Using the budget to create endless war and to continue destroying the social contract

buchco rolls merrily along with their plan to perpetuate our endless war, keep the rivers of cash flowing into already super-rich pockets, eliminate any traces of a social contract, and turn the united states into an authoritarian dictatorship...

the nyt...

The budget is based on a series of improbable, if not dishonest, assumptions. To make it appear as if the tax cuts are affordable in the near term, it assumes that the Pentagon will not spend a single penny on Iraq or Afghanistan after 2009. It also assumes there will be no costs for fixing the alternative minimum tax after this year, even though Mr. Bush and virtually every politician in America is committed to such relief.

The new budget would also slash key entitlement programs and punish many of the country’s most vulnerable citizens. Sharp reductions are envisioned for Medicare, with cuts of $66 billion over five years, and Medicaid, down approximately $11 billion. Some of the Medicare proposals could serve as useful starting points for a debate on controlling costs through such steps as raising premiums for high-income beneficiaries. But the Medicaid cuts would be largely counterproductive. At a time when the number of uninsured children is rising, the cuts would force many states to reduce their Medicaid rolls.

Mr. Bush’s budget would also take an ax to most other domestic spending. One program that would be gone entirely in 2008 provides monthly bags of groceries, each worth less than $20, to 440,000 needy elderly people. The $99 million block grant to states to help pay for preventive health care would also be eliminated. Other cuts — in Head Start, veterans’ health care, environmental protection, scientific research, low-income housing and heating assistance, to name a few — would start in 2008 and grow, totaling $114 billion over five years. Such cuts would be shortsighted and cruel. They would also be politically impossible to enact — further exposing Mr. Bush’s budget as the sham it is.

yes, it's a sham... yes, it's unconscionable... but, what will we do about it...?

ari berman at the nation via alternet...

Four defense analysts at the Security Policy Working Group recently awarded the government low or failing grades on virtually every aspect of the budget -- use of nation's resources (D), affordability (D), realism (D) and transparency (F). On only one criteria, advertising, did they award at A+, "for the Pentagon managing to convince Congress that the world's largest defense budget is too small."

The question now is whether this Congress will take the bait?

will they take the bait...? oh, c'mon... get real... of COURSE they will take the bait... they can't even manage to get a debate going on iraq, the most disastrous misadventure in u.s. history... do you honestly think they aren't going to pass a budget...?

robert scheer writing at alternet...

So the test for the recently victorious congressional Democrats will be to resist the temptation to go along with a patriotic-sounding military budget that may produce jobs in their districts and campaign contributions in '08 but that has nothing to do with fighting terrorism.

If they go the craven route, they will once again join this president in wasting our nation's resources by pretending to fight a world war against a militarily sophisticated enemy that exists only as a contrivance of his speechwriters' rhetoric.

"if they go the craven route...?" "IF...???" (see above comment...)

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