By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

There was a time when politicians tried to gain advantage by giving things to voters. While some of this was wasteful pandering, a lot of it laid the foundation for future economic growth that more than paid for those investments in education, infrastructure, research, health care, and crime prevention.

Today, Republicans and some Democrats jockey for political advantage by taking the same things away from people. They use the bludgeon of the deficits that they themselves created, and they wield it by endlessly reciting falsehoods.

These are changes in federal debt levels produced by deficit spending during each presidential administration:

Kennedy/Johnson        3%
Johnson            5%
Nixon                7%
Nixon/Ford          19%
Carter              28%
Reagan I          66%
Reagan II        104%
Bush Sr.        140%
Clinton I           -7%
Clinton II           -9%
Bush Jr. I        173%
Bush Jr. II        263%

The difference between Democrat and Republican administrations becomes all the more stark when these numbers are expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product. During every Democratic presidency, that percentage declined; during every Republican presidency it increased. You would never believe that, if all you heard was Republican propaganda and Democratic silence.

Nearly the entire deficit for the past 10 years results from three things: Bush era tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and a deep recession that resulted in large part from financial deregulation. Republicans enthusiastically advocated for each of these.

I must say that I am not a big fan of Democratic politicians. But Republican deceit and hate mongering have become so grotesque that Republicans of high integrity such as Barry Goldwater, Robert Taft Sr., Dwight Eisenhower, and William F. Buckley would repudiate it.

I do not believe that government should spend more than it takes in…except in times of war and recession. We are at war and in the deepest recession in living memory. Yet with 9% official and 18% actual unemployment, neither party is offering a plan to put people to work.

In his continual attacks on Democrats during last year’s election, House Speaker John Boehner repeated dozens of times, “The American people want to know, ‘Where are the jobs?’” Indeed, in separate polls by CBS, the New York Times, CNN, and Pew, Americans rate job creation as three-to-seven times more important than deficit reduction.

But since the election, Boehner he has remained silent regarding jobs, except when he said, “If some of those jobs are lost, so be it.” He was referring to federal jobs. But job destruction resulting from Republican budget cuts would extend far beyond government.

Moody’s Analytics’ Chief Economist estimates that the cuts Republicans want for this fiscal year alone would eventually wipe out 700,000 jobs. The Economic Policy Institute puts the number at 1 million. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says that it’s 200,000 or less “over the long run.” He doesn’t define how long the run would be. Even that bastion of reckless greed, Goldman Sachs, warns that with those cuts, economic growth would drop by 2%. Last year’s growth was 2.9%.

Along with misery, lost jobs result in lost tax revenue. The proposed budget cuts would also produce long-term cost increases for healthcare, deferred infrastructure maintenance, increased law-enforcement, and other line items. Put the decreased revenue and increased costs together, and you have a downward economic spiral.

It is heresy, but what we need is more investment in job creation, infrastructure, and education, not less. Seemingly unnoticed are the low interest rates at which the federal government can borrow today—0.63% on a 2-year note and 3.6% on a 10-year note.

The most obvious way to close the deficit is to restore to their historical levels tax rates on the highest personal incomes. The mantra that tax cuts for the wealthy produce economic growth is historically unsupportable when other growth factors are accounted for.

The myth most often recited by tax-cut evangelists is that Reagan’s cuts stimulated exceptional economic growth. In fact, his administration’s deficit spending, which increased the national debt by over 200%, pumped more economic stimulus into the economy than did his tax cuts. Even then, job growth during his eight years—16 million—only kept pace with population growth. It was the worst performance of all of the presidential administrations listed above, except for the Bushes.

As I write this, America’s 1400 largest corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash, but they aren’t making job- and tax-generating investments. Would giving them more cash change this? For every dollar that they pay in taxes, they are holding $14.

A second way to close the deficit is to close corporate tax loopholes. The statutory corporate tax rate is 35%. But the 1900 largest corporations, all with assets greater than 2.5 billion, pay only 14.7%. And eliminating tax breaks on the big oil companies who are enjoying record profits would raise $3.5 billion.

As for “fixing entitlements,” the answer is also simple: lift the cap on taxable income for Social Security and Medicare.

Republicans are fond of saying that they are carrying out the will of the American People. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found in February that 81% of the American people support a surtax on millionaires, and 74% support eliminating oil and gas companies’ tax breaks.

A 5.4% surtax on adjusted gross incomes greater than $1 million would increase revenues by $100 billion. And the top rate on these taxpayers would still be less than it was during seven years of the Reagan administration.

While tax cuts have not increased economic growth, they have increased economic inequality to its highest level in 70 years. The 400 wealthiest families own as much as 155 million Americans put together. The top 1% of households earns more than the bottom 50%.

A Wall Street Journal series on class concludes that, “…in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe (or in Canada) has had a better chance at prosperity.” History is unequivocal regarding the threats to democracy posed by such inequities.

So why are Republicans hypocritically fighting for savage spending cuts instead of cooperating on more effective deficit-reduction solutions? I can think of only three reasons.

First, for many of them ideology is more real than fact. Second, they know that the worse off the economy is, the less likely President Obama will be reelected.

And third, many believe that government should exist to provide internal and external security, and nothing else. Private companies should sell all other services. Private military contracting in Iraq acquaints us with how cost-effective this approach is.

Acting on any of these reasons produces the same outcomes:  stunted economic growth, prolonged recession and unemployment, more suffering, greater inequality, bitter divisiveness, continuing foreclosures, more infrastructure decay, less educated Americans, and increased crime, substance abuse, and suicide.