I got your class warfare right here:
A key House committee has voted to cut food aid, health care and social services like Meals on Wheels to protect the Pentagon from a crippling wave of budget cuts come January.
The cuts approved by the Republican-controlled panel total more than $300 billion over the coming decade.
They are but a fraction of the cuts called for in the broader, nonbinding budget plan that passed the House in March and are aimed at preventing the Pentagon from absorbing a 10 percent, $55 billion automatic budget cut in January that’s the result of the failure of last year’s deficit “supercommittee” to reach a deal.
First things first. Cutting 55 billion out of an annual defense budget 700 billion is not crippling. Inconvenient? Maybe. But crippling? Gimme a break.
But for the folks like Doug Mataconis who will never, ever, fucking get it, there is your class warfare. Right fucking there.
schrodinger's cat
Folks like the guys over at OTB and LOOG are Bobos in training, i.e. practicing the reasonable conservative schtick, so that they can get their NYT and NPR gigs someday. They are not reasonable, all that separates them from the frothing at the mouth brigade is that can string together grammatically correct sentences and have better manners.
Spaghetti Lee
$55 out of $700 billion is something like 7.5%. In other words, we’ve finally found someone who pays less in taxes than Mitt Romney.
The fucking Pentagon can afford it, and then some. I’ve even seen stories recently where the Pentagon itself says that they don’t need all this crap, and the likes of Joe Lieberman are begging them to reconsider.
JPL
What bothers me is cutting housing for the poor while allowing those who can afford to buy a house a tax deduction.
Bunt
As George Carlin said they are a group of people who “deserve to be diagnosed with a tumor at the base of their spines”.
Maude
I’m glad Bill Clinton isn’t president.
General Stuck
Previously, I would have said that Obama and dems would deal some to get those mil cuts, or some of them cancelled. And likely leverage that to get concessions from the nutters, like more UE benefits, or something like that. But Obama has flat ruled out any deal to stop the mil cuts from happening, making a rare formal veto threat for any efforts to undo the debt ceiling deal.
Since he has rarely taken such a step, I figure it will have to be congress to over ride that veto. But the wingnuts by loading up on pain to the poor, will likely make that impossible for many or any dems wanting to avoid the mil cuts affecting their states and districts.
Fairly stupid move on the wingers part, unless I’m missing it, for something they presumably want to happen. Or, it’s just the same detachment from reality, bouncing around in the tea tard bubble, and nothing much else for any kind of expansive strategy for the election.
MikeBoyScout
PROTECT THE PENTAGON!
America, F**K YEAH!
Hill Dweller
@General Stuck: The debt struck ceiling deal Obama struck, and Boehner bragged about, looks more shrewd by the day.
Gex
Those courtier positions won’t come your way unless you prove yourself to your overlords. It’s pathetic when the suck ups think they’re part of the in-crowd when they most certainly are not. Goddamn, but it will have to get so bad that even a random white guy will understand that they are being abused, not by the disadvantaged and powerless, but by the people with money and power. I don’t know if that happens before this whole experiment blows up.
Cassidy
OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH!!!!!!
phillip anderson
I just keep coming back to this thought, namely, if we have to take food out of the mouths of hungry American children and our senior citizens to buy more F-22s, what exactly are we defending ourselves from?
Cassidy
Figured is get it in before the manic progressives show up to enlighten us.
RalfW
Nice to see you pop by Mataconis’ comments today. He’s an utter jackass claiming that Mittens and Obama are exactly the same on gay rights. That earns a hearty what the fuck?! if anything ever did.
kdaug
The worse part is the grind to keep weapon platforms that the Pentagon doesn’t want.
The worst part is the division of labor over all the states. Everyone has their hands in the pie.
Brilliant tactics. Self-defeating strategy.
It will be one fucking hat-trick to pull this out.
Comrade Dread
For conservatives, government is chock full with corruption, inefficiencies, spendthrift bureaucrats, waste, and fraud.
Unless the bureaucrat happens to be wearing stars on his jacket, in which case, none of the supposed waste of tax dollars happens in the large bureaucracy.
And given a choice to starve the poor or more weapons than we’ll ever need unless aliens really do show up one summer, they choose the latter.
I think that puts the lie to anyone who claims to be a ‘fiscal conservative’ or that the United States is a ‘Christian nation’.
srv
Always seeing the negatives, and not the opportunities. A chance to roll out all the poor and infirm to the bombing ranges and let all these wiz-bang drones, F-35s, LCS and choppers do their stuff.
Hell, we don’t even need court reviews for all that either now.
piratedan
note to self… ned a reminder on just who is actually a threat to us?
Cassidy
@piratedan: Zombies. This is a secret push to prepare for WWZ.
General Stuck
@Hill Dweller:
Actually, the entire deal was developed by Mitch Mcconnell in the senate, when he was afraid the tea tards were about to let default happen and kill the golden goose of profit. Now they are reneging on their own brane fart, or trying to. Bunch a morons.
schrodinger's cat
@piratedan: I remember reading somewhere that the US spends more on defense then the ten countries, with the next highest defense budgets put together.
Keith
@phillip anderson: Somali pirates
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@schrodinger’s cat:
__
Fixt for summer blockbuster season.
Redshift
@schrodinger’s cat: IIRC, we don’t actually spend as much as the rest of the world combined, but we do spend more than half as much as the rest of the world combined.
Chris
@Comrade Dread:
Ahhh, but you free up resources so that the rich can take care of the poor out of their generosity and kindness…
(I don’t know who I have more contempt for, the people who spin that bullshit or the people who actually believe it).
Brachiator
Damn, the Republicans really do have a hard on for the military. We could cut the military budget substantially, and we would still have more hardware than anything else, but the GOP is determined to protect us from … something … sometime … somewhere.
@JPL:
I’m not seeing the point in pitting the poor against the middle class.
These cuts aren’t going anywhere, but the Republicans seem intent on trying to show how tough they are when it comes to screwing the average American.
PeakVT
Thank goodness the batshit signal no longer works.
Maude
@phillip anderson:
We will need the F-22s to protect us from the hungry children and seniors.
The is the Ronald Reagan type budget.
celticdragonchick
Granny needs to take a risk, borrow 20 grand from her folks and become an entrepreneur like Mittens.
Also, too.
//
celticdragonchick
@Maude:
We actually could use the F-22’s. The F-15’s are getting a bit old.
I’m not sure we need 10 carrier battle groups, however…
mdblanche
@Hill Dweller: You seem to be implying that John Boehner did not want 98% of these defense cuts.
scav
Military spending map of the world as provided by the Guard. Clock over to spending in $ and reflect upon how vulnerable that cut might have made us . . .
stratplayer
Well, the title to this post is pretty depressing to me, since my economically beleaguered hometown of Syracuse, NY is struggling to hold on to much needed jobs at the local Lockheed-Martin plant designing and building missile-defense systems. What a dismal fucking choice.
JPL
@Brachiator: When you can deduct interest on two homes, we are not just talking about the middle class.
Ruckus
@phillip anderson:
The only answer I can come up with is we are protecting us from not having enough money to spend on even more military crap. Brings to mind another episode of West Wing where there was planning for a trip to Russia and the Russian diplomats wanted to add a line to the speech. Something like we have enough nuclear warheads to blow up the world many times over, surely once is enough.
If you are scared of everything then you need everything to protect yourself. Of course you’ll notice that conservatives are scared of everything. Women, the color black, shades of brown, any language other than american, the list is endless.
Brachiator
@JPL:
You want to talk about reducing or putting a cap on mortgage interest deductions, or eliminating them altogether?
And even here, not every person with two homes is a plutocrat.
RosiesDad
It is crippling if you are a struggling defense contractor seeking to make the mortgage payments on your McMansion, the tuition payments to your children’s’ private schools not to mention the dues to The Club and the time share on Grand Cayman.
Have a heart, can’t you?
JPL
@Brachiator: I’ve taken advantage of the tax cut but I also understand that those who live in public housing don’t have that choice. Public housing is only a few billion a year and yet the republicans want to get rid of it because we don’t need no darn welfare.
My point is we all get benefits. A cap of the deduction would be nice but I still think a flat tax with a large deduction would be nice. Both earned and unearned would be taxed the same if I were the President.
Svensker
@phillip anderson:
Freedom is on the march!
Also, too, we’re defending ourselves from jihadis who want to kill hungry American children and senior citizens! We’ll kill them first you fucking dirty jihadis!
nastybrutishntall
@Hill Dweller: Funny how often that happens under Prez O. Like, every. goddamn. time.
Emoprogs don’t understand the long game. The other side has infinite cash. All we have is a President with infinite patience and a strategy… in other words, a decent fight.
TK421
If only a Democrat were in the White House. Then he could pare back our pointless wars (why are we signing defense pacts with Afghanistan, for cripe’s sake?) and save some money that might help social programs stay solvent.
General Stuck
@TK421:
You are aware that the democratic party has never been an anti war party? In fact, democrats were in the WH when about every major war we’ve fought since the GCW. One exception was Iraq, and we are out of there, at least for the time being. The dem party has major planks for engagement with the world in all sorts of ways, and war is sometimes one of them. Vietnam was escalated into full blown war by a dem president, that also gave us medicare and civil rights laws, and also launched a war on poverty. So Obama most certainly is a democrat of mostly nondescript stripes. Will you ever say something that is accurate, TK? we are waiting.
Mnemosyne
@TK421:
Mumbai, 2008.
It’s not a defense pact to protect Afghanistan. It’s a defense pact to protect India. Or do you think it’s a good idea to let two nuke-armed powers get into a shooting war with each other because, hey, it’s not like nuclear fallout could affect us?
mdblanche
@TK421: Because simply ignoring Afghanistan the last time we stopped having any interests there worked out so well, didn’t it? I’m also less optimistic than you are that House Republicans would be more willing to cut the defense budget and transfer it to programs they’ve promised to abolish if we had fewer troops abroad.
Greyjoy
No, but the Democrats are definitely not the party of “Let’s Go Beat The Shit Out Of Some People” and the Republicans are. And when there isn’t a convenient foreign war to satisfy the Repugs’ need for strife and violence, then they start looking for other targets. And apparently being a patriot doesn’t mean you can’t start picking on your own. Because it’s not like gays, women, the poor and the elderly are really “their own” anyway.
gaz
@TK421: PONIES!
Arclite
It’s all part of the wingnut plan. When granny dies, they’ll grind her into burger and feed her to the troops. It’s win-win-win: food aid eliminated, Social Security rolls reduced, and troops fed.
Martin
@Brachiator: Well, I think the question is ‘Why does anyone deserve the deduction?’ I don’t get a deduction for any other kind of interest. If the government wants to allow people to deduct the cost of shelter, just bake that into the standard deduction and call it a day and have it apply to homeowners (whether they have a mortgage or not) or renters or people with RVs, etc.
kdaug
@TK421: Hate to pile on, TK-Person, but I suspect an India/Pakistan war would have direct, immediate repercussions on us.
Here. At home.
Aside from the fallout (and, no, that’s not a metaphor).
China, Korea (N&S), Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia – these are countries that have some value to us as well.
Please don’t be stupid.
The Other Chuck
Is a country with values like this even worth saving?
Gian
quick, guess which political party’s twice elected president said this:
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 are 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.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
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.
(that would be Ike, who to the Teabaggers and their Koch Johns must’ve been a commie)
http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/ike_chance_for_peace.html
EIGRP
I thought that $55B was over 10 years, and it was really an avoidance of having the budget go up that much, not necessarily cutting $5.5B/year.
I’ll post this and see if I can find a cite before the edit timer is up.
Eric
Found it – I was wrong on the $5.5B/year part: Defense expenditures will decline from $531 billion to $525 billion 6 (FY13 base-level funding), a real reduction of 2.3 percent. This figure already reflects $150 billion in savings over five years beginning in 2010 and new reductions of $259 billion including $60 billion in identified efficiencies plus reductions in manning and procurement
That’s from http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/library/resources/documents/Defense/MeetingDoDSequestrationLevelCostCutsWithoutCuttingStrategyProgramsorReadiness.pdf
General Stuck
@EIGRP:
The total amount for cuts agreed to, was I think 1.2 trillion over ten years, a little over half of that amount for military cuts, and the rest for medicare provider cuts. So it is 55 billion a year, or thereabouts.
mainmati
@General Stuck: Congress is largely divorced from the larger public. The HOR spends most of its time fund-raising for the next election and appealing to the bases. The Senate is composed of more than two-thirds millionaires. Congress simply doesn’t work anymore and won’t until the electorate decides to get serious about civic responsibility and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Another Halocene Human
@Martin: Exactly. Massachusetts allows you to deduct the cost of rent.
You used to be able to deduct all interest on debts. Then they got rid of that but real estate agents saved their bacon by keeping the homeloaner’s deduction. It drives up the cost of housing by subsidizing house debt. This is good for real estate agents, who make a fee that is truly one of the most whacked out transaction costs in any market (7%).
If they got rid of the homeloaner tax cut, then used house sellers would actually have to work for a living instead of running for office and appearing on reality TV in between their four or five annual sales.