Wednesday, March 15, 2006
from The Center for American Progress' The Progress Report
A Blueprint For Fiscal Disaster
This week, the Senate is debating the 2007 budget resolution, a blueprint for how Congress plans to allocate $2.8 trillion in federal spending next year. The federal budget is a concrete embodiment of policy choices, a moral document that reflects the values and priorities of our nation. The budget that the Senate is currently debating runs counter to many of our nation's longest and deepest held beliefs; it prioritizes tax cuts for the rich and wasteful spending in the defense budget while shortchanging veterans benefits, education, health care, energy research, homeland security, housing for the elderly and disabled, and child care for working families. The Washington Post writes, "[I]t's time to pause and consider the unabashed recklessness of the Bush administration's fiscal policies and its unwillingness to alter its tax-cutting course to accommodate new budgetary realities." Indeed, while President Bush and his conservative allies claim their cuts to domestic programs are needed measures to assert fiscal discipline, the reality is that the Senate budget plan would actually increase the deficit over the next five years by $266 billion.
I like the way that they approached this. A "moral document". Nice.
Then again, republicans pay lip service to a lot of things and rarely do they follow through. I'll give one example:
By SUDEEP REDDY / The Dallas Morning News
WASHINGTON – The nation's previous energy crises inspired presidential calls for sweeping action and billions of dollars in new funding to address consumers' soaring energy bills.President Bush appears to be taking a far different approach, at least when it comes to funding. Administration officials are touring the nation this week touting renewable energy programs, but they're doing so with overall funding that barely grows from previous years. Some long-running programs for renewable energy research and energy efficiency have been gutted in the president's latest budget proposal.
"Since the August index was published, the U.S. energy chessboard has been rearranged by a broad energy reform law going into effect, a two-hurricane punch that shut in domestic oil production, sudden spikes in oil prices spurred by geopolitics, and record oil company profits."
So the public might actually be getting a clue!
The rest of the budget is similarly crap. The cost of the war is forcing cuts in crucial services like child care and health care. And much of the war funding, especially aid to Iraq, "cannot be accounted for." And now for the sentence that nobody dares utter for some reason - A lot of money that was appropriated for "Iraq reconstruction" has simply been stolen.
