Four years ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gaveled the House of Representatives into session saying, "For all America's children, the House will come to order.'' The House budget proposal released Tuesday by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan would transform the legislative body from the Children's Congress to the Corporations' Congress, robbing poor children of their futures while rewarding the richest Americans and corporations.
This is radical and reckless, and it's built on rhetoric, not real solutions. This is less a budget proposal than an ideological assault on the foundation of a fair society, with the least among us poised to become the principal victims. Instead of protecting and investing in our most precious asset, our children, certain members of Congress are putting corporations first. This policy is wrong-headed and will dramatically increase the already massive gap between the rich and the poor. Poor children and their families will suffer most.
The House Budget proposal is an assault on children and low income families cutting lifelines and dismantling protections for the Medicaid program that serves more than 30 million children. From cradle to college, poor children would lose crucial supports from Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to Pell grants. Under this budget plan the federal government would forsake its role as the engine of equality, and truly become the locomotive for inequality by cutting taxes on corporations rather than closing the loophole that allows them to dodge taxes by shifting profits overseas; further cutting taxes for the richest Americans; and repealing the estate tax increasing the deficit.
To offset all these financial gifts to the rich, this House proposal would cut health care funding by more than $2 trillion over 10 years—at a time when there are 50 million uninsured Americans including more than 8 million uninsured children. This proposal would not only threaten the uninsured by repealing health reform, it also threatens the health and future of millions of children, more than half children of color, currently being served by Medicaid. The intersection of poverty and race in America today means children of color would suffer disproportionately from these cuts. Instead of leaving no child behind, the House budget proposal would leave no corporation behind.
If enacted this budget proposal would increase hunger, homelessness, and misery for the most vulnerable in America who are already suffering from deep cuts at the state level and are still facing devastating federal cuts in the FY2011 budget battle that could lead to a government shutdown this week.
All of us must do what's morally right and stand together for children to fight back these cruel and immoral assaults on our children. The future and soul of our country is at stake.
Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender
And where do you get off equating government spending with morality? Since when is taking money from people who earned it, or borrowing money from your children moral?
How about this. Fire 33% of all non-defense government employees. Cut the pay of the rest by 30%. Eliminate Medicaid, and block grant the money to the States. Turn Medicare into a program like Ryan says. Dedicate FICA to Social Security and demand that SS cannot spend more than it take in (like a family or a business - radical concept I know).
Grow up. Anything whose costs expand at a great rate than the incomes of the people who have to pay for it is toast. We simply refuse to pay. Get it?
One of my best friends sold a company for a billion dollars and he with a straight face says that the government has "never done anything for him." Yes, he is bright, yes he worked hard, but he also got a full scholarship to a public university in the 80s and the business he sold? A company that was all internet based.
Could those of us who have benefited from the common weal at least recognize how we benefit? When I was in a white out blizzard driving between Vail and Minneapolis I was really glad for the real-time road updates, but the poor don't need those.
This delinking from the "other" or "those" people. The belief that we can just do it all on our own is very immature . . . I'm sure very self-gratifying if true but not real.
Fanned.
When a community has a society in which 50% actually no longer holds any resources or wealth and 20% hold over 87% you no longer have a functioning community. When you see that top 20% actually increase their wealth by 2.2% in 18 months will all other quadrants lost ground stop blaming the poor and start blaming those who have gamed the system to ensure high rates of inequality.
This was CAUSED INTENTIONALLY BY THE CONSERVATIVES. They hate government. Conservatives have hidden behind some kind of family values but they are non-existent. When conservatives don't believe that workers should have fair pay or worker safety. When they don't believe that the financial giants that caused this mess should be let off and Ryan included in his bill a rollback of all financial regulation.
it also includes tax cuts of 4.2 trillion for the top 1% while cutting 4.3 trillion in aid to the poor and middle class. This isn't about DEFICITS. It is simply a war on the middle class by the wealthy and they are winning because of conservatives in the middle class!
I'll like the two wars that were started and were just gonna cost a $1 or so to end. I'd like us to stop cavalierly getting into wars. And I'd also like for people to stop calling Obama a hardcore leftist. He is a centrist, moderate.
Yes corporations get a tax break as do wealthy Americans. But their tax deductions go away...so GE will no longer be able to pay no taxes just because they're good buds with the Pres and John Kerry will finally be paying his fair share (aside from those pesky yacht taxes).
What it additionally does is let people take the money currently spent by the gov't thru Medicare and gives it to individuals to shop for their own private insurance. Libs will scream that then the decisions on health care will be decided by those horrible insurance companies. What libs either don't know or are unwilling to share, is that Medicare denies claims at twice the rate of any private insurer. Ouch. I bet that hurt. Don't believe me, check out the numbers yourself.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2009/10/06/deny-guess-who-has-highest-medical-claim-rejection-rate
We need to stop having our healthcare run through insurance companies. Because there are no people who will not need healthcare, it is uninsurable. You can't insure against what everyone needs. You can ensure against unlikely things, but not likely things . . . So we need to come to grips with that reality on medical care, that it isn't like anything else in the marketplace. Also by having this weird employment insurance situation, many older people refuse to leave jobs (which would open up work for younger workers because of fear of losing their care and people are afraid to innovate and start businesses. Americans waste .30 of every healthcare dollar in the insurance market.
So at least can we dispense with the idea that this has anything to do with deficits? I am not decreasing my revenue at the same time I'm trying to get spending for some needed outlays in control. The idea that the conservatives never come up with a plan that doesn't include massive tax cuts for the wealthy at the same time decrying the giveaways to the poor.
Well the poor aren't getting richer, the rich are the only people who've increased their wealth in the past 30 years and they've done it by a lot. and they've mostly done it by the financial sector applying "rents" on the community . . since 1980 when the financial sectors profits were 7% of GDP, now they are over 27% and they haven't invented or produced anything but a giant financial meltdown. But that sectors profits and wages are up and there isn't a true reason for it, except they can do it to all of us and you will support them instead of standing up and realizing that something is radically wrong when 50% of the population holds less than 1% of the wealth of the country.
That's not a country that provides opportunity.
Comment after comment repeating the lie that we are broke and we're bankrupting the country and the only way to fix the situation is on the backs of the working middle class. People, we waste over a half billion dollars a day...EVERY DAY...In Iraq and Afghanistan and we've been there spending like drunken sailors for ten years. Hundreds of billions of dollars just since the beginning of this year. Since when is killing people in a dusty hell-hole on the other side of the planet more important than our own children?
End the wars and bring the troops home.
Raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires to 2000 levels.
Allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
Raise the cap on Social Security taxes from $107 thousand to $250 thousand.
Place a fee on Wall Street financial transactions to help pay for the damage to the economy that they caused.
Do these things before demanding regular people to tighten OUR belts.
They have been convinced up is down and black is white. They have been convinced that our salvation is to return to a feudal aristocracy is in our best interest and no amount of facts and direct causation will deter them from wanting to ensure an aristocratic rule in our country.
http://www.rationalpublicradio.com/fiscal-crisis-us-gov-spends-8x-revenues.html
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105?currentPage=1
Read, weep, ruminate!
Also the way we feel about one another really has an impact on how well the entire community does. I'm seeing here a complete lack of any empathy or understanding about living in bone crushing poverty in a community where everyone has so much.
Disparities matter because with disparities come fracturing. We used to believe that providing access to education was a value. But that's gone for our young. We used to believe a social safety net was worthwhile but now that's too expensive.The only thing not too expensive is to borrow money for tax cuts for the rich.
I have never been on public assistance (other than the money my foster families received, which I didn't get any of). I would have been ashamed. I worked two jobs to pay my own way through college carrying a 3.95 GPA while working 12 hour days.
I'm the actual proverbial self-made girl. AND GUESS WHAT I know I didn't make myself. Only those who overvalue themselves and undervalue their communities think they've done everything on their own.
But many of my friends were born in the front of the buffet line. And they laugh and laugh and laugh when anyone suggests that they've earned their money or worked hard for it . . .
I have two friends who have each sold their businesses for a billion dollars in the past five years (both investors in my social entrepreneurship). Both in the past two months have told the republican party to remove them from their lists as they don't believe that conservative policies deliver as promised and that they are tired of being lied too. One I fought with over Christmas break in Vail two years ago. He sent me a text that just said. "You can gloat, you were right."
Second, I'm in the top 2% and I resent the hell out of some incompetent in government telling me he knows how to spend MY money better than I do. My wife and I give a lot of money to charities and causes which WE support because we know that we are indeed, blessed. I'd give more but it goes to an inept gov't who spends it on a great many things which I don't support.
Income inequality. I grew up eating Spam and wearing hand me down clothes. Never had a car until I bought it myself. Largely paid my own way thru college with the aid of a football scholarship, summer jobs, and part time work during school. then worked my butt off to get where I am today. Doesn't seem all that unequal to me.
You don't like where you are in life? Get off your ass and change it. Don't expect me to pay your way.
And are you really so clueless that you think someone could "pretend" we didn't spend money on Iraq and Afghanistan? Spending is spending...it all counts.
It would seem to me that someone is using a child as an excuse for theft!
Thus government is merely unable to deliver the necessities for a functional social contract, because the middle class and poor do not receive enough economic value to fund society with the taxes they pay. Concentrated wealth escapes this tax obligation while the true costs of running a society remain. Its so bad now that we have to borrow to pull it off. So the ultimate source of such dysfunction is extreme and structural inequity required to support a small minority underdeveloped people.
'That's a reason you want to attempt to deliver some modicum of equality of opportunity.
Go read this:
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105?currentPage=1