I am seriously p*ssed off at the GOP in Congress
Well, today I was reading Newsweek in the orthodontist's office, and I discovered this:
Washington's Suicide Pact
in which author Ezra Klein opines in a very similar mode to my own earlier ode to p*ssed-offedness:
If those job losses were the necessary cost of doing something serious about the deficit, perhaps Republicans could justify them. But that’s not the case. The GOP’s
spending cuts come from the 12 percent of the budget known as “nondefense discretionary spending.” That’s not Medicare, Medicaid, big tax breaks like the mortgage-interest deduction, military spending, or Social Security—not, in other words, any of the major contributors to the deficit. Rather, it’s a hodgepodge of programs for education, retraining workers, housing the homeless, investing in infrastructure, and so forth. This part of the budget tends to be lean, as politicians continually return to it to make cuts. Why? Because its beneficiaries tend to be politically weak—kids rather than seniors, or unemployed workers rather than corporate titans.
Senate Democrats, frustrated by the depth of the cuts Republicans have proposed, have tried to negotiate. “Tax cuts and expanded mandatory programs are a large part of what got us here,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, “and they are going to have to be part of the solution.” Republicans were not interested. “Right now we need to crawl before we can walk, and that means finishing last year’s business and complet[ing] a spending bill,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. “[The Democrats’] answer is to raise taxes, not to cut spending, and that’s not something anyone else is talking about,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Syrup of ipecac is not necessary to induce vomiting after reading that pap, is it?
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