Congressional Black Caucus Overwhelmingly Supports the “People’s Budget”

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Congressional Black Caucus Overwhelmingly Supports the “People’s Budget”

Black Caucus Overwhelmingly Supports “People’s Budget”
Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
April 19, 2011

When the enemy convinces us that his victory is inevitable, then he has already won the psychological war. Wall Street, which owns the White House, most of both Houses of Congress and, quite literally, the corporate media, is in a mad rush to save itself from its own contradictions by dismantling or privatizing much of the government, while cutting taxes for its own class to the bone. At the same time, under the canard of national defense, the U.S. military spends as much as the rest of the world combined to bring the entire planet under the Pentagon’s full spectrum dominance. The ever-expanding war budget is justified on national security grounds, while the destruction of the domestic social safety net is supposedly unavoidable because…well, because the government is broke.

Of course, banks and other corporations are not broke; they’re doing better than ever. And the rich are richer than at any time in history. They are the ones demanding austerity, and expect their demands are to be treated as law, like stone tablets delivered by Moses from the hands of God.

Obama and the Republicans sing variations on the same song: Surrender to the Inevitable. For Black America, which is being pushed back to pre-civil rights era levels of income and wealth disparity, surrender is no option. Thus, it was encouraging that overwhelming numbers of the Congressional Black Caucus voted in favor of a so-called “People’s Budget” that shows, in dollars and cents, that the Republican and Obama agenda is not inevitable, that the budget deficits can become surpluses by the year 2021 while saving social programs.

The 77 supporters of the People’s Budget were outnumbered by the 108 Democrats that voted with the GOP and Obama’s side of the party. But they did show that not everyone believes that resistance is futile, even if a Black president tells them so. For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.

Read or listen to the full report at:

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/black-caucus-overwhelmingly-supports-%E2%80%9Cpeople%E2%80%99s-budget%E2%80%9D

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The CPC proposal:

• Eliminates the deficits and creates a surplus by 2021
• Puts America back to work with a “Make it in America” jobs program
• Protects the social safety net
• Ends the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
• Is FAIR (Fixing America’s Inequality Responsibly)

What the proposal accomplishes:

• Primary budget balance by 2014.
• Budget surplus by 2021.
• Reduces public debt as a share of GDP to 64.1% by 2021, down 16.5 percentage points from
a baseline fully adjusted for both the doc fix and the AMT patch.
• Reduces deficits by $5.6 trillion over 2012-21, relative to this adjusted baseline.
• Outlays equal to 22.2% of GDP and revenue equal 22.3% of GDP by 2021.

Support for the People's Budget

Paul Krugman

Jeffrey Sachs

The Economist

The New Republic

The Washington Post

The Guardian

The Nation

Center for American Progress

Economic Policy Institute

READ THE PEOPLE'S BUDGET AT:

http://grijalva.house.gov/uploads/The%20CPC%20FY2012%20Budget.pdf