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Dana Bash interviewed the most hated man in America on The Situation Room and he had the balls to call what we have now a "progressive" health-care bill.

BASH: But you talked about the fact that on this particular issue, a Medicare buy-in, you have changed your position and you've said it's because things have changed. The deficits are high and Medicare is in more trouble -- the system.

LIEBERMAN: Yes.

BASH: But give me a little straight talk like your friend John McCain gives. Is it also that you philosophically have moved to the right a little bit?

LIEBERMAN: No, I don't think so. I mean, actually, this is a very progressive bill. The parts that I didn't like are taken out, I'm prepared to support. I've always believed that government has to be there when nobody else will be there to help people. But in this country we don't believe the government should take over everything. And for me, that's what's been on the line here. What kind of future are we going to have? And of course all of this goes to the debt -- the national debt and taxes. If government takes over everything -- the public option is something the public will pay for. And that means higher taxes. That's why I did that.

Didn't you know that John McCain won the election and put Lieberman in charge of health care reform?

There was nothing in this bill that could be considered a government takeover of health care in America, but don't ask a Villager to make Lieberman be honest about it. He has his bullshit fallback position and they just eat up his words and move on. Opening up Medicare to people at age fifty-five would have only helped Americans.

You know that if a health-care bill does pass, Joe Lieberman will take full credit for it. He'll be out there saying that it shows how incredible our system of government is. The media -- who love Lieberman and consider him a real independent soul who was forced out of the Dem party because of the dirty hippies -- will praise Joe's leadership on getting a bill passed.

Since the media believe liberals should always lose, they will relish the opportunity to promote Lieberman all over the TV because they know how much it will piss us off. Anybody who gives that lowlife props should be vilified early and often.

Among the qualities that uniquely define Sarah Palin is that she doesn't know what she doesn't know. But as her confusion about climate change, the First Amendment and even Alaska's energy production showed, Palin's ignorance of a subject is no barrier to her speaking out with great conviction about it. So it is once again with talk of potential tax increases to fund the escalating war in Afghanistan. War time taxes are never necessary, Sarah Palin seemed to suggest this week, because during World War II "many Americans gave what little money they had to buy the war bonds that funded it all."

As Andrew Sullivan noted here and here, the Quittah from Wasilla used this week's anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to invent a new myth about how the United States mobilized and paid for the war which followed it. Palin wrote this December 7:

The attack on Pearl Harbor launched America into the Second World War, and our Greatest Generation did not hesitate when asked to sacrifice for their country. American men enlisted in droves, American women went to work in the factories that became our "Arsenal of Democracy," and many Americans gave what little money they had to buy the war bonds that funded it all.

Of course, in reality Americans funded the war through massive debt and massive tax increases (above).

As NPR recalled in August, Americans starting in 1942 began paying dramatically higher taxes, with the richest paying the most of all:

During World War II, tax rates for the wealthy soared as high as 94 percent. But poor and middle-class families also paid taxes at rates substantially higher than today's. Despite those high taxes, the vast majority of Americans surveyed by Gallup back then said the taxes they paid were fair.

Just two weeks ago, former Reagan Treasury Department economist Bruce Bartlett quantified those war time taxes and how that vast new burden was shared across the Greatest Generation:

During World War II, federal revenues roughly tripled as a share of the gross domestic product (GDP) and the number of people paying income taxes expanded tenfold, from 3% of the population in 1939 to 30% by 1943. In 1940, a family of four needed close to $80,000 of income in today's dollars before it paid any federal income taxes at all. By the war's end, it saw its effective tax rate rise from 1.5% to 15.1%. (Today such a family only pays a federal income tax rate of about 6%.) But taxes weren't the only way the war was paid for. Spending on nondefense programs was cut almost in half, from 8.1% of GDP in 1940 to 4.4% in 1945.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders hasn't heard President Barack Obama's proposal for how to move forward with the war in Afghanistan but he's already saying that he will have a "real problem" supporting an increase of 30,000 or more troops. "You have to put Afghanistan into the context of what's happening in America today. What's happening now, not only a trillion-dollar national debt, we're in the mid midst of the worst recession since the great depression," Sanders told ABC's George Stephanopoulos Sunday.

Cost estimates put the cost of escalation at $1 million per soldier each year.

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Right on cue again, we have Born Again Deficit Virgin Judd Gregg with dire warnings about our debt but no acknowledgement of his own party contributing to the mess as our own Jon Perr rightfully pointed out. This is from C-SPAN's Newsmakers Nov. 15, 2009. Despite Gregg's warnings for the United States if we don't get our debt under control, the last thing he thinks we should be doing is to repeal any of those Bush tax cuts for the rich to fix it.

I would like to know just how repealing those tax cuts would "reduce the productivity of the nation". The only thing I've seen reduce our productivity has been our crappy trade laws which have resulted a race to the bottom with industry running to the country with the lowest wages for labor and the least constraints on those who pollute or have the least protections for their workers in place, which has driven jobs out of the United States with our unwillingness to put some protectionist measures in place to secure our workforce. Maybe someone else can explain this man's twisted logic to me, but I sure as hell don't get it.

I hope the Obama administration is enjoying their kick in the teeth from someone that they once considered for a Cabinet position. I think Gregg and his ilk will be happy to see this country continue to spiral into economic ruin as long as they think it will win them elections and they can shift any of the blame for what's happened away from themselves.

Frates: Senator I wanted to ask you. Do you see the cost issue as a political landmine, and if so, how?

Gregg: Well, I think the cost issue is at the essence of what is the biggest problem our nation has confronting us after the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and that is the impending fiscal meltdown of our nation. We’re going to take our, we’re taking ourselves down on a road to third class status as a nation. You cannot grow the government from 20% to 26% of our G.D.P. and pass all the debt that’s going to generate—because no matter how much you raise taxes you can’t catch your tail when you get that bit—onto our children, because they can’t pay for those debts.

You know, you get…let me try to put this in context. When the public debt goes from 38% of G.D.P. to 80% of G.D.P., that essentially means that the debt, well the financing of that debt, that is going to exceed the cost of anything else in the government, including military expenditures, national defense. And in fact if we tried to get into the European Union—which we’re not trying to do—but if that’s the proof of industrialized states that set certain standards for what a government does—we could not get into the European Union beginning about 2013 because our public debt would be too high. We’d be over their 60% threshold.

And we’re seeing already international statements from China, from other places that they’re worried about our debt. And they’re the ones who buy the debt. And if they start to worry about our debt what does that mean? Well we’re going to have to raise the price, in other words, we’re going to have to raise the interest that we’re going to pay on that debt in order to get those folks to buy our debt. We’re also seeing the international ratings agencies like Moody’s say “well gee, we don’t know if you stay on this path which is unsustainable, we may have to downgrade your debt”.

All of this leads to an instability in our nation because there are only two things you can do when debt gets so high that you can’t afford to pay it. You basically have to inflate the economy, which means you devalue the dollar and you put in place one of the cruelest takes which is inflation, or you raise tax levels so high that you reduce the productivity of the nation and it becomes a downward spiral where basically as productivity drops you drop your, your revenues drop again. So we’re on an unsustainable path. It’s that simple. And you shouldn’t aggravate that unsustainable path by adding another 3 trillion dollar program on top of it.

Swain: Senator we just learned from AP, our wire story that the White House has now told domestic agencies that their budgets will be frozen or even cut by 5% as it signals a big push to take on the deficit next year. Do you have a reaction to that?

Gregg: If it’s true it’s great. I mean, that’s one step that should absolutely occur. We should freeze discretionary spending, but as Willy Sutton said, and that would be good, but as Willy Sutton said, why, when he asked why do we rob a bank? Because that’s where the money is; the money is in entitlements. The money and the problem is in the fact that we’re facing a 60 trillion dollar unfunded liability already without this new major health care entitlement being put on the books being proposed by the House and the Senate Democratic leadership. Without that even on the books we already are short 60 trillion dollars as we go forward. So those are the challenges we have to face up to and address, but yes, if the administration comes forward with a discretionary freeze of a 5% cut in discretionary spending I will strongly support that effort.

Everything you need to know about the descent of the conservative movement into a hypocritical caricature is illustrated by two of its proudest constituencies: Republican deficit hawks and so-called "born again virgins." Having already violated the moral strictures they claim to hold dearest, each now asks the American people to join them in pretending their sin never happened. But unlike a generation of Republican leaders who built a mountain of national debt for the United States, the secondary virgins only screwed themselves.

The Republicans' shameless cynicism was perfectly captured by Vice President Dick Cheney, who in 2002 proclaimed, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

Not, that is, if a Republican is in the White House. But when Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office and the $1.2 trillion deficit George W. Bush left for him there, the GOP quickly changed its tune. While the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under President Bush, House Minority Leader John Boehner in February decried the $787 billion emergency economic recovery spending as "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment." By June, Boehner warned of the "crushing debt Washington Democrats are running up." And Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), Obama's aborted choice for Commerce Secretary, slapped the President last month, "we're basically on the path to a banana-republic-type of financial situation in this country." And, Gregg added:

"You can't keep throwing debt on top of debt."

Of course, throwing debt on top of debt is precisely what Gregg and his GOP allies have done for over a generation.

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To the displeasure of many on both sides of aisle, President Obama on today is hosting the so-called Fiscal Responsibility Summit at the White House. While some Democrats question the timing of Obama's expenditure of political capital on Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement reform, obstructionist Republicans are ridiculing the event even as they hype the myth of Republican fiscal discipline.

And a myth it surely is. Far from the deficit hawks of Republican legend, the modern Republican Party from Reagan forward devastated the U.S. treasury, leaving mounting debt and hemorrhaging red ink for as far as the eye can see.

Of course, you'd never know it listening to the grousing from some of President Obama's Republican guests. On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) declared the summit "sobering up here and beginning to rethink the kind of debt that we're laying on future generations." And New Hampshire Senator and aborted Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg turned on his would-have-been boss, sneering:

''It can either be a nice press event. Or it can be a substantive event. History tells us it will be the first. We've had these meetings before. There's always a lot of people willing to point out the problem."

As the history of the past 30 years shows, those people "willing to point out the problem" are called Republicans. The ones doing something about it are called Democrats.

As the chart above shows, the national debt under president Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 exploded as a percentage of GDP, interrupted only by the all-too-brief fiscal sanity of the Clinton years. And to be sure, the budget surpluses of the late 1990's seem like a distant memory.

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February 12, 2009 C-SPAN