Deficit and Debt Reduction: It's Math Stupid.

The House voted, mostly along party lines, to cut $60Billion from the 2011 spending.  The GOP targeted its usual suspects:  the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.  It also piled on amendments to defund the Affordable Care Act and the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  The GOP showed themselves to be deeply in the pockets of Big Oil when they went after cuts for heating oil subsidies and healthcare for the poor while IGNORING ALL CURRENT SUBSIDIES received by the Oil and Gas Industry.  Sprinkle in the reinvigorated culture war attacks on Planned Parenthood, the assault on collective bargaining and we get another glimpse of the GOP Vision: Pit working Americans against one another while the richest 1% gets richer and richer.
Clearly this bill is DOA when it hits the Senate and President Obama is already stating he will veto the bill.  So where do we go from here?  Likely another temporary funding resolution after the present one expires next month; meanwhile we have not addressed the structural issues facing this country.  Meanwhile polling suggests Americans want the deficit dealt with, but differ on how to deal with it.
Liberal Economist Paul Krugman summed it up best “The key point to understand us that while many voters say that they want lower spending, press the issue a bit further and it turns out that they only want to cut spending on other people.”  Then there’s NJ Governor Chris Christie “The president’s not talking about it (debt crisis) because he’s waiting for the Republicans to talk about it.  And our new bold Republicans that we just sent to the House of Representatives?  They’re not talking about it because they’re waiting for him to talk about it.”
We must go after all discretionary spending ESPECIALLY defense as it makes up the biggest share of that bucket.  We also need to address entitlements or nondiscretionary spending because they are what will sink this nation the fastest due to the rapidly increasing financial demands tied to the aging population.  I ask Congress tg\o once again open up the Domenici-Rivlin Plan and attack this structural problem strategically, not through a willy-nilly approach of cut this and cut that.  And yes that plan will include necessary tax increases, I particularly like a carbon tax,to increase revenues.
It’s math stupid.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Secular American Jew and a Love for Israel

Sunni and Shia: So who are the bad guys again?

September 10, 2001 was a Monday