...an idea endorsed by almost every reputable right-of-center economist.

BOTH OF THEM!?

The Republican Rheteoric, no matter how stupid, has to be addressed. The repetition of the assininity is what non discerning Americans hear. Because the rehetoric continues in the same path the non discerning Americans think this is gospel truth.

Since World War II, the federal government has ...spent less than one dollar in five of national income. Once the stimulus gets underway, the federal government will spend more than one dollar in four. The cost of everything the Democrats want to do comes closer to one dollar in three.

I'm not sure if there is a difference between "national income" and GDP, but Heritage Foundation says in "the most recent year" (since this comes from their 2009 Index of Economic Freedom, I assume they mean fiscal 2007), we spent 36.7% of GDP.

But Europe happens to offer a model that has a 13% flat tax and corp. tax capped at 24%. So perhaps Frum and friends could just come out and say it: "Let's be more like Russia".

More like "Love in an Elevator", these guys are "livin' it up while they're going down"

"Back in the Saddle"? More like, "Dream on."

ZING! That's a mega Zing. 1000% Zinged.

"The federal government wants a huge new role in redirecting private investment in transportation and energy in the name of "green jobs."

Um, 'scuse me, but, why hasn't private investment already solved these ills?

Answer: Too much money to made on the status quo.

Seriously, why hasn't someone pointed out the fact that private enterprise has had the last 30+ years to come up with green technology, to rebuild our infrastructure? I thought competition always drove down costs.

What happened?

OH YEAH! GREED!

The Republicans may think they are Back in the Saddle but they will soon find that their political toys are in the attic, out of reach

The payroll tax holiday is a hoax. So what if we get a blip in consumer spening? We need a sustained effort to pull out of the recession and the Republicans would gladly steer us into a depression if we let them.

It will take a lot of convincing to get the rest of the country to Walk This Way.

Wow. That scored a 10 on both delusion and deperation. Imagine how giddy they will be when they get thrown and trampled by the horse.

Although I disagree fervently with Frum, someone who concedes that the talking points from his own side are an insult to the intelligence is, at least, demonstrating *some* intelligence.

Next time any GOPer sez Medicare or Social Security is going broke, every reporter and pundit needs to ask them if they support(ed) a payroll tax holiday.

I suppose in the next day or two Eric Cantor will be put on notice that Tyler and Perry had an entirely different saddle in mind. But, yet again, I am shocked and amazed by the theme music chosen by conservatives. Do you think Cantor listens to Aerosmith?

Do you think Cantor listens to Aerosmith? -Capt Kirk

No, I think the staffer who made the video spent all weekend rocking out with his brother playing Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and thought this would resonate and make them look hip.

Any day now, I expect the 'Boner' to straddle a backwards chair any day now to 'rap' with us.

Next time any GOPer sez Medicare or Social Security is going broke, every reporter and pundit needs to ask them if they support(ed) a payroll tax holiday.

I think this gets right to the heart of the matter about why the GOP delegation in Congress didn't seriously do anything to push for a payroll tax holiday.

Because if the GOP started pushing for it, there would be a small-to-mid-sized group of Progressives in Congress who would go one further and demand that the regressive payroll tax be eliminated altogether and replaced with a progressive payroll tax scheme. Or possibly just have Medicare and SS rolled right into the income tax.

And THAT is not a position that the GOP wants to be in - trying to defend the payroll tax scheme to their base would be a dangerous thing to do even in good economic times.

So instead they come up with crazy stunts and no new ideas and put tiny roadblocks up that the Democrats have to get around. Because they've got nothing else, and if they try to get out of the little boxes they've built for themselves they're going to get crushed.

Cantor and his master Boehner are nothing more than a couple of Slim Pickens types---riding the bomb down in Dr. Strangelove. They don't give one whittle if they wreck the world in the process, so long as they demonstrate their "mutual machismo" in the process....

doubtful: BOTH OF THEM!?

and let's check their track record...

"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession." - Republican Phil Gramm 7/10/08

"[A]nyone who says we're in a recession, or heading into one...is making up his own private definition of 'recession.'" Donald Luskin, Washington Post, 9/14/08

gop: any suckers left?

It would make for a great parody for the likes of "The Daily Show" or SNL.

This sort of self-congratulatory pumping up of egos makes them look age 6.

They sound so desperate for an identity, so hungry to feel good about themselves that they're grasping at straws here.

They look like fools.

I heard one Republican spokesperson early last week on CNN and on Hardball (can't remember his name...he's darker skinned with a mustache?)was rather gleeful as he exclaimed that the widespread Republican Stimulus Bill resistance was giving the Republicans a new sense of energy and purpose, that they got their 'Mojo' back.

I couldn't believe it--the country is falling apart at the seams on several levels and he was gleeful that his part had 'found itself'.

Truly shameful and pathetic.

an idea endorsed by almost every reputable right-of-center economist

Both of them, hell -- are there any? Was he thinking maybe Donald Luskin? Dream on, indeed...

Is it just me, or do Mitch McConnell and John Boehner look really stiff, really uptight, really uh--sorta constipated?

They're just SO angry--they kinda look like thugs in a B-grade mobster movie...Don't ya think?

I agree with mljohnson, above. As ridiculous as they are Republican talking points have to be answered. They have been spouting insane things for years with little or no response from Democrats. Is it any wonder that many in the public believe them?

Just take the often-repeated talking point "Tax cuts raise revenues". This is intended to make people think that tax cuts pay for themselves, something that Republicans occasionally even say explicitly. Yet even Bush's own economic advisors' numbers showed that even in the very best of circumstances, tax cuts can generate at most 50% of what the cut costs the Treasury. Normally the return is much lower than that. I have often heard Republicans make this claim yet never heard a Democrat debunk it.

The same goes for the claim that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Even Barney Frank let that stinker go unanswered on ABC's This Week when Jim DeMint made the claim. Frank never pointed out that we allow deductions for things our country wants to encourage - employee health care, R&D, expansion, etc., making our rate competitive. This is a talking point that is easy to remember. By not responding to it viewers could easily get the impression that it is true.

The payroll tax holiday is another dumb idea, especially if it is given to people at all income levels. If that happens it will be about as effective as Bush's tax rebate of last summer. That did not work because so many people used it to pay down debt. The only way a tax holiday would work would be if it were only for lower income people who would spend it quickly. And by taking money out of the system, Republicans would eventually spin the drop in revenue as more evidence that the SS system is unsustainable.

Democrats have been completely incompetent when it comes to standing up to the powerful, well-organized right-wing propaganda machine. They have stood by while it took down Gore and Kerry. It is well past time for them to learn how to defeat the spin machine.

Just a question, if someone knows . . .

Did the House Republicans work on reconciliating the House and Senate versions of the Stimulus Bill?

If so, why?

"If you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you still wouldn't have spent $1 trillion."

And still no one mentions to these bozo's (no offense Bozo), that under dubya they will have spent nearly a trillion dollars on the Iraq war in only 8 years!

this site seems more interested in complaining about republicans than anything else.

the porkulus will in theory create a job for every $250k spent - first off, no guarantee that it will create the jobs it claims, but ignoring that, how does spending $250k per job make any sense?

how does spending the vast majority of $ in 2010/2011 help the economy now?

how does borrowing another trillion get paid off? what about consequences to the dollar/inflation/interest rates?

Oh, I guess it is easier for liberals to simply blame republicans after all.

The GOP was in the saddle in 2005, too, when Bush announced he had a "mandate" to privatize social security.

Still, you have to hand it to them, that video screens like a bad acid trip. I felt so dizzy by the end of it I thought the graphics were telling me that All of the house republicans had voted for the bill. By the time the last 0 had floated past I was cross eyed. And the music? Its not just that its bizarre and out of date, its also that it sounds like defeat.

aimai

If you spent a million dollars on the US, every man woman and child in the US would have less than a third of a cent each.

Let's hooray for that level of stimulus that most conservatives won't stoop for a penny.

Actually of all tax cuts -- the only kind of economic program Republicans believe can be effective for any purpose -- a payroll tax holiday is the most effective.

Check this chart to see Moody's rundown of the effect of $1 of stimulus spending on actual growth in GDP: http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20081022/

The payroll tax holiday is one of the few tax programs that actually produce more than $1 in GDP growth for $1 spent. It is money that is spent fairly quickly by recipients rather than saved or invested.

It is worth noting that most of the tax cuts urged by congressional Republicans are among the least effective ways of stimulating GDP growth, producing less than $0.50 per $1 spent. Among the most effective are things like food stamps ($1.73), extending unemployment benefits ($1.64) and infrastructure ($1.59).

This is the same party that also hesitated to bailout the banks. ooops!!

[Republicans in Congress] are offering a clapped-out package [...] -- David Frum

Reminds me of an old Polish joke:
Q: Dr X, is it possible to get pox from a bicycle seat?
A: It's possible but, if you contact me privately, I'll show you some more satisfying methods of getting it.

Back in the Saddle? If I were them, I'd get off it pronto and start looking for more satisfying ways of getting their clap.

Yes indeedy. As I open my quarterly investment statements these days, the one prayer on my lips is "Please, please cut the capital gains tax. It's my only hope."

Rachel farts: "Oh, I guess it is easier for liberals to simply blame republicans after all."

::taptap::: Is this thing on?

These assholes don't seem to be hearing what the people said November 4th!

(Back-in-the-saddle translated: Saddlebacking)

In one year, my wife and I have lost a full one-third of all of our retirement savings. We are in our mid-50s.

Nope, no capital gains to tax here.

how does spending the vast majority of $ in 2010/2011 help the economy now?

BZZZZT! Wrong.

Rachel, 75% of the money in the stimulus bill WILL BE SPENT in the first 18 months. That ain't no way 2011.

Daddy Love: Same here. I'm sure we'll all think fondly of the Bush Years when we have to work 5 years beyond our planned retirement.

how does borrowing another trillion get paid off? what about consequences to the dollar/inflation/interest rates?

Oh, and Rachel, I was just wondering if you asked those questions last week about the $2.5 trillion "tax-cuts only" stimulus proposal that 90% of the Republican caucus in each House voted to support (though of course it went nowhere). What do you think the "consequences" of borrowing that much money would be, and do you approve of the Republican "borrow $2.5 trillion more" approach?

You should really be happy that such responsible people are in charge instead of Congressional Republicans.

Marko,
I'm guessing that I won't be retiring at all.

I read the Frum article. He linked to another article near the end giving "smart" ideas they could use. Guess what it amounted to? Cutting social security taxes, making the capital gains tax permanent and other permanent tax cuts. Oh, and more defense spending.

So, yeah, he's right that they're being stupid, but really, what else do they have?

In the early part of the 21st century, the Republicans became Democrats, and the Democrats have become fascists. The GOP under Bush promised limited government, and went nuts with social programs. Meanwhile, the Democrats are now supporting the government takeover of private business.

Crazy world we live in these days.

The stimulus package will send tons of money to the oil sheiks in OPEC as Obama's energy policies leave the nation ever-reliant on foreign crude.

the problem is that the arguments were ridiculous.

that was also true of the arguments in favor of most items in the bill.

But all is not lost. Practically none of the money will actually be spent in the next 9 months, and during that time Americans (and the Congress and the President) will finally have time to read all of it. Concurrently, Congress will be deliberating its next budget, knowing how much has already been budgeted. They'll have time to think about what they are doing.

comparing this with the Saturday Night Live "satire" of Boehner and McConnell debating whether to impeach Obama now or in April, one sees the complete impossibility of satirizing those who are a satire for real.

RightOnDemand said "Crazty world we live in these days."

Yes indeed, it is a crazy world, one in which the computers are so user friendly that a Homo Sap like yourself, lacking both opposable thumbs and a neocortex, can use them just like a real human being. But thanks for your ever-so-useful efforts in proving what a drooler you are.

In the early part of the 21st century, the Republicans became Democrats, and the Democrats have become fascists. The GOP under Bush promised limited government, and went nuts with social programs. Meanwhile, the Democrats are now supporting the government takeover of private business.

Three sentences, and every one of them completely wrong. I think it's a new record.

It's especially funny to me that you think that the war in Iraq is a "social program," and that you're obviously too young to know that it's not the fascists who were constantly accused of wanting the government to take over private business. The word you're looking for starts with a "c," or if you're trying not to look insane, an "s."

"The Democrats are expanding Medicaid to crowd out private insurance."

Are they really? REALLY?!!?

Cuz I wasn't aware of that. We're on the road to single payer, and no one told me? Sheesh.

Because Medicaid is WAY better than the private insurance I CAN NOT GET with my "pre-existing" condition.

Obama is thinking long and hard about Afghanistan before ordering more U.S. troops into the country.

Too bad Obama's "Best and the Brightest" won't be reading this, just as their Kennedy-era "Best and the Brightest" wouldn't read anything by Bernard Fall (particularly "Street Without Joy").

Afghanistan, Another Untold Story
by Michael Parenti
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/12/02
~
Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghani history and the role played by the United States.
~
Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet "invasion" of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as "a good thing." The actual story is not such a good thing.
~
Some Real History:
Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People's Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.
~
The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. "It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it," writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.
~
The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.
~
The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.
~
A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been "a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city's university. Afghan women held government jobs--in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women."
~
The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world's heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a "genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope."
~
But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government's dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.
~
Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.
~
A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.
~
It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.
~
In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.
~
Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style:
The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.
~
After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.
~
Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as "a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.'"
~
Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world.
~
Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah's name against the purveyors of secular "corruption."
~
In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban---heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan---fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.
~
The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of "immorality" that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research.
~
The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed "immoral" were stoned to death or buried alive.
~
None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban's oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women.
~
If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically.
~
The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water.
~
The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas:
While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world.
~
US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific.
~
The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing bid for the pipeline. Bush's war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL's hopes for getting a major piece of the action.
~
Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a "rogue state" designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.
~
In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.
~
One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, "there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy." But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation.
~
US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives.
~
The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth's dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world.
~
In the face of all this Obama's call for "change" rings hollow.

Ahem ... you've all missed the point.

The message of that video is NOT that the Republicans are "Back in the Saddle", but that "tax & spend" Democrats are.

All of the "stupid spending" talking points that flashed across the screen are aimed at the base, to remind them of why they hate Democratic rule.

ACORN? Marsh Mice? It all goes against "common sense", as they say in Kansas.

Obama does a hell of a good job of explaining to the people of Kansas why it does make "common sense" to spend this money.

Does the rest of the party? Not so much.

"If you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you still wouldn't have spent $1 trillion." GOP lawmakers invested heavily in going after money relating to a salt marsh mouse in California, despite the fact that the bill didn't actually include such a provision.

The math involved here is multiplication.
1 million per day times x365 days per year, x 2000 years = 700+ billion.

Let's throw in some division:
1 million divided by 300 million Americans.

Gee, if we spent less than half a penny per day since Jesus was born, we wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars.

Does it STILL sound like a lot of money?

Inflation, population growth, the non-existance of American currency for 90% of the time being discussed....

Nuance and details are such a bother, aren't they?

The payroll tax holiday is a 2-fer: it is a tax cut that would do damage to the SS system, therefore making it easier to gut.

"GOP lawmakers invested heavily in going after money relating to a salt marsh mouse in California" Leave it to the GOP to take pot shots at something that does not exist.
This ->"1980s-vintage solutions" is the GOP's real problem. Until they get rid of all the OLD men, stuck in the past, and move into the 21st century they are going to continue to shoot blanks.