Most of us have been wondering and blaming either Party for the delay in producing a balanced budget – whose fault is it? Why are we seeing such irrational thoughts and acts from a group of ‘selected’ officials sent to do one job? Is it just partisan politics?
First things first… the bickering is about twelve percent of the budget! That twelve percent is where Planned Parenthood is funded (abortion rights advocates); Medicare is there, so is Medicaid; and a host of other significant entitlement programs like Pell Grants! The Republicans and their Tea Party sidekicks want to dump all entitlements, or at the least strangle them out of existence.
There are riders on H.R. 1 that make it a ‘poison pill’ for many of those entitlements – riders put there by the Republicans, and their Tea Party cohorts, to destroy many of the entitlements that we have paid into from the first day that we went to work – SSA and Medicare Part D will die if the Democrats aren’t strong enough to defend our rights; many things will die.
Here are some examples of how the Republican Party and its sidekick, the Tea Party, intend to deplete the budget of entitlements – most of which are absolutely necessary for lower income people.
Restricts, or eliminates the following…
1. Prohibits the Federal Reserve from transferring more than $80 million to the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.
2. Prohibits funds for a government sponsored “consumer products complaints database.”
3. Prohibits funding for the Biomass Crop Assistance Program.
4. Bans funding for the Department of Education regulations on Gainful Employment, as-yet- unpublished rules that would restrict federal student aid (Pell Grants) to for-profit colleges whose students have high debt-to-income ratios and require the schools to report more information about student outcomes.
5. Prohibits funds for implementing a provision specific to the State of Texas in the “Education Job Fund.” Prohibits funding for the Wetlands Reserve Program.
6. Prohibits funding for the Conservation Stewardship Program.
7. Prohibits funding for the Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act.
8. Prohibits funding for the Weatherization Assistance Program or the State Energy Program.
9. Prohibits funding for various environmental projects in California.
10. Prohibits funding for a climate change czar in the White House.
11. Prohibits funding for EPA efforts to regulate greenhouse gases.
12. Prohibits funding for the EPA to change a rule regulating water.
13. Prohibits funding for enforcing an order by the Secretary of the Interior calling for protecting public natural spaces.
This is not the entire list; there is more… but, it gives you a definitive understanding of why the Democrats are not able to come to a resolution of the budget for, get this… 2011!
This is not the 2012 budget where there is no doubt that more cuts to Social Services and entitlement programs will be ‘cut’!
In a democracy, silence is not golden; it is condonance in the face of injustices; it is fear, where the thought of reprisal fosters control – Rodney A. Davis
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