ReTHUG bill : "erect a constitutional firewall to safeguard tax cuts and tax breaks" for wealthy

[tpsbmam]

From Robert Greenstein, the founder & Pres of the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities:

The “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act” that the House of Representatives will vote on next week stands out as one of the most ideologically extreme pieces of major budget legislation to come before Congress in years, if not decades. It would go a substantial way toward enshrining Grover Norquist’s version of America into law.

Greenstein notes that the plan to be voted on locks in cuts for the next decade, the cuts are at least as extreme as the Ryan budget (I say way worse), and spending caps will be written into law.

What a major "fuck you" to the American people:

It also would hold the increase in the debt limit needed by August 2 hostage to approval by two-thirds of the House and the Senate of a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget every year while effectively barring any increases in revenues. The constitutional amendment would make all revenue-raising measures unconstitutional unless they secured a two-thirds supermajority in both the House and the Senate.

It requires immediate cuts to the tune of $111 billion and would result in the loss of 700,000 jobs relative to what jobs would be without these cuts.

The bill overturns a feature of various bipartisan budget laws over the past quarter century, by subjecting programs for the poorest Americans to the specter of meat-axe across-the-board cuts. It does so even as it protects tax breaks and tax subsidies for the wealthy and powerful by erecting a constitutional barrier to any measure that would raise any revenue.

<snip>

Adding to the extreme nature of the measure, the legislation also reverses a feature of every law of the past quarter-century that has contained a fiscal target or standard enforced by across-the-board cuts. Since the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law of 1985, all such laws have exempted the core basic assistance programs for the poorest Americans from such across-the-board cuts. “Cut, Cap, and Balance,” by contrast, specifically subjects all such programs to across-the-board cuts if its spending caps would be exceeded.

IMO this is a must read. I had one hell of a time coming up with just 4 paragraphs to excerpt -- this statement is replete with information about the bill and its potential ramifications.

[n2doc]

1. No chance of this passing n/t

[tpsbmam]

6. True, there's no chance of the ENTIRE bill passing BUT

what portions will make it into whatever does pass? You know that's going to happen....so just how much will we be fucked?

Look at the healthcare bill. Jesus, once the ReTHUGS, bluedogs, lobbyists, insurance industry & big Pharma got hold of it, look what we ended up with.

The same thing will happen here. Regular Americans will get fucked -- the question is just how much and what part of this will the ReTHUGS joined by bluedogs manage to work into what ends up passing.

Obama is sending very mixed signals IMO. One minute he's conciliatory and talking about Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security "reform" and the next he's banging his fist at the ReTHUGS. I frankly no longer trust him and am very concerned that he'll, once again, end up capitulating to too many of ReTHUG wet dreams. Truism: the best predictor of future is past behavior. And that most certainly does not fill me with hope.

[baldguy]

2. They want to create a feudal aristocracy in America

With them & their friends as the aristocrats, of course.

[Brickbat]

3. Democrats need to use this as their model, and when they're in the majority say things like, "OK, we

want a statue of Lenin in front of every library, mandatory routine abortions procedures for girls and women aged 12-21, and a quota of gay teachers in every public and private school, plus a rollback of the Bush tax cuts, an overhaul of military spending, and SSM cuts are off the table. Compromise? Wellllll....OK, we'll give up the Lenin statues and the abortions...aaaannnd.....well, OK, the private school gay teachers, but not the public ones! Oh. You want those too? OK, we'll give them up, BUT THAT'S IT."

Problem solved.

[saras]

4. Damn right. We need a sixties left as a counterbalance

Not that I'm suggesting some twenty bombed buildings a day (all targeted and the media notified so as to eliminate human injuries and casualties), like in parts of 1969. That is, after all, illegal. And ineffective.

But we DEFINITELY need a similar sort of extremism to balance the wacko right and let politicians appear like they're in the middle, making compromise. Dope, guns, and fucking in the street are probably also an outmoded platform. But something similarly outrageous, that can't be dismissed as humor, ironic or otherwise.

[socialist_n_TN]

5. That's what I've been saying too

but without the bombings. :) We need a radical, rowdy and hard core left to counter this shit or else the argument gets dragged further and further to the right.

That's why I've suggested Marxism to all who are angry and/or despairing about what's going on. And active SUPPORT for Marxists even by the "sensible centrists". Without that VERY left wing, it will CONTINUE to be how right can we go.

[L0oniX]

7. Greedy savages in office.

[applegrove]

8. They had to come out with something with more cuts that Obama's 4Trillion deal. Otherwise they

would look like pussies to the tea baggers. Thankfully this will not pass.