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Mike Lux

By Mike Lux
Author, “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be”

There is an old adage that always was a lot of comfort to those of us who barely survived our junior high school years: if you stand up to bullies, you’ll find they tend to be cowards not very far beneath the surface. Part of it is that they are so used to people cowering and giving way before them that when someone does stand up and fight back, they don’t how to handle it.

We are seeing that play out right now in the world of politics. Big corporate interests and conservative Republicans are so used to bullying people into easy submission, that when someone stands up to them, they lose it awfully fast.

My first example is Republican reaction to the President’s budget speech. Can you believe the level of high-pitched whining coming from Republicans when the President pointed out the fairly obvious fact that their budget is a tad bit unfair because it takes health care and nursing home coverage from seniors and those with disabilities while giving massive new tax cuts to millionaires? Seems obvious to me, but when Obama stood his ground and made these self-evident points, these guys squealed like stuck pigs. “Partisan,” “class warfare,” and all that. Ryan even complained that Obama invited him to the speech but then criticized his plan, which sounded a lot to me like Newt being invited onto Air Force and then complaining about his seating assignment. Now, as Jon Stewart hilariously pointed out, this is coming from a party whose leaders have spent the last three years calling Obama a socialist, communist, Nazi, and a friend of terrorists, questioning his citizenship and his religion and his patriotism. Great on the old dishing it out thing, not so much on the taking it thing. (more…)

Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

You are a congressperson. You just voted for a budget that would destroy Medicare. Then you traveled home this week to meet with your constituents. Most of them like Medicare. What do you tell them?

Tell them you want to “save Medicare.”

Bloomberg reports:

House Speaker John Boehner said Republican lawmakers should tackle head-on the Medicare issue during the recess….

…Before the House vote, Republican leaders circulated a package of charts, talking points and fact sheets supporting the budget to members, including links to a document countering the main attacks on the plan.

The document encourages lawmakers to highlight how the budget “saves Medicare,” and offers “future beneficiaries access to the same kinds of health-care options now enjoyed by members of Congress.” (more…)

Sen. Bernie Sanders

By Sen. Bernie Sanders
Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont

Republicans in the House want to balance the budget by denying more than 200,000 little children the opportunity to receive an early education through Head Start; reducing or eliminating Pell Grants for 9.4 million college students; eliminating primary health care services to 11 million Americans; and delaying Social Security benefits to half a million eligible Americans, among other things.

Before Congress cuts funding for Head Start, Social Security, and financial aid for college, we have got to make sure that large, profitable corporations are paying their fair share of taxes.

At a time when we have a $14.2 trillion national debt and a $1.6 trillion federal deficit, it is unacceptable that Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Bank of America, Chevron, Boeing, and other large, profitable corporations are not only avoiding paying any federal income taxes at all but have actually received huge refund checks from the IRS.

Loopholes in the tax code, offshore tax havens, tax breaks to companies that export American jobs to China, and other tax breaks have allowed giant corporations in America to receive billions in refunds from the IRS.

Meanwhile corporations are sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash on hand, and big banks have nearly a trillion dollars in excess reserves parked at the Federal Reserve.

In 2005, one out of four large corporations paid no income taxes at all even though they collected $1.1 trillion in revenue over that one-year period. (more…)

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

Governor Scott Walker and a gaggle of Republican governors assault the right of workers to bargain collectively in states across the country. Teachers get laid off as school budgets are cut across the country. Colleges hike tuitions and shut down course offerings. Public workers face furloughs, layoff, cuts in health care and pension benefits. Congress is tied in knots about how much and what to cut. And Republican and bipartisan pressure to go after Social Security and Medicare is escalating.

We should be very clear about what unites these stories, for these struggles will say much about what kind of America emerges from the rubble of the Great Recession.

Who Gets Stuck with the Bill for the Great Recession?

From the tea party Republican caucus to the Obama White House, leaders of both parties have moved from worrying about the recovery to worrying about how to pay for the costs of the Great Recession. With 25 million Americans in need of full time work, this is bipartisan folly. With Japan melting down, the Middle East erupting, energy and food prices soaring, housing prices and starts sinking, states and localities enacting brutal budget cuts, it is callously irresponsible, risking a double dip recession that will explode public deficits. (more…)

Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

Instead of the House Republicans breaking their own proposed “CutGo” rule to offset the cost of all spending increases, they have chosen to carve a multi-billion dollar loophole, specifically exempting the $143 billion 10-year cost of repealing health care reform.

By brazenly doing so, House Republican leaders are tacitly admitting that 1) health care reform is deficit reduction, and 2) their claims of fiscal responsibility are completely empty.

Not only is health care reform the equivalent of deficit reduction, health care reform is the only serious path to deficit reduction. The CBO estimates the savings of the Affordable Care Act to be $1 trillion over the next two decades, and many health care experts believe that’s a conservative estimate because the cost-control provisions are inherently experimental.

To exempt heath care reform from a deficit reduction rule is to not have a deficit reduction rule. (more…)

Bob Cesca

By Bob Cesca
Author of One Nation Under Fear

It only makes sense that a party currently being wagged by fringe crazy people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michele Bachmann would release its alternative budget on April Fools’ Day.

Not only does the Republican plan freeze discretionary spending for five years in the midst of a recession which, by most accounts and proved by history, will countermand any sort of economic recovery, but it also cuts taxes by 10 percent for the same Wall Street executives whose actions largely got us into this economic mess in the first place. In other words: Congratulations, Republicans, you just released a budget that rewards wealthy corporate executives while blocking any attempt to dig us out of the economic catastrophe they created.

Smart!

The only bit of Republican legislation that’d be more ridiculous would be if Michele Bachmann were to introduce a constitutional amendment thwarting a fake plot to eliminate the dollar as the form of currency in the United States.

Oh wait. She’s already done that. And 30 Republican congressmembers so far have co-sponsored the amendment. 30 Republicans have irrevocably tethered their wagons to the Bachmann crazy train. Excellent. Next on the agenda: a bill creating the Office of Robot Insurance, protecting us from robot attackers who use old people’s medicine for fuel. Speaking of which, the Republican plan also phases out Medicare.

The marquee item, however, in the Republican plan is their inexplicably regressive tax cut for the super rich. Wealthy Americans in the top three tax brackets would see their tax burden cut to a flat 25 percent from previous rates of 35, 33 and 28. According to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, CEOs from any of the top 800 corporations would receive a tax break of around $1.5 million a year. Meanwhile, if you earn $15,000 a year, your tax break will be around $0 a year.

But get this. Under the Republican plan, Americans are given the option of paying the old tax rates instead of the new, expensive and regressive Republican rates. So, for example, if your household income is $100,000, you could pay the same tax rate as someone earning $15,000. Or you could be a swell egg and go back to your old rate. Aside from the utter lack of fairness in the notion of a $100,000 household paying the same rate as a $15,000 household, who in their right mind would voluntarily pay higher taxes?

Now you might be asking, given that the Republicans are all about fiscal responsibility, how much does this Republican tax cut for the wealthiest three brackets actually cost? Some estimates, according to Steve Benen, project upwards of a $4 trillion price tag. At the very least, according to their own projections, the Republican plan would run up a $500 billion annual budget deficit through at least 2080. Again, the Republican grasp of fiscal responsibility is about as firm as their grasp of reality and sanity. The subtext here being: The trillion dollar Bush tax cuts weren’t irresponsible enough. Let’s go crazy! WOOO!

And by the way, those are annual deficits that factor into the mix a completely insane five year freeze on discretionary spending — a freeze that would surely plunge the American economy into a deep depression. To that point, the Republican plan doesn’t account for such an economic catastrophe, and therefore doesn’t factor such an inevitable consequence into their revenue and deficit projects.

All told, imagine if you will the Monopoly man running up and shoving you into a deep precipice. The Republican plan not only gives that Monopoly man a $1.5 million check for his trouble, but it also cuts the rope you were using to climb out of the hole — provided you actually survived the fall in the first place.

Speaking of holes, did you see the graph Paul Ryan clearly yanked out of his?

Check out that steep blue line illustrating the alleged Democratic budget deficits extending to upwards of 50 percent of GDP by 2060. Put another way, suggesting a deficit that’s 50 percent of GDP is like presupposing a living human being that’s 50 percent marshmallow man. It’s insane. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections only extend out to 2019. Yet the Republican chart somehow extends out to 2080. The steep upwards slope of the Democratic budget begins at around 2030 — 11 years after the furthest CBO projections stop.

What does this mean? For starters the claim on the chart: “Out-years based on CBO’s Long-Term Alternative Fiscal Scenario” is a lie. And the text: “Source: House Budget Committee Republican Staff” might as well say: “Source: Paul Ryan’s Ass.” In other words, that steep upwards slope is entirely made up.

The graph might as well look like this:

Yes, the Democratic budgets will be so out of control they’ll eventually make little curly-cues and travel backwards in time — adding to past deficits — while also looping around the word “government” — you know, because the Democrats love government.

At this point, the laughable street vendor pamphlet that John Boehner rolled out was probably less ridiculous than this actual budget plan and its accompanying Wall Street Journal graph. But it stands to reason that given their track record the Republicans would churn out a budget proposal that’s fully in line with their backwards, zero cred reputation.

BobCesca.com

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CORRECTION: I erroneously credited the CEO taxation numbers to the Center for American Progress. These numbers came from the Wonk Room at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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One Nation Under Fear, with a foreword by Arianna Huffington of  Huffington Post is available on Amazon. For more by Bob Cesca, see BobCesca.com! Go!