The financial mess we’re in

When the Republicans had the White House eight years ago, they never really cared how they spent the nation’s budget. At the same time, ex-military war contractors were making millions and millions in the Bush and Cheney administration, the nation’s budget was out of control or in a big deep ditch, as we are trying to get out of this big deep hole. When Wall Street and the bankers crashed our financial economy, a lot of people lost their homes and ended up on the street and these Republican still don’t want to look at the reality we face today: that it was on their watch when the economy crashed.

Now Paul Ryan (R-WI), chair of the House Budget Committee, released a budget plan that he claims will bring the size of government down and cap its growth and, if I may add, save the rich, tax the middle class Americans, and give big tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires. Let’s not be fooled. These Republicans are in the deep pockets of the big, rich investors. Look at how other state Republicans are eliminating police union benefits, fire union benefits, and teachers’ union benefits across the U.S., even eliminating women’s rights and cutting off children’s nutrition services. Hopefully they cannot eliminate food stamps. His proposal cuts $6 trillion over the next decade by bringing non-security discretionary spending to 2008 levels, reforming Medicare by offering government-subsidized private insurance options and reforming Medicaid through state block grants. In other words, these budget cuts will eliminate Medicare and Medicaid and put the power back into the hands of rich insurance corporations who could drop you from getting emergency medical services.

This budget plan is more aggressive than the proposal released by the President’s bipartisan Fiscal Commission, a panel on which he was a member. The Commission’s proposal, released in December, closes the budget gap by cutting spending by $4 trillion and raising taxes in the next decade. This is way too radical, given the fact that our economy need to be nurtured slowly out of the big ditch the GOP put us in in the last eight years.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), ranking member on the Budget Committee, responded to the proposal. He said, “Behind the sunny rhetoric of reform, the Republican budget represents the rigid ideological agenda that extends tax cuts to the rich and powerful at the expense of the rest of America, except this time on steroids.” To the tea party radicals who think the federal government is the problem, when their houses were devastated by the tornados they came crying to the federal government for help. Okay now tea party folks, who is your daddy now? This is like a double-edge sword—damned of you do and damned if you don’t. We all need our federal government and FEMA in time of typhoons or tornados.

Another set of lawmakers, known as the “Gang of Six,” is also working on a long-term budget proposal. This bipartisan group of senators says everything is on the table: cuts to defense spending, entitlement reform and tax increases. I like this plan because it is responsible at a time when our economy needs to grow and will help our financial economy in the long run and create more jobs in the future as we climb out if this big hole our Republicans put us through eight years ago.