Could Republicans Buck Their Leaders Over Spending Cuts?

These are the same people who argued that tax cuts for billionaires would create jobs. Obviously, the rejection of objective fact is their main value in life.

They are concerned that the budget cuts are not tackling big-ticket items like … Planned Parenthood?

By my calculations, the $300m for Planned Parenthood will fund the Pentagon for slightly under 4 hours at 2010 levels.

The GOP would vote lockstep to shut down the government were it not for the Gingrich debacle of the mid – nineties. If they were serious about bringing government spending under control, they would demand the cessation of all DoD spending other than that which is required to conclude current wars and humanitarian missions. But of course defence spending is a sacred cow to the GOP – they receive far too much cash from the AIPAC and defence contractor lobbies.

The Tea Party supremacists who regularly rain down the constitution on their foes (ie. everyone not considered a TP fundamentalist) conveniently overlook the standing army/standing militia dichotomy. If the US wants to spend three – quarters of a trillion dollars every year on defence then logically a resistance to gun control is unsustainable.

Not that it’s relevant to this article– which aims to be a collection of press releases from various quarters– but the policies these freshmen & Bachmanns are advocating is complete, unvarnished, 100% poppycock & balderdash.
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In a situation like the one we’re facing– low interest rates, low cost of gov’t borrowing, businesses holding onto cash, and an astronomical unemployment rate– those advocating that we cut spending may as well be demanding that we bleed the economy with leeches.
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The Lib Dem/Conservative government in the UK is trying austerity. And guess what? Just like the US in 1937, it’s damaging the economy. These are very, very old lessons of economics. But we’re constantly struggling not to see what’s before our nose.

Shared Sacrifice:
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http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/03/hart.html
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See chart
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“You don’t have to be a flaming Marxist to see that there’s something askew here.”

Special Olympics? What’s So Special About Them?
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The House GOP’s budget, which passed last month, takes a hatchet to programs for disabled kids and Special Olympics athletes. The proposed cuts could force the closure of at least one Special Olympics program, which is funded through the Department of Education. Dubbed Project UNIFY, the program serves more than 750,000 students in 43 states and draws from techniques used in Special Olympics training for activities in public schools.

The program includes sports teams that pair disabled athletes with nondisabled athletes; developmental activities for young children with disabilities; and anti-discrimination programs to combat bullying in schools. Special Olympics president and CEO Tim Shriver has said the program is at the forefront of a national movement to fight bias against the disabled and, in a recent interview on MSNBC, he denounced the GOP cuts: “It wasn’t a haircut—it was a guillotine job for the programs for health and education for children with special needs.”

I can’t decide if they are doing this just because they are mean-spirited a$$holes who care nothing about anyone other than the super-rich who should get tax cuts every six months, or if they are just going after it because the Kennedy’s were involved.

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http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/03/10/special-olympics-whats-so-special-about-them/

Shared Sacrafice
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Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?
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Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them
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Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted.

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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216
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The Cheaters and Their Banks
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The Obama administration is rightly keeping the pressure on tax cheats and the bank executives who help them by stashing their money in secret accounts overseas. Now we would like to see the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department take the battle to the banks themselves. That’s the only way of getting them to drop this lucrative and illegal business.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/opinion/14mon3.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha211

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For all the reactionary Republicans. NSFW.
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Lewis Black on Broadway talking about how America may not be #1,

Thank you, apr2563.
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It reminds me of my soon-to-be brother-in-law, who has never set foot out of the Alabama county in which he was born, declaring loudly at every family dinner how fabulous America is … if we could just get rid of the liberals Fox News tells him are destroying this country.
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Just like my last THREE brothers-in-law, all divorced by my sisters and sisters-in-law, who were all idiots, and are now all living in poverty, and blaming liberals for it.
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I’ve told my wife I’m not going to tolerate this idiot BIL like I did the last one, and she somewhat agrees, but she really wants me to bite my tongue until her mother dies. But, boy, he’s loud, he’s stupid, he’s arrogant, and he never stops talking. And he’s not a bit concerned about being polite until the old girl dies.
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Even his own children can’t stand him, but I’m supposed to. Jeebus.

Apr, I’ll give them this much, there is nothing stealth about their plans.
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They are as open as they can be with their intentions/priorities. We shall see if an opposition party holds one body of Congress and the White House.

Thanks, apr!

In the headline, was the work “Buck” a typo?

heh

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?
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Even Bernard Madoff is asking this question.

“we are keeping our promise to the American people to reduce the deficit and fix the economy.”
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Except what the republicans are doing or threatening to do will not reduce the deficit or fix the economy.

So all the spending and massive debt we have accumulated to date since Obamao came into office is working? I didn’t think so.

Unemployment rate when Bush tax cuts extended 9.4%.
Since then 9.0% Jan. 8.9 % Feb. Seems fact doesn’t match your bashing (again)

And the fiscal year budget the Democrats passed had what cuts?

Oh right they NEVER passed a budget!

When liberals speak, they never use facts. They may use a kind of fact, a twisted like a pretzel fact. Liberalese. Don’t tell the truth, just omit things, or bring up something that is totally unrelated. If that doesn’t work, simply LIE about it.

I have no doubt the libtards would be very upset that the Special Olympics may have to take some cuts in their spending, JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE.
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You are such a good little liberal april2563. Almost as good as my use of the baby from Canada which the government run healthcare wanted to just leave him to die.
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Good job.

“Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”

Because they would have had to fess up that folks like Dodd and Schumer were actually on the take. Or that Barney Frank was guilty of obstruction.
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BUt let’s look at Fannie & Freddie where the fraud was bigger than Enron where several officers went to jail. Here we have Demo operatives that collected millions while cooking the books including Gorelick, Raines, Johnson, Hubbell (Webster’s son) and Barney Frank’s partner Herb Moses.

Instead of jail taxpayers are paying million for their legal expenses.

It would appear that RustFreep are special needs people as well, Apr.

Great we can add Lewis Black to the list of Jon Stewart as sources of liberal ideas and facts. Gee can FAmily Giy be far behind?

The nice thing about facts is they can be verified by multiple observers. They are not dependent on the angst-ridden dreams of a feverishly lying liberal, bent on world domination and total destruction. No one, honest enough to abide by the constraints of critical thinking at a minimum, who avoids conspiracy theories, false analogies, straw men, etc., can miss them.

I share your pain. I have one BIL who’s a really nice guy and another whose funeral I can’t wait to help plan. It involves a cremation and a flush.

There is something called Confirmation Bias and it happens to us *all*.

Of course if you just want to bash the people that disagree with you rather than teach (or learn) anything then carry on…

But Freeinpa that was not a tax cut but an extension. The Bush tax cuts were in place when the unemployment rate was at 9.4 percent. You can’t logically argue that a tax cut lead to the drop in unemployment when the rate stayed the same (it just did not increase on the those earning over 250,000) at both points. It’s like me saying that the NHL hockey season lead to the drop in unemployment since it happens to coincide with this decrease (although it started Oct 7th).

I’m not an economist, but my understanding is that modern economies are one of the most complicated things known to man. There are lots and lots of forces pulling it in every direction. That is why it is so unpredictable.
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So, while it might not be working, it is certainly helping.
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Personally, i never understood the republican approach to the economy. The best way to get people back to work, is to fire a lot of people?

elvis, expansive fiscal policy is a great tool, but is available only to responsible societies. with $14T of debt, a figure that is nearly 7 times the federal government’s annual income, we have lost that option. we have nearly replicated economic conditions that existed in 2007: cheap money, irresponsible lending (to the feds), all rationalized on the “HOPE” that we’ll get the economy growing. our debt remains serviceable ONLY because rates are at historical lows. any hiccup causing rates to spike upwards, and we face the equivalent of national bankruptcy.

To be fair, it does reduce the deficit, just in an insignificant way.
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I would be all for a plan that actually solves the problem: eliminate the deficit completely and come up with a plan to avoid more deficits during the next recession.
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Until then don’t act like your budget is worth fighting for.
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At least Obama’s budget, while fails miserably to address the deficit, has a second goal of helping the economy (both now and in the future), and has (in my opinion) a reasonable chance of working. (that is until the interest payments on the debt take up half the budget).

Rusty as a Canadian who actually heard about that story earlier than yesterday (remember reading about it on and off for the past couple of months) I can tell you that it wasn’t “government run health care system” that wanted the kid to die (oh by the way since 2006 we’ve had a conservative government that is lead by the Alberta based extreme right in Canada which is only kept in check by its minority status, if anything our government, who recently told public servants to officially call in memos the Harper government, not the government of Canada, is more like your neocons than any left wing american group. So given the “pro-life” stance of this party it would seem odd that they would push for the death of a baby), the kid was in a vegetative state and dying, the parents wanted him to die at home , but the hospital did not want to preform the tracheotomy that that parents wanted since it was not medically necessary. The courts sided with the hospital, they ordered the breathing tube removed, the parents refused, but unlike in your evil fantasies, where a faceless government worker comes in in the middle of the night and pulls out the tube, the hospital has left it in while the parents attempted to find another solution (one can’t blame them, their child is dying, but the sad fact is there is basically no hope, he will die in hospital sooner or later). A priest group raised the funds to fly the child to a hospital in St. Louis (a catholic hospital which means that even if he is completely brain dead they will stick him on life support until his frail body finally fails) and pay for his care. There is no way knowing the facts of this case you can say the hospital decision is based on the bottom line. Up until the past few days no hospital in Canada or the US would accept this case and the bottom line is even the parents expect him to die (nine years ago they had a daughter who had the same thing and died or it) they wanted the tracheotomy to have the kid die at home, the hospital did not want to preform an unnecessary and dangerous procedure on a fragile patient. That is all this case was about until some right to life people decided to turn it into a lightening rod (a la Terry Schiavo). Look we all feel bad for this family and we understand that the parents are clinging to even the faintest of hopes, but reality is reality and even in your pay for play system this child would be in the same state (probably would have died earlier as his parents would not have been able to afford the costs of his treatment for these many months).

So Rusty please have some basic human decency and not exploit the sickness and death of a small child to attempt to score points against the democrats, especially as you are factually wrong in this case.

freeinpa seems to think 3 mos is enough to “prove” the tax cut extensions create jobs. How about some real historic prospective: Unemployment rate in 2000:4.0, then Bush elected: 2001:4.7 / 2002 5.8 / 2003 (Bush tax cuts take effect):6.0 / 2004:5.5 / 2005:5.1 / 2006:4.6 / 2007:4.6 / 2008 (the collapse of economy) 5.8 and up from there. Also worth noting “97-”99 all under 5%. Historically more telling is highest tax rate from 1965 through 1980 was 70% and unemployment rate ranged from 3.6 to 7.7%. Study the hard, cold numbers for more than a couple of months, or even 2 or 3 yrs, and one can find no clear correlation between tax cuts for wealthy and job creation. What the high end tax cuts has created is a huge redistribution of wealth to the very top at the expense of everyone else. In fact the U.S. has been better off as a whole when the highest rates were 50% and above. Those whom have benefited the most should bear the largest tax burden because that is what works best for all.

Excellent chart, should put things into correct prospective, but I doubt any tea-party-types will see the obvious. The budget problem is largely due to the tax cuts for the wealthy. Republicans needed to extend the tax cuts to give them an excuse to cut the social programs they hate. How about it freeinpa and friends, look at the chart, do you really favor the programs on the right (of the chart) to those on the left? If so, then WHY?

Answer to 1.1.

Wrong, it is Obama’s stimulus plan taking full effect, which is lowering the unemployment rate. (Just kidding, though the stimulus is helping, it is the natural cycle of the economy.)

Agreed, I have a BIL who believes in trickle down economics, never had to actually work for a living, and doesn’t even know how to change a tire on his car.