Enough Of This Bullshit (xpost from Veterans)

[unhappycamper]

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18305-sequestration-slashes-head-start-funding

Sequestration Slashes Head Start Funding
Tuesday, 20 August 2013 15:49
By Adrienne Lu, McClatchy Newspapers | Report

WASHINGTON — Last year about 1 million of the nation's poorest children got a leg up on school through Head Start, the federal program that helps prepare children up to age five for school. This fall, about 57,000 children will be denied a place in Head Start and Early Head Start as fallout from sequestration.

New estimates about the automatic budget cuts were released Monday by the federal government. The cuts have slashed more than $400 million from the federal program's $8 billion budget.

Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Association, said sequestration represented the largest hit to Head Start funding in terms of dollars since the program began in 1965.

"The cut has been very painful throughout the country," Vinci said. Nationwide, about 1,600 grantees, which include nonprofits and local government agencies, receive federal Head Start funding.




unhappycamper comment: We need to change the dialog. For starters, let's look at how the United States funds 'stuff':



That big chuck o pie on the right (57% of all discretionary spending) is for 'the military'. It includes things like the 21st century equivalents of $400 dollar toilet seats, the military's black budget, nukes, wasted billions in Afghanistan reconstruction, $2 billion a week to keep the Afghanistan occupation going, and lots of new stuff.

The article cited above states "The cuts have slashed more than $400 million from the federal program's $8 billion budget." Let me show you how to find a quick $400 million to reinstate food to starving Americans.

Since Littoral Combat Ships cost around $500 million dollars each, don't build one. Another way to 'find' a quick $500 million: don't build two F-35 fighters.

Want to find a quick $1 billion? Don't build more nine more $110 million dollar MV-22 Ospreys. Don't build three more $318 million dollar C-17s.

Want to find a quick $5 billion? Stop building $5+ billion dollar stealth destroyers.

Want to find a quick $7 billion? Don't build a Virginia-class submarine this year.

Want to find a quick $40 billion? Stop building the $40 billion dollar USS Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier.




It adds up.

[warrant46]

1. Disgusting waste of our children's future

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

34th president of US 1953-1961 (1890 - 1969)

[yeoman6987]

13. Budget FY-14

They don't have Social Security and entitlements like welfare on the circle graph. This can't be the entire thing. Maybe I am missing something. DoD has taken a big hit with sequestration as well. Losing 400 million out of 8 billion dollars is not that hard a hit in the big picture. How about fire a couple of the big administrators. That would fix the problem. Every program in America could be cut by just streamlining. Private Companies do it all the time.

[Bandit]

15. This graph is just "Discretionary Spending"

[yeoman6987]

16. Thank you!

[daleanime]

17. "Private Companies" don't care about their employees....

is that how you want the US government to ran?




If so just take a good look around.

[Enthusiast]

23. There is no justification for a military even a fraction of its current size.

A military should be based on the nature of the threat.

If we would get the fuck out of other people's countries we wouldn't have any enemies.

[truebluegreen]

24. Social Security is self-funding and has never added a dime to the deficit.

It is not an "entitlement" no matter how many RWers say it is.

"Welfare" IS part of discretionary spending under the Dept of Health and Human Services. It is not a big chunk of anything if that is what you are thinking. The total budget for HHS in FY 2011 was 78.4 billion. That covered not only "welfare" but the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, the FDA, the administration of Medicare and Medicaid and a lot of other things.

But of course the biggest drain on our budget are those greedy moochers and their entitlements.

[Divernan]

2. What a wonderful world it would be if 57% military spending was redistributed

to health, housing & community, veterans' benefits, energy & environment, science, labor, transportation, agriculture & education.

A healthy, well-educated, decently-housed, fairly paid, populace eating healthy food and driving on safe highways, with good public transportation, with clean air and water. We could have had all that RIGHT NOW in this country were it not for the profiteering 1%, MIC & the like shareholders, manipulating and controlling the sockpuppets elected to public office.

Let the other countries in the world govern themselves and determine their own destinies. A little foreign aid? Fine, but not with the strings controlling the recipient country's politics, or contingent upon purchasing weapons from the MIC, or forbidding abortion/birth control, or putting in roads and utilities to benefit corporations' outsourced labor markets.

[malthaussen]

3. I think "pork" should be re-named "long pork"

... since it is our children we're eating, after all.

-- Mal

[cliffordu]

21. Learned about long pork in John Huston's biography.

nice reference. And I think you may be correct.

[democrank]

4. Enough of this bullshit indeed.

We need to stop making excuses for our elected "leaders" and start reminding them they work for us. We need to take control of our message and let these politicians know that we will no longer support "winning" at any cost.

[progressoid]

5. The MIC is too strong and Congress is too weak.

Nobody want their military jobs cut from their district or state.

But apparently, it's OK to take money from our kid's education.

[yeoman6987]

14. Education

Why is Education a federal problem. Just have the states take care of all education. It does not make sense to have federal money going to Head Start when the states have the money for education in their budgets.

[truebluegreen]

25. So you don't like head Start?

[The Wizard]

6. Like all of History's empires

we will fall because of unwarranted military waste and foreign military adventures at the expense of the General Welfare as prescribed in our Constitution's preamble.

[Jackpine Radical]

7. Like Everett Dirksen said--"A billion here, a billion there…

pretty soon you're talking real money."

[bluedeathray]

26. ^^Beat me to it^^ nt

[Thav]

8. And the enemies we're fighting

Are still using AK-47's, RPG's, and stinger missiles.

What I find amazing is when the military says, "we don't want X" and congress goes, "Well, you're getting a fleet of them anyway."

[Octafish]

9. War is Welfare for Warmongers

Not to say all warriors are warmongers. All combat veterans I've gotten to know well are, and were, men and women of peace.

[tabasco]

10. More "compassionate conservatism"

aka "hateful imbeciles."

[woo me with science]

11. That chart should be everywhere.

On a billion stickers and signs and posters and etc. Attached to everything in the country.

And still nothing would change. They will not allow it to change.

This is madness.

[JayhawkSD]

12. It also includes $1.3 billion to Egypt for M1A1 tanks...

... and Apache helicopters for which Egypt has absolutely no actual need. They need those tanks like I need another leg, but those tanks are their implements of pride and ego. Likewise the Apache helicopters, which are awesome instruments of war, but Egypt is not at war. Neither weapon can be used for internal population control, which is the only thing that the Egytian Army does.

[Egalitarian Thug]

19. It has nothing to do with Egypt, it's all welfare for the builders of tanks and Apaches. n/t

[Egalitarian Thug]

18. Honestly categorize all of the money and corporate welfare and it's even worse. n/t

[AnotherMcIntosh]

20. No one should think that the stockholders in the MIC companies are all Americans.

Even if the trickle-down theory would work, there are foreigners and members of the international rich whose wealth is increasing at the expense of ordinary Americans, their children, their great grandchildren, ...

At a minimum, this is economic treason.

[Enthusiast]

22. If the undeserving didn't get food stamps we would have plenty of money.

I'm only pointing this out.