GOP leaders pledge to cut government, taxes
By the CNN Wire Staff
September 23, 2010 11:19 a.m. EDT
Some provisions in the GOP document match positions of the conservative Tea Party movement that has helped defeat mainstream Republican candidates in several primary elections this year. For example, the document calls for a federal hiring freeze on nonsecurity employees and requiring all legislation to include a clause showing that it is authorized under the Constitution.
Other items would cancel unspent funding authorized by the economic stimulus bill, roll back spending to levels before the stimulus bill and earlier federal bailout legislation and repeal the health care reform bill passed in March.
The document also calls for permanently prohibiting taxpayer funding for abortion.
Several Republican sources said there was no intention to directly address social issues because the electorate is so heavily focused on jobs and spending.
Republican leaders settled on a line that states: "We pledge to honor families, traditional marriage, life, and the private and faith-based organizations that form the core of our American values."
Republican 'Pledge to America': spending caps, tax cuts
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42566.html#ixzz10N8kTRe8
“”To cut spending, Republicans say they are committed to canceling remaining expenditures from the 2009 stimulus law, return domestic appropriations to 2008 levels, impose "hard" budget caps on discretionary spending accounts, reduce spending for congressional operations, have weekly floor votes on winners of the "YouCut" program that allows citizens to vote online for programs that should be slashed, end the Troubled Asset Relief Program, end government control of the secondary home-mortgage lending giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, freeze federal hiring for non-security jobs, sunset programs after a certain number of years, and use more straightforward budgeting for entitlement programs.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42566.html#ixzz10N8T3yPH
Straight from the horse’s ass, Eric Cantor and his apologists for the ultra-wealthy bring you”
http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/
“YouCut – a first-of-its-kind project - is designed to defeat the permissive culture of runaway spending in Congress. It allows you to vote, both online and on your cell phone, on spending cuts that you want to see the House enact. Each week, we will take the winning item and offer it to the full House for an up-or-down vote, so that you can see where your representative stands on your priorities. Vote on this page today for your priorities and together we can begin to change Washington's culture of spending into a culture of savings.”
Ezra Klein writes in the Washington Post today.
“Their policy agenda is detailed and specific -- a decision they will almost certainly come to regret. Because when you get past the adjectives and soaring language, the talk of inalienable rights and constitutional guarantees, you're left with a set of hard promises that will increase the deficit by trillions of dollars, take health-care insurance away from tens of millions of people, create a level of policy uncertainty businesses have never previously known, and suck demand out of an economy that's already got too little of it. “
This “pledge”, like 1994’s contract on America is an attempt to gut and discard every bit of social and economic safety-net legislation passed since the FDR administration. It is an attempt to incorporate all the changes wanted by the Tea Party, the fiscally conservative GOP, and the evangelicals/Christian fundamentalists. It will leave millions of citizens with no access to health care, no income, no housing, and no food. It will result in repeated demands for privatizing every aspect of America. Someone on the GOP/TP/Jesus side will find a way to charge to use the national forests until they are logged off by campaign contributors. Someone will sell vast stretches of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system to developers who will erect toll booths and do no maintenance. Our standing army will be downsized in favor of using the quasi-militia groups that run around on weekends pretending to be soldiers.
As for assuring personal liberties, they will ignore such things and force their way into people’s homes and bedrooms, waving their bibles and demanding that everyone behave and pray as they believe they are supposed to behave and pray. The party that once ran Teddy Roosevelt, a true progressive, will now join politics with creation fairy tales and bigotry to become the party of repression.
Most frightening, perhaps, is the proposal that Eric Cantor unveiled. I shudder at the thought of allowing uninformed voters to “vote” against funding bits or fiscal legislation. Looking at the proposal, it would take me days of intensive study to know how best to vote on fiscal bills. That is, after all, what we taxpayers pay Congress to do rather than pal around with lobbyists on golf courses, fact-finding cruises, etc. Now the GOP intends to palm this job off to singularly uninformed voters whose only qualification is that they have access to a computer and ISP or cell phone account. I don’t want to see our barely functional republic become something governed and controlled by popular opinion of the moment; directed by propagandists running ads on television or by religious demagogues eager to establish a theocracy.
It’s scary out there when the idiots and asylum inmates gain power. Our revolution largely escaped a reign of terror. We may have only delayed it.
Words for art-history: pylon, hypostyle,
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment