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Right. We're not going to borrow money from China to pay for Sesame Street. Of course, we can always pay taxes, instead, can't we? Sesame Street costs each of us about two cents per year in taxes.
All of PBS costs less than a dollar and a half per year. I think we can afford that without borrowing from China, don't you?
And, in fact, we've funded PBS for years and years without any problem. PBS didn't just start with George W. Bush, you know, or even with Ronald Reagan. So it can hardly be considered the cause of our current economic woes.
Why don't we reverse course on the things which did create this mess? Why don't we reverse course on the things which actually caused our record-breaking deficits?
Like Mitt Romney, George W. Bush promised during the presidential debates that his tax cuts would go mostly to the poor and would not increase the budget deficit. Like Mitt Romney, he lied.
Likewise, Republicans started two wars for no reason and without paying for them! Remember how the Iraq War was going to "pay for itself"? (Yeah, sure, and if you believed that...) Well, war is fun, when someone else has to fight it and no one has to pay for it, right?
Then, Republican policies - including their mania for deregulation and the bubble in arcane financial instruments caused, in part, by that very windfall to the rich - crashed our economy in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression (which automatically cut tax receipts and increased government spending - exactly what's supposed to happen).
We had Sesame Street long before the Bush administration. We had Sesame Street while we were enjoying budget surpluses during the Clinton years. Sesame Street didn't break our budget - and for an extra two cents per year, it never will.
Here's what broke our budget:
(CBPP)
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