Time For A Bold And Ideological Democratic Budget!

by: Bill Egnor AKA Something The Dog Said

Wed Apr 06, 2011 at 06:28:02 AM MST

So, now that House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan has unveiled his steaming tightly coiled pile of a budget the argument in the media is starting. It is to be strongly hoped that the Traditional Media outlets will look at the facts of this budget.

You know the little problems like the draconian cuts are not going to actual deficit reduction because they are being used to pay for tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. Just to raise your blood pressure a little this morning, let me give you and example. Under this budget a single person making $75,000 a year (a nice chunk of change) would pay the same tax rates as people who make multiple millions a year.

Another issue that has to be brought up again and again is that this budget would gut the newly minted financial regulations, would gut the EPA, would gut the Social Security Administration (setting up the argument that it is poorly run and needs to be ended all together) as well as ending Medicare and Medicaid as we know them within ten years.

As if all that shite were not enough, there is the fact that like all of the proposals that Rep. Ryan puts forward, the numbers don't work. He assumes that if we pass his budget in 4 years, just 48 months, the unemployment rate will fall to 4%.

I'd love that to happen, but I have this mental defect, I can't get behind something that has no basis in reality, or as in this case is actually counter factual. Over the last two years the only thing that has kept the economy afloat was major federal spending. Business is sitting on 1.4 trillion in cash and has shown no sign of wanting to use it to stimulate demand. Rep. Ryan wants to slash hundreds of billions from the budget every year for the next decade. Is there really anyone out there who thinks that the resultant loss of jobs is going to improve the growth rate or the unemployment numbers?

If there was anything to this, then we would have had the boom that Rep. Ryan and the Heritage Foundation both predicted from the original Bush tax cuts. Instead of job growth we lost 600,000 private sector jobs in that time period. I think we have been "trickled down" upon enough to show that it is insane and does not work.

There is one piece of the Republican push that I do agree with; there is no plan from the Democrats, yet. For all its flaws (and lets face it they are legion) the Republicans have put forward an ideological marker for budgets. Everyone can see they want to slash government at the expense of the young, the poor and the elderly. I think it is more than a little bit of political suicide, but this is what you get when the inmates run the asylum as has happened with the modern Republican Party.  

We should talk about how we will fix the issue of spiraling costs of Medicare and Medicaid by moving to single payer health care in a decade. After all if we leverage the health care buy of an entire nation, there are tons of savings to be had.

We should end our subsidies of any industry that has any of the 100 earning companies in the world as part in it. We should end subsidies to any company that pays dividends. This budget proposal should end all tax breaks for off-shoring jobs and turn them around to breaks for bringing them home. It should end the practice of allowing companies to keep profits in foreign counties and not pay taxes on them until they onshore that money.

We should propose a budget that includes money for to repair and modernize all our dams and waterways. It should include funds for High Speed Rail and if the states won't participate, then they will face federal imminent domain and will not have any say in where the rail goes nor any share in the taxes on it.

I know that these are big ideological ideas and that in practice we can not pass them all. That is not the issue here. The issue is to show the stark difference between the Republican mean spirited and punitive ideological budget and what a Democratic budget will look like.

Putting this bold ideas in front of the people gives the voters something to really compare and contrast. They will be able to see that the Democrats really want to do more than fight a rear guard action against the Republican insanity and destruction of the gains of the Twentieth Century, and actually want to bring the real prosperity that comes from a nation with a strong infrastructure, a strong middle class and an income gap that does not leave the top 1% making as much as the bottom 50% combined.

There will always be compromises in politics. It is the nature of the beast, but if we as Democrats, Liberals, Progressives and others want to start moving the ball in the right direction we have to lay out the really big picture. It will not be without its share of risks and frankly vilification by the Right, but that is the cost of leadership.

It is time to show that the Republicans do not have the ideas that the nation wants, they do not speak for the people but only for the wealthy and that there is a strong and valid alternative. We must stand up for what made our part great and that is its commitment to the well being of the little guy, the well being of our children and elderly, the idea that you can have a nice home with and a nice life without having to be born into it.

These are our values; it is time to show them in the same way the Republicans are showing their cold hearted values in a bold budget proposal. The best thing about any proposal that Democrats put forward is that we will have numbers that actually work to back it up.

The way to electoral success next year lays through showing the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Now is the time, we can win if we are willing to be bold and willing to stand for what we actually believe in.

The floor is yours.