Though some try, it is absolute bunk by today’s Republicans to describe the Obama administration as having been on a spending spree, especially with the Administration stupidly having allowed itself to have been straight-jacketed by sequestration, which has imposed automatic spending limits.
The great drag on the economy has been that after the deepest recession ever, there hasn’t been allowed adequate enough public spending to provide the oomph to pull us out of a deep economic morass. That’s why we got a third round of quantitative easing from the Feds: that is, the central bank buys up government securities in order to lower interest rates and increase the money supply. To a certain extent it has helped reinvigorate the economy, but it has lopsidedly been to the benefit of big business and the investing class because of congressional Republicans misguided notions that have blocked the federal government from partaking of the same near zero interest borrowing rates that big business has taken advantage of. Thus, incredibly, investment has not been allowed in our infrastructure and in putting our people back to work at such a bargain rate.
Why, talk about being penny wise and a dollar foolish, rather, self destructive.              
Just imagine back in 2009 if the Republicans had control of the House, where would we be today? For no matter how Republicans try to concoct it, it was the injection of $780 billion by the Democratic Congress and the Obama Administration that pulled us out of our economic nosedive. Ever since, the Republican Party has roundly criticized the President, as if his measly emergency spending, in comparison to what was being lost at the time, was what’s been responsible for our nation’s gargantuan debt.
What a crock.  
I wonder, have Republicans ever bothered to add up just what the Iraq war and its aftermath has and still is costing us in comparison to the President’s economic stimulus? Or is it that the math, or is it the reality that’s too hard?
Then, of course, there is the cost of President George W’s Ownership Society for which the Republican Party, at the time, was in full control of the government, but yet they manage to refuse to take ownership of the economic nightmare that the Ownership Society program unleashed.
Remember it was the way George W stimulated the economy after the 2000 recession. Remember the collapse of Lehman Brothers it ultimately engendered? Remember?
Today’s Republicans slough it off by saying it was all the fault of Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Barney Franks and Connecticut’s Sen. Chris Dodd. I suppose it must have been their supernatural powers that prevented, at the time, the House and Senate majority Republicans from exercising themselves.
It’s just purely head spinning how they manage to heap on Obama the complete absurdity of his being primarily responsible for our huge debt. There’s something about today’s Republican mindset that makes them just incapable of foursquarely dealing with the facts. They, especially, have problems when it comes to comprehending numbers, for they thrive in a world of absolute distortion where verifiable truth does not compute.
The only thing that has bearing to them are the talking points that Rush Limbaugh gives them.  
But don’t let Republicans pull the wool over your eyes for who really has been at heart of our reckless spending that’s culminated into a $17 trillion deficit. For, yes, it was the Republican Party’s leadership that’s delivered us unto this untoward place of massive debt. From Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon procurement scandalous spending to his Resolution Trust spending to help tender the collapse of the Savings and Loan Banks his policies caused, climaxing, beyond all gravity, with George W. Bush’s absolutely warping spending on war and pie in the sky. As a compassionate conservative, Bush would have had us not feel the pain of paying for his extravaganzas, like a simple war in the middle of the Middle East, but, rather, have had us all have a great day of just going shopping.
Remember Dick Cheney’s immortal words: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”
Anyway, to see the result of Republican reckless spending all you have to do, of course, is to be able to add.  But, again, today’s Republican mind set won’t allow itself to do that. They’d rather be out there blowing smoke in our eyes trying convince us that they’re pro-life.
And we all know, especially with their recoiling vehemence against the Affordable Health Care Act, just what a cosmic joke that is.  
Anyway, not only has the Republican Party delivered us into severe economic straits, they have done their very best to keep us there. Let us not forget their penchant for taking our economy hostage by playing chicken with the fiscal cliff over our debt ceiling and their penchant for shutting down the government.
That really hurts if you’re on Social Security.
But to me, most unforgivably, has been their squandering away our chance of investing in our infrastructure at bargain based interest rates and, accordingly, of putting our people back into good, paying jobs.
What a waste of an opportunity.
After what the Republican Party has done and is attempting to do, are Alaskans actually going to help deliver the Senate into their hands?
For the good of the state, the good of the country, for the reaffirming of the facts revealed by simple arithmetic and, hence, the preserving of our faculties and, correspondingly, our future, let us vote, again, for Sen. Mark Begich come November. May we deliver the Senate from the clutches of the Republican grasp. Let us help them to mend their ways.
Tim O’Leary is a longtime Homer resident and political observer.