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ACCORDING TO LIZ - This travesty of a sell-out of the American people in the House GOP’s budget wet dream demonstrates that these Republicans truly are a quarrel of irresponsible children playing with matches.
Nasty thuggish children, dedicated to harming their fellow citizens or, if denied that fly-wing plucking power, blowing up the whole world’s economy.
As Ilhan Omar pointed out last week, this bill "represents failed trickle-down economics at its worst.”
One class of people, however, must be whooping it up with pleasure over McCarthy and the Republicans’ proposed attack on Biden’s hard-won Inflation Reduction Act which is presented to the public as the Limit, Save, Grow Act.
Yes, unlimited savings for the ruling class to grow corporate greed.
It sets limits on the rights of ordinary people to oppose corporate polluter abuses and price hikes by profiteering multinationals as well as egregious government intervention in their doctors’ offices and in their bedrooms. It does bring savings – but solely for the less than 1% of Americans already benefiting from Trump’s tax rejuggling to ensure that the poor subsidize the rich. And it does bring growth – to the power of corporate interests on Wall Street at the expense of the rest of us living on Main Street.
Trumps’ billionaire buddies, private equity mafiosi, and those Wall Street honchos pulling down obscene salaries to manipulate the market for short term gain in return for the ever-increasing pain of everyone else will make out like the bandits.
The rest of us?? Tough luck for being born without a silver spoon in your mouth.
Republicans claim that the U.S. government is too large, it spends too much, that its debt and deficits are not sustainable, and spending cuts will ease inflation.
But Republicans scream for smaller-government only when they are not in power; in 2017 and 2018, they increased both federal spending and the deficits. The biggest driver of deficits for the last 20 years has not been programs for the poor but ever-increasing tax cuts for corporations and the rich.
And the Republicans have been the biggest promoters of American military intervention in foreign countries and the ever-escalating Pentagon budget is the biggest single drain on federal discretionary funds.
If Republicans make those cuts, what will happen to the economy? Federal funds help maintain jobs across the country. Without jobs there will be fewer companies providing goods and, even if wages are forced down as unemployment rises in response, the lack of competition will inflate costs to whatever greedy corporate (leaders feel the market can bear.
Meaning a bonanza for Amazon, the oil companies, and Wall Street, and the devastation of Main Street.
Furthermore, the devil in the details means that while Republicans promised to shield Social Security, Medicare and military spending from direct cuts, indirectly they have gone far, far out of bounds on the first two.
To balance the largesse lavished on their corporate and wealthy masters, deep cuts must be made elsewhere. Since McCarthy and his minions are unlikely to cut back on the para-military areas such as border security, the obvious targets are ancillary programs for Americans suffering from the ravages of the precarious post-pandemic economy.
Medicaid, food stamps, and the Social Security Administration itself.
Slashing health safety nets for the most vulnerable – at a time when the need is exponentially increasing due to inflation. And further exacerbating the existential American public health crisis.
Removing food assistance from more than a million low-income seniors, putting almost half a million Section 8 housing recipients at risk for eviction, and placing millions of private sector workers' pensions in jeopardy with cuts to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.
Cutting in excess of three and a half trillion dollars over the next decade from childcare and preschool programs, from schools, college aid, housing, medical research, transportation, and other social priorities, will negatively impact the futures of poor and middle-class Americans.
Pulling resources from the Social Security Administration will hurt processing and distribution of benefits to needy Americans, and will force office closures and layoffs, deliberately making access even more difficult.
Then, on top of the recent revelations that private equity companies are buying up nursing homes and slashing services to increase profit, removing oversight funds, putting tens of thousands of elderly Americans at risk of living out what remains of their lives in debilitating conditions.
At the same time, this Limit, Save, Grow Act protects the wealthy from paying what they owe in taxes by repealing IRS funding; a cut that a Congressional Budget Office analysis says would add $114 billion to the deficit.
And about as much as Republicans claim would be saved by imposing work requirements on those receiving Medicaid and nutrition assistance. Onerous Dickensian style obligations that would put children at risk to ensure rich tax cheats won’t suffer audits.
The public-debt clause of the 14th Amendment holds that “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
It’s may be a stretch but the ongoing and deliberate tax evasion by the wealthy sure smacks of insurrection.
Perry v. United States (1935) specifically prohibits a current Congress from abrogating a contract of debt incurred by a prior Congress.
But Limit, Save, and Grow is clearly a direct attempt to roll back Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act which finally put the U.S. squarely on the road to environmental justice including boosting clean energy, imposing more stringent regulations on the fossil fuel industry, and enforcing other key green-economy provisions.
Curtailment of expenditures on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also in the crosshairs of Limit, Save, and Grow, would de facto limit investment in America’s infrastructure, cutting jobs and reducing economic growth.
Decimating domestic spending hurts ordinary people and small businesses; while the wealthy have the wherewithal to weather most fiscal storms and the multinationals see such disasters as opportunities to reduce costs and increase their profits on the back of the health and livelihoods of everyday Americans.
Reagan’s gift to the rich cost the country’s treasury almost $20 trillion in today’s dollars, and the Trump and Bush tax cuts for the wealthy are directly responsible for adding another $10 trillion to the U.S. debt, and for the 90% increase in the debt ratio since 2001. And this House GOP budget continues their disproportionate pandering to the most affluent of Americans.
What gives the McCarthy’s horde the power to leverage the debt ceiling?
No other countries suffer through such convulsions of political brinkmanship.
Democrats should never even begin to negotiate from such a travesty of a bill, especially when served up as a purportedly responsible approach to the country’s economic woes.
To save us from the bloodbath of Republicans cuts, no-one can give a millimeter. The past four decades have demonstrated what compromise means to Republicans. They stand their ground until the Democrats give in. No more!
House, Senate and President must hold as a united front, not only against the House Republican hubris but against the efforts of the plutocracy to shift every provision of the budget to align in their favor.
The constituents of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Simena must lean heavily on their Senators to not cave – again – to their campaign contributors. The DNC, Wall Street’s favorite charity, must be brought to heel.
Discussions should only commence after the Republicans increase the debt ceiling and the focus must be on containing the out-of-control Pentagon, paramilitary and armaments industries along with the financial and private equity sectors.
The Republican posturing as fiscally disciplined has been exposed as crass opportunism to enrich their pre-election war chests and glorified news-cycle theatrics to entertain the masses.
Mindless rah-rah from the plutocrat-owned press has turned policy analysis into just more infotainment, with the Republican shills micro-managing content to manipulate public opinion and (mis)comprehension.
Every budget reflects the values of those who draft it, and this House Republican budget reflects how abysmally awful those who wrote it truly are.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
