As Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith points out, the GOP doesn't give a damn about the deficit or the debt ceiling  This is all just political games. See Debt Ceiling Hypocrisy, Naked Capitalism (cross posted from Credit Writedowns) (July 7, 2011). here's an excerpt.During the Bush administration, when a budget surplus tuned to deficit and debt piled up, Republican leaders in Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling 5 times, increasing the limit nearly $4 trillion. We’re talking about Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl. Combined, they voted 19 timesfor a debt ceiling increase without complaint or conditions.When the 2001 and 2003 and 2004  Bush tax cuts were passed, the GOP KNEW that the cuts would cause huge record setting deficits.  When they were passed and the war costs for Bush's wars of choice raged on, the GOP KNEW that this would result in huge, unprecedented budget deficits. 

Let me repeat the title.They're bamboozling usAnd Obama is betraying us. Obama is failing to use his bully pulpit to shame the GOP with its ridiculous attempt to double-down on failed right-wing friedmania economic fundamentalism.  See Joseph Stiglitz, The Ideological Crisis of Western Capitalism, Commentary, Project Syndicate  (July 6, 2011) (Hat Tip, Mark Thoma at Economist's View).  Sitglitz notes what I have often pointed out--that friedmania is a failing ideology, yet the GOP is pushing that failed ideology, based on ridiculous and proven-wrong assumptions about human society, to the brink, arguing for austerity when we need stimulus, tax cuts when we need tax increases (at least on the wealthy), and more military when we need to end our endless wars and get smart.  Says Stiglitz:Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980’s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world. Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year. ...I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government. Alas, that has not been the case. On the contrary, a resurgence of right-wing economics, driven, as always, by ...

In 2004, corporate lobbyists successfully lobbied for a doozy of a corporate tax break--after already getting years of tax deferral on their offshore profits (oftenprofits that should have been taxed in the US, for which companies had dreamed up transfer pricing schemes  to move the profits offshore, such as selling IT properties to their offshore subsidiaries at a claimed third-party comparable price, even though they would NEVER really sell it to any third party so it was truly priceless), they got added to the deferral tax break a near-zero 'repatriation' tax break.  As CTJ notes (see below) this was a downright ridiculous reward to the very corporate tax dodgers who had intentionally kept profits offshore to keep from paying tax and then paid an army of lobbyists to get them the tax break they wanted to bring it back. The republicans in control of the House and Presidency at the time claimed it would be a big job booster--they even named the disastrous bill that enacted that and myriad other corporate tax breaks (the wish list that corporations had been vying for going on 20 years) the "American Job Creation Act".  HAH!  The joke was on Congress and the workers who bore the brunt of the job cutting by these same corporate giants.  Of course, the bill did nothing of the sort.  Some of the biggest repatriation dollars went to share buybacks (ie, benefited the wealthiest amongst us that make up the investor class) while tens of thousands of workers were laid off.  Hewlett-Packard was a prime example.Repatriation was a flop,that is,  for everybody except the managerws and wealthy investors who own most of the financial assets in the country and are pushing the corporatist agenda that is dominating the GOP and ...

The national discussion on budgetary matters and proper expenditures of the federal government is enormously distorted.  The right repeats 'free market' mantras as though they are the answer to all problems, but doesn't acknowledge the very failures of that free market system that landed us in the Great Recession and kept us there out of the right's insistence on tax cuts as a major part of the pitiful economic stimulus package put together in the early days of the Obama administration and refusal to allow tax increases that are required to fund important programs that every American cares about.We are being bamboozled to believe that we "have to" cut Social Security and Medicare and other aid packages, that we 'have to' cut public employees' benefit packages, and on and on.  Brute capitalism is taking over, as corporations are treated as though they were living people with speech rights (tomfoolery that results, under the right-wing activism of Scalia, Roberts, Alito and Thomas, from the foolish original Supreme Court decision equating spending money to support political speech as equivalent to engaging in speech).None of this is true.  So it is worth reading a book by Ha-Joon Chang, "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism" (Bloomsbury Press 2010).  Chang's introduction is a good riff on the problems with Friedmania (free market economic theory) and worth excerpting here.The global economy lies in tatters.  While fiscal and monetary stimulus of unprecedented scale has prevented the financial meltdown of 2008 from turning into a total collapse..., the 2008 global crash still remains the second-largest economic crisis in history, after the Great Depression... [A] sustained recovery is by ...