The Republican GOP party has heckled, chided, bribed, underminded and acted unAmerican in almost every form they could merely to oppose Democratic power since President Obama entered office, and tried to countermand any proposal by the Democratic Party whether the GOP's action's impeded or harmed the causes for the common good of the Nation or not.
It is a true ideal, to control government spending, and in so doing sometimes its a necessity to label bad programs for what they are, and seek to oversee spending to control the deficit. However, to present ploys under the guise of such and impose changes which are none more that detrimental to the nation merely for the purpose of presenting an opposing opinion and declare oneself more righteous than another, is more dangerous to the nation than would be the willful plans and attacks by overseas powers that seek our demise.
Their latest attempts and goals by promising $100 billion in cuts and deductions to the national domestic deficit by leading the public to believe that the GOP platform is better, have many hidden costs that will take YEARS to repair and patch if allowed to be put into play.
By vying for public support and striving to swing the political prowess of legislative branches, a scenario may very well explode upon our nation, possibly enabling the GOP create some of the merely "few" following disastorous results in key funding arenas.
Low-income students would have to strive for educations using smaller grants, making it impossible for tens of thousands of present day or prospective future students from even "contemplating" a continued education to better themselves. Pell Grants for college students from low-income families could be cut by more than $1,000 from the current $5,550 maximum grants.
The newly disabled would find that the "already" burdensome and bureaucratically crippling system to obtain disability further stifled and have to wait even longer than the common 12 to 18 months before start of benefits due to budget cuts and lowered personnel staff to handle claims.
Just about every politician across the face of the NAtion is going to get an earful from the local PTA if "schooling and educational aid" gets whacked.
Republicans are finding it's one thing to issue a blanket promise to cut spending, yet it's an entirely different matter when you actually take the scissors to $1 of every $6 spent by agencies like the IRS, the FBI, NASA and the National Park Service. Federal layoffs would be unavoidable, the White House warns.
That's the real-world impact of House Republicans' campaign promise to cut $100 billion from the budgets of domestic agencies. Next week, they plan to vote on a resolution setting appropriations for the rest of the year back to 2008 pre-recession levels, when funding was far easier to obtain and the economy poured more $'s into the government tally coffers.
The vote will be largely symbolic though, for the actual cuts would have to be actually made in appropriations bills that would have to clear a 60-vote hurdle in the Senate, where Republicans hold only 47 seats. So once again we are hit with the Republican partisan publicity stunts, which merely slow down the bi-partisan process we seek to use in appropriate branches.
The $100 billion promise, contained in the GOP's "Pledge to America" campaign manifesto, is based on cuts from Obama's budget recommendations for 2011 merely to disagree with his proposals, but the actual savings in returning to Bush-era levels would be a little less since the government is operating at last year's slightly lower budget anyways.
Still, compared with 2010 rates and assuming a full year of implementation, Republicans are promising to cut up to $84 billion from nine appropriations bills, cuts that would average 18 percent across the board. Thus, we won't be surprised to see quite a few Republicans, especially in the Senate, joining Democrats in balking when they see the size of those cuts and what areas the are proposing to apply them to.
Some of those newly elected Republicans in Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Dakotas are sure to feel major political pressure over big cuts looming for LIHEAP, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides home heating subsidies and programs supplementing not just low income families, but more importantly the elderly and the disabled who are by far the least "income-adaptable" and the hardest hit). Former Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., orchestrated a doubling of the program's budget — from $2.5 billion to $5 billion — since 2008, just for the sake of increasing those benefits to their present substandard level and attempting to bring them up to date. A cut in those areas would be nothing more than a failed stroke to the programs and proof to other nations that the US does nothing more than ignore the poor, the elderly, the disabled and less privileged of the nation. Obey said it's going to mean "a lot of people who aren't able to pay their heating bills are going to have no way to heat their homes — or they're going to have to decide to eat less or see the doctor less."
Rising Medicare and Medicaid costs are the real drivers of the United States' long-term deficit woes and substantial cuts to those would mean just the opposite is being achieved from proposed national health care changes and coverage for the poor.
The Women, Infants and Children program, which provides food for low-income pregnant women, mothers and young children, has near-universal support. But without an exemption from the cuts, 1 million of them could lose benefits next year, according to calculations by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research and advocacy group.
all of this is going to be on the table:
A cutback in housing subsidies would mean that hundreds of thousands of people won't see their Section 8 vouchers renewed.
And a $1 billion, 24 percent cut to historically underfunded Health Services would reduce critically needed health care in some of the most impoverished places in the country.
Republicans in Texas, Florida and Alabama — where NASA facilities mean thousands and thousands of jobs — are sure to fight against cuts to the space agency, the White House warns. Loses in these areas would definitely mean job losses all across the personnel market as companies lost contracts for the space industry's needs.
As local school districts cope with budget squeezes, they won't be able to count on the same amount of help from the federal government. Teacher's pay and jobs would be frozen, materials from books to teaching aides would be chokingly limited. Special education grants to states could be cut by $1.4 billion, or 11 percent, forcing hometown school boards to cut services.
"Cutting the big programs isn't that hard. It's the little stuff that everybody fights the hardest about, whether it's LIHEAP or WIC ," said Jim Dyer, a former top aide for the House Appropriations Committee. "You're looking at tremendously popular programs like state water grants, the national parks, cancer research, higher education, food safety — (small programs by comparison, but together collectively and combined, are just as much a part of what our country has done to improve itself in the last 50 years as are the big programs.)"
At a time when the recession is on an acutely tittering like a drunken gymnast on a perilous balance beam; with the economy on the verge of barely recovering and unemployment staggering around with questionable repair in the near future, this is definitely not the time to be imposing legislation that will harm the nation.
"In terms of the bottom line... we shouldn't for a moment believe that these levels of savings will in and of themselves solve the fiscal challenge (to significantly reduce the deficit)," said White House Budget Director Jacob Lew.
