On that deficit problem those Republicans are fighting?

Here's your deficit spending for you that the Republicans say they're fighting in Washington:

Don’t be fooled. This war was never over the federal budget deficit.

In fact, federal deficits are dropping as a percent of the total economy. For the fiscal year ending in September 2009, the deficit was 10.1 percent of the gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in America. In 2010, it was 9 percent. In 2011, 8.7 percent. In the 2012 fiscal year, it was down to 7 percent.

The deficit ballooned in 2009 because of the Great Recession. It knocked so many people out of work that tax revenues dropped to the lowest share of the economy in over sixty years. (The Bush tax cuts on the rich also reduced revenues.) The recession also boosted government spending on a stimulus program and on safety nets like unemployment insurance and food stamps.

But as the nation slowly emerges from recession, more people are employed — generating more tax revenues, and requiring less spending on safety nets and stimulus. That’s why the deficit is shrinking.

Yes, deficits are projected to rise again in coming years as a percent of GDP. But that’s mainly due to the rising costs of health care, along with aging baby boomers who are expected to need more medical treatment.

Health care already consumes 18 percent of the total economy and almost a quarter of the federal budget (mostly in Medicare and Medicaid).

So if the ongoing war between Republicans and Democrats were really over those future budget deficits, you might expect Republicans and Democrats to be focusing on ways to hold down future healthcare costs.

They might be debating how to make the cost controls in the Affordable Care Act more effective, for example, or the merits of moving to a more efficient single-payer system, as every other advanced country has done.

But they’re not debating this, because the federal deficit is not what this war is about. It’s about the size of government. Tea-Party Republicans (and other congressional Republicans worried about a Tea-Party challenge in their next primary) want the government to be much smaller.

“My goal,” says conservative guru Grover Norquist, “is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

What’s behind this zeal to shrink government? It’s not that the U.S. government has suddenly become larger. In fact, non-military government spending relative to the size of the U.S. economy remains the smallest of any other rich nation.
Apart from the military, Medicare and Social Security account for almost everything else the federal government does – and these programs continue to be hugely popular, as Republicans learn every time they threaten them.

The animus toward government has more to do with the growing frustrations of many Americans that they’re not getting ahead no matter how hard they work. Government is an easy scapegoat, utilized by much of corporate America to convince average Americans to cut taxes, spending, and regulations.

The median wage continues to drop, adjusted for inflation, even though the economy is growing. And the share of the economy going to wages rather than to profits is the smallest on record.

Increasingly it’s looked like the game is rigged, especially when people see government bailing out Wall Street (the Tea Party movement grew out of the bailout, as did the Occupiers), and handing out corporate welfare to big agriculture, big pharma, oil companies, and insurance companies.

The outrage grows when average working people are told – wrongly — that a growing portion of Americans don’t pay taxes and live off government handouts.

The battle over the fiscal cliff is nearly over, but the trench warfare will continue.

--Robert Reich, American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator.

Oh, and then there's this:  The Biden-McConnell Tax Deal Would Save Less

The tax deal negotiated between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and approved by the Senate early on January 1 would save less than half as much revenue as President’s Obama’s original proposal.

And if they really WERE concerned about all that pesky deficit spending, would this be true?

Eight Corporate Subsidies in the Fiscal Cliff Bill, From Goldman Sachs to Disney to NASCAR

Nice, huh?

All these, above, seem to make clear that in actuality, the Republicans aren't all about that pesky deficit after all. They're all for themselves and they simply want to stop this president and the other political party.

It's sick.
Links: Michael Hudson: America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal Cliff, Part II – The Financial War Against the Economy at Large
The "Fiscal Cliff" Hoax

Robert Reich - Wikipedia

Robert Reich

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