Today's Cartoon And Reading - The Republican Budget "Tell"

(Tom Toles, once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle)

How can you tell Republicans are lying when they talk about easing income inequality?  Their lips are moving (heh - rimshot).

As noted the other day, the House Crackpot Caucus Republican produced a "slumlord budget" that promotes a plutocratic dystopia of winners (the 1 per centers) and losers (the rest of us), using "magical asterisks" and blatant dishonesty (surprise!) in  the process.

Today, E.J. Dionne, Jr., shows how Republicans are pushing policies and budget priorities that exacerbate income inequality rather than ease it:

The wholesale assault on efforts to provide lower-income Americans with health insurance is the clearest sign that Republicans don’t want to deal with inequality. The inability to get health insurance is one of the biggest burdens on low-income families, particularly those working for low wages and few or no benefits. 

Obamacare has helped 16.4 million Americans get health insurance. Where would they turn? And Republicans would compound the damage: The Senate proposes cutting an additional $400 billion from Medicaid over a decade, the House more than double that. Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that on other low-income programs, the Senate budget cuts even more than the House’s. The vagueness of these plans makes it hard to tally how much damage would be done to food stamps, Pell Grants for low-income college students and the like, but Greenstein estimates that about two-thirds of the cuts in both plans come “from programs for the less fortunate, thereby exacerbating poverty and inequality.” 

Greenstein concludes that under such proposals — here’s hoping President Obama is relentless in blocking them — “ours would be a coarser and less humane nation with higher levels of poverty and inequality, less opportunity” and an “inadequately prepared” workforce.  

The "tell" in all of this budget smoke and mirrors is what Republicans would do to affordable health care and other programs for low- and middle-class Americans if given the chance.  It's been there for all to see not just in this year's Republican budget proposals, but ever since St. Ronnie of Hollywood and his acolytes took over the party with their promises of "trickle down" prosperity, busting unions, shrinking government, tax cuts for the wealthy and "pain-free" cuts to social programs.  Every single one of the putative Republican candidates for president continue to bow down at the altar of this smiling sociopath, the former corporate pitchman.  They're not even trying hard to hide their true goals;  they know they won't be challenged by the "mainstream media," and they continue to hope that there are enough plutocrat bucks, gullible voters and fellow sociopaths* out there to keep them in power until they can finish America the job.

*UPDATE:  And let's not forget Supreme Court-abetted voter suppression.

"Trillion Dollar Fraudsters"

Here's today's must read.  Paul Krugman discusses the recently unveiled House Republican budget as yet another in a long, fraudulent tradition (these are lengthy excerpts, but the op/ed has much more, so please read it in its entirety):

By now it’s a Republican Party tradition: Every year the party produces a budget that allegedly slashes deficits, but which turns out to contain a trillion-dollar “magic asterisk” — a line that promises huge spending cuts and/or revenue increases, but without explaining where the money is supposed to come from. 

But the just-released budgets from the House and Senate majorities break new ground. Each contains not one but two trillion-dollar magic asterisks: one on spending, one on revenue. And that’s actually an understatement. If either budget were to become law, it would leave the federal government several trillion dollars deeper in debt than claimed, and that’s just in the first decade. 

You might be tempted to shrug this off, since these budgets will not, in fact, become law. Or you might say that this is what all politicians do. But it isn’t. The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum. (our emphasis)

(Spoiler alert:  Republicans are social Darwinist plutocrat pawns.)  Krugman then briefly explores what the effect of this magical budget would be:

... Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.

(Spoiler alert:  Republicans respond "Class warfare!  Class warfare!") Krugman concludes:

Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry. 

The core Republican belief - as expressed so succinctly by its 2012 standard bearer Willard "Millionaire Mitt" Romney - is that there are makers/ worthy "Real (white, well-to-do) Americans" and then there are the takers/ the "47 percent" mooching off "the system," (i.e., the "welfare state").  It shows up in this and every other Republican-spawned budget, "opportunity society" policy scam, faux concern expressed for income inequality, and in the plutocrat-funded efforts (=cough= Koch brothers = cough=) to crush labor unions.  The fraudulence is always there, but never treated as the con job that it is.  If only we had a fourth estate that was interested in the truth (yes, there is such an objective thing) and not on "buzz," or who's up or down, or manufactured "it's out there" scandals, or the ever-popular "both sides do it."

BONUS:  Too bad there's not an honest budget the media can ignore focus on.

House Republicans' 2016 "Slumlord's Budget"

The Crackpot Caucus in the House of Representatives (i.e., Republicans) are out with their FY 2016 budget and, hoo-boy, it's a nasty piece of work (surprise!).  Here to briefly summarize is the estimable Charles Pierce:

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has revealed its budget plan, and that plan has as its apparent goal the cruel, blasted dystopia of Paul Ryan's fondest dreams. This budget is in no way either sensible or patriotic. It is not patriotism to throw so many of your fellow citizens out On The Road, as the old Irish used to say. This is a gombeen's budget, a slumlord's budget, an evictor's budget, an auctioneer's budget of a kind that emptied towns all over the Great Plains. It assumes the existence of a propertied class and a servile class, both of them eternal and immutable. It is as democratic as a brick through a window.

Repeal Obamacare.  Check.

Repeal Medicare expansion under Obamacare.  Check.

Partially privatize Medicare.  Check.

Block grant Medicaid to the states.  Check.

Repeal parts of Dodd-Frank financial institution reforms.  Check.

Convert Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ("food stamps") into state-run programs. Check.

Lower taxes for corporations and the wealthy.  Check.

That covers the Ultra-Right Wingnut Agenda pretty well.  More Charles Pierce:

There should be no compromise from the Democratic minority on any of this. It should be rejected, root and branch, because it is based on an economic philosophy, and an overall view of the relationship between people and their government, that has failed the country and its people savagely in the past and inevitably will do so again. But, even if this budget goes nowhere, it should doom the Republican party as a serious governing party for the next two decades, but it won't. Its basic philosophical foundation has been treated as a serious intellectual exercise for so long that it is now beside the point that it stands revealed (again) as a plutocratic charade. Pieces of it will be debated gravely. Some of them may even survive as "compromises" because Americans want "the government to work again." (I just saved Joe Manchin's press staff a ton of work right there.) But the philosophy itself is so deeply embedded in our politics that I'm not sure that enough people can sicken and/or die before we pry it out again. 

That basic Republican/ plutocratic philosophy being, "I've got mine, to hell with anyone else."  So we have yet another Republican budget that enshrines that dystopian philosophy for all to see, if they have eyes and are willing to see.