House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi made the case for funding Zika prevention Wednesday on Morning Joe and, in the process, talked about the basic difference between Democrats and Republicans: Republicans don't want to pay for anything except tax breaks for the wealthy. Asked "what is the real problem" with Zika funding when there's clearly a "health emergency," she answered the first problem is "they have said no matter what we do we're not going to have contraception as part of that," even though "it's a terrible thing because it is also sexually transmitted."
Beyond that, though, there's the radical departure from "regular order" in the House with Republicans refusing to pay for national emergencies unless the money is cut from somewhere else.
[T]hey made a departure from what would be the normal regular order which is let's just do it. Instead, they said well, take the money from Ebola, which eventually the NIH had to do because there was no money. So this comes back to the real basic difference between Democrats and Republicans. […]
You have trickle-down economics which says give tax breaks to the wealthiest people in our country. Let it trickle down and if it creates jobs, that would be good. If it doesn't, so be it, that's a free market. […] Now why it relates to this is because […] the same crowd said now you go balance a budget and you go balance a budget because the tax cuts are tax expenditures. They cost money. So now you go take it out of—cut Pell Grants, don't expand some of our investments into the future. And when something like this comes along—we have another one—we have opioids. They haven't put up the money for opioids yet, either. […]
[T]hey never want to offset a tax cut for the wealthiest people in the country, which doesn't do anything to create jobs except it increases the deficit, so it's inconsistent.[…]
[W]hen you have an emergency—you have an emergency—it's going to end up costing you more if you avoid the investment.
This isn't the first time we've seen this—it's been Republican orthodoxy for a few decades now. Everything has to be paid for out of money already allocated to something else. Everything except tax cuts, that is. Or war.
For too long, Democrats acquiesced to that, bought into the deficit panic pushed by Third Way and other Very Serious People insisting that they would face total disaster if they didn't agree with Republicans that cutting the meat off the bone of government spending. Luckily, they got over that, and made the tax cuts for the wealthy—and the war—under President George W. Bush a political fight.
They need to continue that fight, and Pelosi is going to need more help to do it.
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