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Sequester: Holding the American People Hostage
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Walter Brasch: The Congressional Budget Office says the sequester could cut more than 750,000 federal jobs. Republicans like that idea, especially since most federal employees are also members of unions. But, those jobs include public health officials, social service workers, teachers, air traffic controllers, and others in critical jobs.
Activists Should Back Obama’s Progressive Agenda
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Randy Shaw: Activists now must write a new script for the post-2012 election by pushing the President to keep his progressive campaign commitments on taxes, the budget, and, most urgently, comprehensive immigration reform, where the time for action is now.
Why Jobs Still Matter More Than Budget Deficits
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Robert Reich: Government should extend unemployment benefits, and not cut spending until the nation’s rate of unemployment is down to 5 percent. Then, and only then, should we move toward budget austerity.
Cut The Death Penalty From California’s Budget Woes
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Andy Love: As California cuts critically important funds, the state continues to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into one government program that is expensive, arbitrary and ineffectual: the death penalty.
Stop the Austerity Train Wreck!
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Robert Reich: Agreement or not, Washington is on the road to making budget cuts that will slow the economy, increase unemployment, and impose additional hardship on millions of Americans.
Latinos Support Raising Taxes on Wealthy
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Pilar Marrero: According to our poll, Latino voters are also almost completely opposed to balancing the budget following the formula of the GOP and the Tea Party: only budget cuts.
7 Myths That Drive the Debt Ceiling Debate
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Adam Eran: The metaphors that frame the current Federal budget and debt ceiling debates are completely inaccurate, and if the media coverage is any indication, the public has swallowed them hook, line and sinker, too.
Portantino’s Staff Faces “Leave Without Pay”
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Eliot Sekuler: The ultimate victim of Perez’ punishment will be the people who live and work in Assembly District 44. And the wall of secrecy surrounding the State Assembly’s operating budget certainly has no place in state government.
The Biggest Driver in the Deficit Battle: Standard & Poor’s
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Robert Reich: Standard & Poor’s insists any deal must also contain a credible, bipartisan plan to reduce the nation’s long-term budget deficit by $4 trillion — something neither Harry Reid’s nor John Boehner’s plans do.
Don’t Be a Chicken: Go for the Defense Budget!
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Steve Ybarra: Now that Boner blinked, all this talk about the budget got me to thinking, just how much money do we spend on military bases, where are they, and what difference do they make to the average American?
We Need to Rethink the Morality of the Economy
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James Livingston: Why can’t the liberal Left answer the Right when budget deficits are the issue? Why are Democrats, Obama included, so eager to reduce spending on so-called entitlements?
A Few Cutting Remarks
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Walter Brasch: Slagheap World Airlines announced that in the spirit of national cost cutting, it would cut back its cockpit crew to one pilot and eliminate flight attendants, meals, and life rafts. “This way,” said the president, “we won’t have to penalize our loyal stockholders by lowering our return on investment.”
Beware of the Racial Demagoguery
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Carl Bloice: With public opinion across the political spectrum clearly opposed to slashing the healthcare and retirement programs, any negotiated settlement would be undemocratic.
The Fake Budget Debate
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Shamus Cooke: This two-party big lie is not an accident, but an expression of a deeper held belief: that the U.S. government must be directed to meet the needs of the super wealthy who own U.S. corporations.
Why Obama’s Proposal Is Risky
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Robert Reich: The underlying problem isn’t the budget deficit. It’s that so much income and wealth are going to the top that most Americans don’t have the purchasing power to sustain a strong recovery.
Budget Cuts Obama’s Transparency Sites
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Marian Wang: Though the budget deal struck by lawmakers over the weekend averted a shutdown of the federal government, it still has open-government advocates worried about a shutdown of another sort: a shutdown in transparency.
Disaster Capitalism in the Budget Debate
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Adam Eran: Historic tax reductions on the wealthy, and the Wall-Street-Fraud recession, have reduced public revenues, and this reduction now makes otherwise too-popular-to-cut programs vulnerable. But are such cuts really necessary?
The Progressive Caucus Budget
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We hear a lot about Ryan’s budget and the President’s budget but we’re not hearing very much about the Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget which appears to be more in line with what the average middle class American wants and needs. What’s up with that?
Prisons or Higher Education, Which Do We Fund?
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Sharon Kyle: Either large segments of the American population suddenly decided to engage in criminal activity or there were changes in sentencing law and prison policy that dramatically increased America’s prison population. Whatever the reason, states are spending more on prisons and less on higher education.
Stephen Box: Balancing Budgets on Labor’s Back
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Stephen Box: The City of Los Angeles is experiencing a Crisis of Leadership, one where the people of Los Angeles are being asked to pay more for less and the people who deliver the city services are being treated as if they are expendable. They’re not.
Public School Budget Cuts Herald End of Equality
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Mark Naison: If the only schools that can function well are in communities where parents have the resources to compensate for the budget cuts, then we are basically creating a social order where children will remain in the social position of their parents into the next generation, and where poor and working-class children are doomed by inferior training to be a servant class for the rich, if they are lucky enough to find jobs at all.
Shock Wave Coming
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Brent Budowsky: The economic and political shock wave will be momentous as budget politics will increase joblessness and reveal with brutality that Washington is out of touch with heartland America and dominated by special interests that voters deplore.
The Coming Shutdowns and Showdowns: What’s Really at Stake
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Robert Reich: Public budgets are in trouble because revenues plummeted over the last two years of the Great Recession. They’re also in trouble because of tax giveaways to the rich.
On Wisconsin: End the War, Invest at Home
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Tom Hayden: It is time for our most prominent liberal economists to broaden their analysis of the domestic crisis to include spending for these unfunded wars. Only Joseph Stiglitz has done so.
Across-the-Board Cuts Needed to Avoid Fiscal Armageddon
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Ivan Eland: To keep with the bipartisan spirit after the Gabrielle Giffords’ assassination attempt and also to avoid partisan fighting over spending priorities, which will bog down and probably eventually kill any significant budget cuts, all government programs should be cut by 15 percent from last year’s budget level, including heretofore sacred defense and entitlement programs.
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It’ll Be an All-Cuts Budget “Deal” (Just Like California)
Joseph Palermo: The debt ceiling gambit that Republicans in the House of Representatives have used to tie the U.S. government in knots in recent months is simply the California GOP’s tactic writ large.