Short answer: Not a damn thing. Long answer: No really, not a damn thing.
The House Republicans (as Now What? pointed out above) have passed a new budget for the next year that is pretty much…what’s the right word…awful in its treatment of everyone who isn’t super rich.
They want to cut Pell grants for poor students. They want to cut access to cancer screenings for uninsured young women by defunding Planned Parenthood. They want to cut insurance for young people who do actually have it by repealing “Obamacare”’s provision that people up to the age of 26 can stay on their parent’s insurance (which is how I personally have health insurance right now). They want to cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency which most criticize as actually being too lax on corporations that pollute, not too lenient. Let’s extend that to include they wouldn’t mind cutting funds to most regulatory agencies. They want to cut news not brought to you by corporations by defunding NPR/PBS (non-profit public news that manages to escape the long arm of corporate influence in part due to government funds). They want to cut money to help children with low fetal birth rates. Along with dozens of other, nonsensical cuts that disproportionately affect poor people, working class people, and Democrat causes.
Just in case I haven’t hit home the point, they also want to cut heating subsidies for poor people, because we all know North Dakota squatters are really what’s driving up the deficit [sarcasm drips off the screen]. Of course, none of these things put together equals what the United States spends in corporate welfare, no bid defense contracts, or even corn subsidies. And that’s not even mentioning the reason we “don’t have” the money to pay for miniscule costs like NPR (which of course we do have): taxes.
Criminally low taxes for the richest one percent and corporations have all but insured our government is underfunded. We are “over budget” because the proper amount of taxes hasn’t been collected for that budget. It’s a revenue problem that is being spun into an over spending problem. Of course, maybe I should lay off the Republicans. I mean, we all know the tax cuts given to corporations (billions stacked on top of billions annually) couldn’t actually cost as much as Planned Parenthood (312 million annually, there is over double that number of people living in the United States), right?
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