Next Week in Congress

Next week the Republicans go back to work on their rob from the poor, give to the rich agenda. The House wants to cut the Federal budget by 50 billion dollars. Sounds like a lot until you realize the projected budget through 2010 is 4.6 trillion according to the Congressional Budget Office. Now let's do the reverse Rumsfeld and calculate that 5o billion as a percentage of the total deficit: 1.2 percent. This is not, you can easily see, meaningful deficit reduction. What is meaningful is where they intend to take it.

At the same time (a week later, actually, since Senators apparently need more vacation than Representatives), the Senate wants to cut taxes by 60 billion, the benefits going to, you guessed it, the rich. The cuts will benefit those earning capital gains and dividends - not your average medicare recpient. For reference, my Bush tax cut amounts to about $23.00 per month - I ain't one of the beneficiaries of tax cutting.

Here are some of the places the budget is to be cut:

- Student loans. More poor loose out on education while a Harvard education just got more affordable for those who earn a large percentage of their income from investments.

- Medicare. Reduced health care for those who can't afford health insurance more for discretionary (or not, depending on your aesthetic sense) boob jobs, er, elective surgeries.

- Hurricane Katrina relief: New Orleans remains without electricity over eighty days after the storm but we can shift $17 billion to build Federal facilities.

And they want to do all this before Christmas. What ever happened to going and selling all your possessions and giving the proceeds to the poor, values espoused by the man whose birth Christmas celebrates?

Hastert and Frist claim they're deeply committed to fiscal responsibility, the same fiscal responsibility that, instead of returning money for pork projects such as the Bridges to Nowhere, convert it into a half-billion dollar grant to the Alaska general fund to claim the bridges are no more. It's called lying by omission, a favored Republican tactic. It's the tactic Laura Bush used when claiming her hubby the Shrub was the first president to fund stem cell research: Technically true but misleading in that Clinton laid the groundwork f0r Federal funding and Bush restricted it to the point where any research funded with Government money will be meaningless. It's Rumsfeld's tactic in claiming that millions of Iraqis favor our presence in Iraq. True, twenty percent of 27 million is 5.4 million. Millions, all right, but millions in an extreme minority. In the case of deficit reduction, misdirection is also in play. One bill is in the House and the other in the Senate, making it an effort to see that the overall thrust of deficit reduction a la Republicans is to take it from the poor and give it to the rich.