Tag: budget

There is politics and then there is policy. The Democrats may as yet win politically in the current debate over the budget and a potential shutdown, but the American people already have lost.

The debate has occurred within parameters set by the Republicans, meaning that we are witnessing a massive slashing of spending at a time when the government needs to help prime the economic pump. The two sides already have agreed to $38 billion in spending cuts, according to The New York Times, and are separated by the smallest of margins:

Despite the disagreement over what still divided the two parties, it was clear that the dollar difference had shrunk to only about $1 billion or $2 billion, and that lawmakers would have a difficult time explaining to voters how most of the federal government could come to be closed over such a relatively small sum.

Think about this for a second. For all the talk about the vast divide separating the two parties, the budget debate has come down to essentially a few pennies. All that really separates Democrats and Republicans, despite the rhetoric in Washington and on the chat shows, is the proverbial drop in a bucket.

The debate, of course, should have been about priorities — about what programs are important to Americans, what kinds of things the government can and should be doing to make the livers of Americans better.

But neither party really takes those concerns to heart. Rather, the two ultimately are beholden to the same corporate master.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

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.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

The liberal case for cutting Social Security? Matt Miller has decided to follow Andrew Cuomo down the spider hole of regressive budgeting, buying into the notion that the only way to fix our fiscal problems is to cut our way out of it.

Never mind that Social Security, as it’s currently constituted, does not go nearly far enough and that Medicare should be expanded to cover all Americans. I know this is a statement that is out of step with political fashion, but our problem is not that we pay too much in taxes to get overly generous benefits. Our problem is that we have allowed the gap between the rich and the rest of us to grow exponentially.

Taxes in the United States account for 27.3 percent of gross domestic product — far lower than the 36.2 percent average for 30-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and lower than all but four of its members.

And yet, we still pay more per capita for healthcare than any other industrialized nation, fail to cover a large section of our citizens and still have one in six workers either unemployed and underemployed.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.