Conservative Cuts Have Consequences

[sfc_oliver]

Seems like some forget the actual facts that we as a nation are faced with.

We are in debt.

We are going deeper in debt every second of every day.

Almost no one seems concerned about how far into debt we are going.

We cannot continue to go into debt forever.

No one wants to "not help the poor" but we need to give them a hand up, not a hand out.

It is going to take some deep cuts and belt tightening at the Federal level if this great nation is going to survive.
(And yes, if need be, I would gladly give up 10% of my retirement check, if there were a 10% cut everywhere else at the same time)

We the people need to wake up, this spending and entitlement generation cannot continue for much longer.

[Youngstownshrimp]

Must I say more?

[irishbobcat]

Shrimp, you are one sick mother.....

if you continue to post lies about me I will sue you.

Just because you hate aiding the poor, is no reason to continue to attack

me......

[irishbobcat]

Shrimp is another example of a neo-con who hates the poor and those disinfranchised.....

[irishbobcat]

Dan, I knew you wolud agree with Rick becase you are a heartless fool......
yup, ALL people in assisted housing kill people......
your logic is warped......
you folks hate the poor.....

so be it...may God have mercy on your souls.....

[Dan Moadus]

I agree with Rick. All those programs have done, is destroy families, mainly minorities. If they didn't exist you might see families doing what they used to do when hard times came along. They consolidated their resources. Families lived together, husbands and wives stayed together simply to survive. You would see two, sometimes three generations under one roof sharing the cost of housing and food.

People like Dennis felt sorry for folks in those circumstances, and subsidized them, but we now know what came of it. Families separated; fathers left their children and wives because they became a liability rather than an asset. It paid to be a single mother, and paid more, as they brought more fatherless children into this world. As usual, the so called progressives launched programs that allowed them to feel good about themselves but were rife with unintended consequences.

Before we "helped" them, minorities were better off. Scrap all those "feel good" programs.

[irishbobcat]

You have gone over the deep edge, Rick.......

May God have mercy on your soul, you thoughtless, wretched Neo-Con.....

You surely have no Christian morals left......just hate for the poor and underclass.....

[Rick Rowlands]

Eliminating affordable housing subsidies will have the greatest impact on addressing the problem of crime in cities such as Youngstown.  HUD projects and section 8 housing are breeding grounds for the scum who prey on innocents in Youngstown.  If we could purge these programs from Youngstown the recipients would either have to straighten up and support themselves or move somewhere else. 

I have had enough of these parasites.  This weekend's shooting has pushed me over the edge.  Let them go.  Make them go.  Get rid of them! We need to reclaim our city back from the parasite class instead of subsidizing and enabling them. If they don't work for a living then I don't care where they go.  Build more bridges for them to live under! I don't care. I will not have my city destroyed under the guise of compassion.

[irishbobcat]

Rick,
Affordable housing programs shouldn't exist?

I guess you suggest more folks living homeless next to I-680.....

Man, you guys are truely wack jobs.....

[Rick Rowlands]

I think Rand Paul's proposed budget is a great start!  I think he would agree that deeper Defense cuts could be made, 62 billion is just a starting point.

The writer of this article seems to assume that the states do not exist so he does not mention that many of these cut programs would then be picked up at the state level where they belong.  In most cases the states already have agencies that mimic the federal ones and already regulate what the feds regulate.  Its called redundancy!

HUD and the affordable housing program shouldn't exist.  I'll bet that the YSU frat house shooters were probably third or fourth generation residents of HUD housing.  Those are the types of people that you get when you subsidize their existence and remove the necessity of providing for one's own survival.

Dept. of Education did not exist until the 1970s, right about the time that student performance started to take a nose dive.  Coincidence?  The states know how to educate children.  Let them!

Yes this is a good first step.  Too bad such common sense and necessary cuts would never be seriously considered. 

[irishbobcat]

Conservative Cuts Have Consequences
By Terrance Heath

February 7, 2011 - 2:32pm ET
Whatever you may think of him, you've got to give Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) credit. He said he would present his own budget, and now he's done it. He's even taken to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to defend it, and challenge Republicans and Democrats to: find other places in the budget where cuts can be made, to replace particular programs; consider whether it is worth "borrowing billions from foreign nations," to fund programs "that could be administered better at the state and local level, or even taken over by the private sector."

Paul's challenge underscores the dishonesty of his budget, as well as those proposed by other conservatives. Paul and other conservatives wear their proposed budget as badges of honor, but they lack the courage to state clearly the human impact of their budget cuts, and the candor to confess the unreality of their proposals.

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Dr. Paul, budgets with a meat cleaver, hacking some government agencies out of existence. Others are all but eliminated, and simply sliced within an inch of their lives. A few more are left on life support (for now) and in the care of the agencies that still stand (for now.)

The body count and wounded list include:

•The Department of Education - Cut 85%, with only the Pell grant program surviving.
•The Department of Energy - Cut 100%, with the Department of Defense taking over its remaining functions — like nuclear waste, for example.-
•Housing and Urban Development Cut 100%, veterans' housing programs transferred to the VA.
•Affordable Housing Program - Cut 100%.
•Consumer Protection Safety Commission - Cut 100%.
•Food and Drug Administration - Cut 62%.
Also up for massive reductions: the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, the Commerce Department, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Science Foundation.

It's almost impossible to cover all of the human consequences of Sen. Paul's proposed cuts in one blog post, as they would impact millions of Americans across the country. But the reality is that the programs he and other conservatives want to cut are designed to solve specific problems that real people are having. The GOP has all kinds of plans to reduce, cut, or eliminate these programs and much-needed services they provide but no plans to replace them.

A Lexington Herald editorial suggests the best place to start is with the impact of Paul's cuts on his own Kentucky constituents.

If his plan had been in place in 2007-08, the year before the Great Recession, Kentucky's public schools would have been $711 million poorer. Fayette County schools would have lost $31 million and the schools in Warren County, Paul's home, $11 million.

As Paul points out, federal money can't be used any way local districts choose and comes with "red tape." Indeed, federal dollars are largely targeted at leveling the playing field for poor and disabled children.

Kentucky last year received $147 million through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, money that educates disabled children and that would go away if Paul had his way.

Also lost to Kentucky would be $435 million for schools with high percentages of low-income students and $7 million through the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, named for a Kentuckian in Congress whose values could not have been more different than Paul's.

He would eliminate the Consumer Product Safety Commission and cut the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees food safety, by 62 percent. He wants to reduce funding for the National Park Service by 42 percent, eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and privatize the Smithsonian Institution. He would cut the National Science Foundation by 62 percent because he thinks private industry should be in charge of research.

Blaming food stamps for obesity among the poor, he wants to reduce spending on the program to 2008 levels. The average food stamp allotment for a household in Kentucky last month was $276.
Near the end of Paul's WSJ column, he says that his budget cuts "wasteful spending in the Department of Defense." The problem is that his proposed defense undermine his first challenge.Paul says that the annual defense budget had increased by nearly 120% since 2001, and that even subtracting the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan only brings that increase down to 67%.

The problem is that, in a budget that all but eliminates some departments, Paul cuts just 6.5%, or $47.6 billion, from Department of Defense. In fact, Rand's cuts are less than half the $100 billion in cuts proposed by Defense Sec. Robert Gates.

Paul might want to reconsider his first challenge to his colleagues on either side of the aisle, to find other places to cut, and sit down with Sec. Gates first.

I'll get to Paul's other challenge, and the impact of his budget proposals in the states, in another posts. But the snapshot of consequences in Kentucky underscores a point driven home at the end of the Lexington Herald editorial.

Paul pines for a land built on libertarian theory. But the country of his ideals is a place that few Americans would want to leave their children.
It's a place that few Americans want to live in, or want their children to live in, today.

As the Lexington Herald op-ed says, in drafting his budget plan Sen. Paul had the luxury of knowing that no one in Congress would take it seriously. But that doesn't mean he's not serious about it, and that goes for other conservatives like him.

Along with others presented by The Republican Study Group and Rep. Paul Ryan, Paul's budget illustrates the enormous fiscal challenges we're facing. Looking at the human consequences conservatives don't want to talk about illustrates they have no plans to relieve the economic pain of Americans caught in the economic and unemployment crises.

Conservatives know their proposed budget cuts have consequences that a majority of Americans know conservative budget cuts have consequences, and a majority of Americans reject those consequences. That's why they don't want to admit that their cuts have consequences. And that's why we must raise the human consequences of conservative budget cuts, every chance we get.