GOP hopes to hide connection between tax cuts and budget cuts

From WorkingForChange:

Here's a little-known fact symptomatic of everything wrong with the way Congress has dealt with our nation's finances over the last four years. Writers of both the House and Senate budget resolutions were careful to make sure that Congress would not consider budget cuts and tax cuts at the same time.

The House budget resolution requires the Ways and Means Committee to report legislation on tax cuts by June 24. But bills that will enforce cuts in entitlement programs aren't called for until Sept. 16. The Senate reverses the order: spending cuts by June 6, tax cuts on Sept. 7.

Why is this important? Because there are a couple of things our legislators and our president do not want citizens to do: (1) link the big deficits with the big tax cuts, (2) notice that if the tax cuts weren't so big, cuts in domestic spending wouldn't have to be so big. The nice separation of those dates is just the ticket for obscuring the obvious.

Click here for the rest.

This concept actually goes back a few decades. Evil economist Milton Friedman, the man who invented the idea of "trickle down economics," has strongly advocated that conservative politicians use tax cuts in order to paint the government into a corner such that it eventually has no choice but to cut popular social programs. Indeed, Friedman once said, "I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible." The idea is that it is political suicide to advocate doing away with Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, free school lunches for the poor, college aid, etc. The government must be driven into bankruptcy in order to force spending cuts. Pretty sneaky, huh? Well, that's what's been driving the Republicans for nearly thirty years now. That's the hidden ideology behind Bush's psychotic tax giveaways to the rich.

When you dig a little deeper into Friedman's lunatic philosophy, you discover more evil. Friedman's followers, the neo-liberals, believe that the best possible government is ultra-weak and ultra-small. In their ideal world, the government only builds roads, provides a military, and defends against monopoly. This last bit is especially interesting because it seems to me that in order to stop massive corporations from monopolizing entire industries, the government must be strong. But what do I know? I'm no hot shit economist.

The bottom line here is that these people, and as far as I can tell, this means most economists today, envision an America that is essentially run, lock stock and barrel, by the wealthy elite, a plutocracy. In other words, when tax cuts become as insane as those passed over the last few years, it is anti-democracy. Anti-American.

But we already knew that the GOP was anti-American, didn't we?

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