Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, laments the traditional media's failure to give the Congressional Progressive Caucus's "People's Budget" any air time or ink.
Twenty five million people are unemployed, underemployed or out of the workforce altogether, but that's not on anyone's agenda. Millions of homeowners are underwater in their mortgage and facing the loss of their homes, that's also not on anyone's agenda. Tens of millions of baby boomers are at the edge of retirement and have just lost their life savings. This also is not on anyone's agenda.
Deficit cutting fever is the current craze in the nation's capital. But even here there is little tie to reality. House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan put out a budget that proposes that in 2050 we will be spending less on defense, domestic discretionary and various non-medical entitlements together than we spend on defense today. And most of the punditry praise its seriousness. Meanwhile, the Progressive Caucus, the largest single bloc in Congress, proposes a way to get to a balanced budget by 2021, and it is virtually ignored. ...
The Progressive Caucus has done the country an enormous service in producing its budget. They have helped to show as clearly as possible that the deficit hawks do not give a damn about reducing deficits and balancing the budget. They want to cut the programs that the poor and middle class depend upon—programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—so that the rich can have more money in their pockets.
Deficit reduction as it is usually discussed is a give to the rich agenda. The fact that the Progressive Caucus budget was so universally ignored drives this point home very well.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:
Ordinarily, it's the "majesty of the office" that prevents us from seeing such criminal conspiracies for exactly what they are. We are instead told by apologists for the guilty that we're "criminalizing politics." But with Bush sitting at an historic low of just 28% approval, is there any "majesty" left? And with nearly the entirety of the executive branch now infected, is there any politics left in between the criminalization?
Twenty briefings—directed from inside the White House—to violate the Hatch Act and use official government resources to illegally influence the elections. When are we going to start calling this what it is?