April 26, 2011
Looney Tune Time Among the Elites
Decifit Fever
By DEAN BAKER
Deficit-cutting fever is the current craze in the nation's capital. But even here there is little tie to reality. House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan put out a budget that proposes that in 2050 we will be spending less on defense, domestic discretionary and various non-medical entitlements together than we spend on defense today. And most of the punditry praise its seriousness. Meanwhile, the Progressive Caucus, the largest single bloc in Congress, proposes a way to get to a balanced budget by 2021, and it is virtually ignored.
If the budget cutters were serious then the caucus' proposal would be very much at the center of the debate. All of its proposals poll reasonably well and have been tested in the United States or elsewhere. On the revenue side it calls for raising taxes on the wealthy, but not to levels that are higher than they were in past decades. It also calls for a tax on financial speculation similar to the one that the UK has had for decades and the U.S. actually had prior to 1966.
On the spending side it calls for a quick end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a return to post-cold war levels of military spending. It calls for a public option for health care to save on the costs of the health care exchanges in the ACA. And it calls for negotiating prescription drug prices in Medicare.
The Progressive Caucus has done the country an enormous service in producing its budget. They have helped to show as clearly as possible that the deficit hawks do not give a damn about reducing deficits and balancing the budget. They want to cut the programs that the poor and middle class depend upon -- programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- so that the rich can have more money in their pockets.
Read the full article at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/baker04262011.html
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