At every budgeting cycle the Republican deficit hawks work themselves into a frenzy of concern about budget deficits. To remind you, the annual deficit is the amount our government has spent beyond what it has taken in that year. Implicitly included under the umbrella of deficit is the debt, which is the credit card balance we owe for all past unpaid deficits.

Certainly debt and deficits are liabilities and it would be great if we could avoid them completely and spend only what we take in, but we realistically cannot operate without dipping into our credit card sometimes. The contention arises around how to control spending in order to avoid crippling credit card payments.

To reduce our credit burden, both parties strive to increase efficiency and reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. Beyond that, Democrats generally aim to raise revenue from the wealthy and corporations, and (to a far lesser extent) reduce military spending, while protecting and expanding social programs. Republicans mostly push for cuts to social programs, while increasing tax cuts (only for the wealthy), and opposing new taxes (only on the wealthy), while maintaining or increasing defense spending.

Democrats assert that the rich and powerful do not pay anything near their fair share and can afford to contribute far more, while Republicans assert (incorrectly) that the rich and powerful deserve even more money that will supposedly then “trickle-down” to help poorer people.

Not many appreciate that the concept of a “trickle-down” economy did not originate with Ronald Regan who put it forth as a credible economic principle. It was originally a satirical joke made by Will Rogers back in 1932 to mock then President Hoover’s response to the Great Depression in giving more money to rich people.

I’m going to forgo a lot of additional argumentation and simply skip ahead to the conclusion that Republicans are simply wrong on both the merits and the ethics of their budget logic, and rather try to understand their thinking.

I’m going to put aside sheer greed and self-interest as uninteresting. My interest is in how well-meaning people can come to support Republican policies.

First and perhaps foremost, Republicans believe incorrectly that rich people and corporations deserve (are entitled to) more money because the rich deserve it and can make the best use of it. Second, they love a strong military because either they are fearful, love having the biggest guns, love war profits, or are just afraid of looking weak on defense. Finally, they believe that regular people deserve nothing and should either get rich or die quietly without bothering anyone.

These biases result in the following internal logic. A) we must give as much as we can to rich people, and B) we must maintain or expand the military, so C) the only way we can accomplish both is to siphon away money from the 99%. This is accomplished by finding new ways to tax or increase costs for regular people, by destabilizing and pillaging the social security fund that they paid into, by compromising or withholding their healthcare, and by deregulation that shifts the cost of doing business from rich corporations to ordinary communities.

To extract wealth, they continue to perpetuate the joke of trickle-down economics. The term may be discredited, but the concept still underpins their worldview. They extract wealth by grossly downplaying the amount of money being spent on the military, and by exaggerating the cost of social service programs (see here).

And they have elucidated no limit whatsoever in just how much more the rich and powerful deserve. In fact the expressed American value is that personal wealth should be unlimited. Therefore, their goal of decreasing the debt and deficit can never be achieved no matter how much they extract, no matter how much damage they do, no matter how many people they impoverish, the rich can and will never have enough under the logical framework they have constructed.

Thus is the folly of their worldview, their rationalizations, and their policies. Their concern about the debt and deficit may or may not be genuine, as is their belief that the rich should receive even more. But to achieve both, the vast majority of people have to suffer. The end result of their thinking can only be incredibly harmful, unsustainable, and unethical budgetary policies enacted under the pretext of responsible deficit reduction.