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Friday, February 11, 2005

Bush Budget: Screw America 

My most recent diary on Dailykos:

Bush Budget: Screw America
Feb 11th, 2005 at 06:20:40 PST

While you expose the Gannons, be careful to keep your eye on the real Bush prize: the elimination of the middle class, and the devastation of the working poor.
A dumbed down, financially struggling class, versus the rich, is what their battle cry is, secretly.

It is my belief that this administration has written off huge portions of our population, in the name of enriching a few, private coffers.

If, and I say if, they stole the election in 2004, they need not count on support from anyone, necessarily. They can steal more elections, though obviously, the risk for exposure rises.

They can propose what they want to propose, throw it out there, and see what sticks. We have to be extremely vigilant and on top of their every move.

What they are practicing with the current budget proposals is a form of social darwinism practiced to the extreme, laced with religious fervor.

They are the chosen ones because they are rich. They are the chosen ones because God chose them.

They have annointed themselves.

What kind of nation do we want? Are they stupidly pushing us to the brink of civil war with most of the budget earmarked for war, and the devastation of social programs?

Why haven't the democrats, in good conscience, signed up to repeal the tax cuts, and made this a cornerstone of good, economic policy?

Why isn't there a national movement to repeal the tax cuts?

What is the alternative to the huge outlays for war in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Bring the troops home.

Here is Ruth Coniff's blog in the Progressive on the budget:


All of this domestic cutting is supposed to calm the deficit hawks in the Republican Party and on Wall Street, who are alarmed at how this Administration has taken the federal government from surplus to record deficits in the space of four years.
But the budget leaves out all the big-ticket items, ignoring altogether the future cost of the war in Iraq and continued military operations in Afghanistan. (The White House is preparing to make another $80 billion request to fund these operations in the next few days.)

The President's budget doesn't even touch on Bush's biggest domestic-policy initiative for this term: the privatization of Social Security, and the massive borrowing necessary to get his plan for private accounts off the ground.

And Bush's budget is particularly galling given that he still plans on giving $1.8 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.

"We calculate that 257,000 American millionaires are scheduled to receive an average of $123,592 each in federal tax breaks this year," says Dr. Elizabeth A. Letzler of the group Responsible Wealth, an organization of affluent Americans who reject Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy (www.responsiblewealth.org). Letzler spoke to a group gathered at the National Press Club today. "That alone totals $32 billion," she said.

But why scale back tax cuts for millionaires when you can take the money out of Medicaid, the major health-care program for the poor?

What does Bush mean when he says our society can be measured by how we treat the weak and vulnerable?

That slapping the weak, the elderly, and the poor, while coddling the rich shows what big bullies we are?

The context for Bush's line about the weak and vulnerable was abortion and medical research. "We must strive to build a culture of life," he said in the same breath, and then thanked Congress for increasing funding for the National Institutes of Health.

It was a way of waving at his anti-abortion base, alluding to his opposition to stem-cell research, and suggesting that he supports treatments and cures for people with illnesses and disabilities--as long as the research doesn't involve human embryos.

# posted by scorpiorising : 7:05 AM |

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