What can Americans expect if Republicans make significant gains in Congress after the coming November elections? Not only a doubling of the national deficit and a crippling of Social Security, health-care reform, and other important public-assistance programs, but a repeat of the government shutdown that so angered voters in the mid-1990s. It’s sad to think that the U.S. electorate may not have learned from the monumental GOP failures of the recent past.
READ MORE: “Republicans Want to Cut Federal Spending but Have No Idea What Programs to Cut,” by Ben Armbruster (Think Progress).
Friday, September 17, 2010
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2 comments:
How about cutting the bloated, hugely expensive military budget, slated to be $850 billion as of Oct. 1? How about no aid to the banks? How about letting the tax cuts for the rich expire?
How about putting people back to work, to generate income into the economy, and so that millions can be productive and save their homes?
I agree, Kathy, that significant changes still need to be made. But it took a Republican-controlled Congress and a Republican president eight years to screw up the American economy. Why do people think that a Democratic president and his fellow Dems in Congress can fix all those screw-ups in only two years? Not possible.
And none of the concerns you mention would be given priority status by a Republican-dominated Congress. Republicans love to spend money on the military, because it makes them look macho and dispenses with any extra tax funds that might otherwise go to social services, which they despise. (Note the present right-wing drive to privatize and starve Social Security.) The GOP would be equally unlikely to discontinue the Bush-era tax breaks to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, even though they provided for a sunsetting of those tax breaks in 2010. And the “big idea” Republicans have for stimulating the country's anemic economy? MORE tax breaks, of course, which unless they’re given to low-income people, have very little stimulative value.
Republicans are hoping, of course, that voters are simply too stupid to recognize the hollowness of their rhetoric and the shallowness of their legislative promises. They just want power, and they aren’t above lying every day, in every way to win it. I hope they're unsuccessful.
Cheers,
Jeff
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