Budgets and priorities: A GOP assault on the middle class (UPDATED)

And so you have it, a Republican budget plan that would roll back the clock to a time when society’s most vulnerable had nowhere to turn.

The budget plan would change the existing Medicaid program — which guarantees minimum health care for poor and disabled Americans — into loosely supported block grants to states. it would kill Medicare and shift its responsibilities onto the private health insurance industry, a prescription for higher costs and abuse.

At the same time, it lowers upper-end tax rates — money that will land in the hands of those who already have it. And it increases defense spending — though it does so by recategorizing spending to make it look like a decrease.

Budgets are blueprints of priorities. The winners and losers in budget battles are not the political parties — despite what the Washington chattering classes have to say — but the American people. The rich, the military sector, the corporate classes — they get a lot from the GOP budget proposal. The middle class and the poor — our benefits are going to be slashed. We lose badly.

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Here is a statement from U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-12):

Budgets are moral documents. They reflect, in dollars and cents, our real priorities. Republican priorities are clear: abandoning the most vulnerable in our society by destroying Medicare and Medicaid in order to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans.  They would further shift the cost of government onto the middle class and force students, medical researchers, and small businesses to fight over the remaining scraps. These are not my priorities. My priorities are making smart investments that create jobs and strengthen American competitiveness and reducing the deficit by avoiding wasteful and unnecessary spending and costly tax expenditures.

If the new majority was looking for a formula that would bring back the ‘misery index’, they have succeeded.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

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