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The AP announced Tuesday that Americans’ confidence is near a fiver year high on growing optimism. Oh, feeling sunny, eh? Not so fast, citizen.

Republicans are gearing up for yet another hostage taking moment, since elections don’t work for them. Republicans are threatening to crash the economy and stick the American taxpayers with another 18.9 billion dollar price tag. They don’t have a good reason for this — in fact, the reasons keep changing.

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Republican lawmakers are threatening to crash the economy if ObamaCare isn’t defunded. But Speaker Boehner said Monday that he has new hostages. Boehner said that he can’t get the House to raise the debt ceiling unless changes are made to Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, farm programs and government pensions.

“I made up my mind that we weren’t going to kick the can down the road any more,” the Speaker said, as if the deficit wasn’t actually shrinking. “There is no reason for the government to run out of money. Our goal here is to stop Obamacare. Our goal here is to cut spending.”

Ah, but ObamaCare cuts the deficit. And in 2012 when Republicans were trying to repeal ObamaCare, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that “Republican legislation to repeal the overhaul — passed recently by the House — would itself boost the deficit by $109 billion from 2013 to 2022.” So add that $109 billion to the 18.9 billion they’re going to cost us by delaying raising the debt ceiling, and the Republican party is charging us billions of dollars for nothing — nothing but a seemingly endless tempter tantrum.

The debt ceiling represents money lawmakers already spent. In other words, Republicans are once again refusing to pay their own bills by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. That’s not exactly a conservative or fiscally responsible position.

Republicans like to pretend this is about “debt” and the “deficit”. It’s as if they don’t know that we all know that the defict is shrinking . You want to know which debt fear mongering Republican leaders did their part to increase the debt by 3.4 trillion dollars when the Republican Party was in charge?

According to data compiled by Bloomberg News in 2011, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell voted for, “Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and Medicare prescription drug benefits. They also voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. These initiatives added $3.4 trillion to the nation’s accumulated debt and to its current annual budget deficit of $1.5 trillion.”

In June, the month we had a huge budget surplus and Dow rallied above its all-time closing high, Standard & Poor said the shrinking deficit improved the outlook for debt and so it boosted its outlook for the U.S. government. In other words, things were looking up. It was Standard and Poor that had lowered our credit rating after the Republicans’ last debt ceiling games.

Consumer confidence is up, so it’s time for Republican killjoys to stamp the sun out, crashing the economy again because they lost yet another election and they don’t know how to tell their base the truth about the campaign promises they made.