Budget War: No Retreat, No Surrender!
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on
DickMorris.com on April 4, 2011
It is a stupid, false choice to say that the Republicans in the House
have either to accept the split-the-difference compromise proposed by
the Senate on the Continuing Resolution battle or shut down the entire
federal government. Nonsense!
Instead, the Republicans should refuse to accept less than $61 billion
in cuts and -- if the Senate and Obama refuse -- should target
for shutdown a handful of specific and highly unpopular programs
and agencies. Why shut down the entire government?
Zero fund the State Department or Agency for International
Development, thereby suspending all foreign aid. Zero fund
the Bonds for America program where the feds pick up the local
debt service payments for states and cities. Zero fund the
Highway construction program. Any combination of some of
these cuts can easily generate $61 billion in cuts (less the $10
billion already cut).
The Obama Administration and the Democrats are posing two false
choices for the Republican Party and Speaker John Boehner shows
every sign of falling into both traps:
1. The Democrats want to pretend that the choice is
between a total government shutdown and compromising on the
budget cuts. It's not. |
2.
They want to sell the notion that you cannot cut the deficit without
fundamental changes immediately in Social Security and Medicare.
Not true either. Block granting Medicaid and rolling it back to
2008 levels, continuing with cuts in discretionary spending, and
limiting deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan to 60,000 troops by 2015
will immediately lower the deficit to less than 4% of GDP from its
current perch of 10%. See our book
Revolt! for details.
Please! Write your Republican Congressman and ask him or her to stand
firm. You got them elected! Don't let them sell us out on a
split-the-difference compromise. Don't let them tell us that the
Democrats can't find $61 billion of cuts in a $3.7 trillion budget or
even in the $750 billion of nondefense discretionary spending.
That proposition is laughable.
And tell them not to shut down the government, just shut down the parts
we don't like. If the Democrats want to shut down the government
in retaliation, a kind of lock-out in retaliation for a strike, let them
be our guests!
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(c)
COPYRIGHT 2011, DICK MORRIS AND EILEEN MCGANN.
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