oil companies [1] and cut the deficit by forty billion, but apparently that's not how serious people do things.

If the Republican Party were singing to its base today, the song would be the theme from Friends, "I'll Be There For You." And the Democrats would be singing "You Always Hurt the One You Love." We're being told we should celebrate a "compromise" in which Democrats gave up [2] $38.5 billion in spending cuts, when the original Republican demand was [3] for $32 billion. That means the Democrats only gave the Republicans 20% more (20.2135%, to be precise) than they originally demanded.