Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) (photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr)

In case you weren’t paying attention during the debate about the extension of the Bush tax cuts last year, members of Congress are again working on a deal to clearly show there is no such thing as a deficit hawk. From Politico:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is quietly working both sides of the Capitol to build support for a plan to rework automatic spending cuts and combine the proposal with a wide range of critical year-end tax and spending measures.

What it amounts to is a major year-end pitch: Democrats and President Barack Obama would get their much sought-after payroll tax cut extension and jobless benefits, while Republicans would tweak the Pentagon cuts that defense hawks hate.

So the second ranking Republican in the House is working on a deal where the deficit increasing payroll tax holiday, instead of being fully paid for like the Democrats first suggested, is going to be traded in exchange for even more useless military deficit spending. The GOP is actually suggesting they undo the deficit reduction agreement they were able to win only a few months ago to make it easier to expand the deficit.

This is very much like when Congress couldn’t decide to extend some of the deficit-exploding Bush tax cuts or all of the deficit-exploding Bush tax cuts, so their solution was to extend them all plus a whole grab bag of even more deficit increasing provisions.

Since I think Congress’ obsession with the deficit is idiotic at this time, I’m not really disappointed that the so called “deficit hawks” don’t ever live up to their “the deficit is the worst thing ever that will destroy America” rhetoric. All that upsets me is that that media still pretends these people care about the deficit.

It has become abundantly clear that these deficit hawks only “care” about the deficit unless: it means raising taxes on the rich, stop spending money on unnecessary defense contracts, ending corporate welfare programs, closing loopholes, ending wars, expanding money-saving government programs, reforming drug policy, improving IP law, eliminating some of our absurd security theater, stopping farm subsidies, imposing All-Payer for health care, etc… basically everything but taking stuff away from the poor or the working class people.