Over the last year, the American public has been inundated with conservative austerity arguments. Medicaid and Medicare needed to be reined in (or handed over to the states entirely, according Paul Ryan), unemployment insurance was, at times, too costly a burden for the nation, and even heating oil subsidies to poor families had to be cut if the economy was going to rebound. All of this formed to core of the Republican economic orthodoxy. Cut to stimulate was the motto and everything else was deemed voodoo economics.