Suddenly Republicans have discovered the budget deficit and concluded that we need to cut money from programs that support the poor to close it? Puh-lease...
By and large, the programs we spend our tax money on are investments. If we invest in education or infrastructure, we may get a return on that spending in the years to come as taxes from people with good jobs. If we invest in food and housing for the poorest, we may reduce the desperation and misery of those who could otherwise resort to crime and violence (like we see in France at the moment).
It should be no secret that, like millions of our citizens, our government is living beyond its means and borrowing to keep the good times rolling. We have to cut something but student loans, food stamps, public housing, education are not the things we cannot afford. They are the things we must afford.
What we cannot afford (and what is never mentioned) is our military spending. What we cannot afford is spending more money on the military than every other nation in the world COMBINED - over $300B every year BEFORE September 11 and BEFORE we invaded Iraq. If we need to cut something to pay our bills and meet our obligations, the Cold War military industrial complex is the first thing we should cut. Stealth bombers, laser satellites, all that billion Dollar crap we built to fight the Soviet Union and now have no use for is what should go first.
All those expensive weapon systems we built to fight off a Soviet Invasion do us no good in stopping terrorists or in Iraq. Dick Cheney's friends at Halliburten, Lockheed, and the other defense contractors should feel the pain - not the poor, the old, the weak, and the young.
The time has come to choose between guns and butter. This should be an easy choice of priorities.
House Passes Budget-Cut Bill Despite Republican Divisions
Victory Follows Spending Measure's Defeat; Senate Approves $60 Billion Tax Legislation
November 18, 2005
WASHINGTON – House Republicans sweated out a victory on a major budget-cut bill early Friday morning, salvaging a major pillar of their agenda despite divisions within the party and nervousness among moderates that the vote could cost them in next year's elections.
The bill, passed 217-215 after a 25-minute-long roll call, makes modest but politically painful cuts across an array of programs for the poor, students and farmers. The bill would slice almost $50 billion from the deficit by the end of the decade by curbing rapidly growing benefit programs such as on health care, food coupons and student loan subsidies.
The Senate, meanwhile, passed a $60 billion bill that would extend expiring tax cuts and prevent roughly 14 million families from paying higher taxes through the alternative minimum tax.
Both measures are meant to show a prudent Republican majority addressing the costs of the Iraq war and recent Gulf Coast hurricanes. But moderates are uncomfortable with the juxtaposition of a new round of spending cuts just as tax cuts are being extended to the benefit of often higher-income individuals.
Moreover the following editorial (which largely argues against my opinions) from the WSJ points out that the current debate about cuts wont really cut enough of anything to be significant anyways. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the real problems that need to be addressed although I would argue that reform of our medical system and not cuts is the answer there.
As i read this article i asked myself (once again): If we have a Republican President, why oh why wasnt it John McCain?
Fiscal Chicken Hawks
November 16, 2005
To hear the rhetoric from Washington, you'd think Democrats and Republicans were engaged in some titanic clash over the future of government. The reality is that they are fighting over entitlement restraint that is so minor that it reveals this year's entire budget debate as a political charade. Let's pull back Oz's fiscal curtain.
There's a shred of good news in this story, which is that Senators Sam Brownback of Kansas and John McCain of Arizona have joined with five first-term Republicans to propose some genuine cost cutting. Their plan would delay the Medicare prescription drug bill, adjust Medicare benefits to seniors with incomes of more than $80,000 a year (or $160,000 for a couple), cancel highway pork projects, end dozens of obsolete spending programs, and cut all domestic discretionary spending programs by 5%. Their plan saves $120 billion over two years, which would offset the added costs of Katrina and take at least a five times larger whack out of the long-term federal debt than the current GOP leadership plan.
This is the kind of spending restraint Republicans ought to bring to the House and Senate floor. At least they'd be criticized for doing something worthwhile. As it is, they have the worst of both worlds: They get assailed as mean-spirited skinflints even as they spend like Democrats.
