Tag: Republican budget cuts

Boehner Pledges to Cut ‘Entitlement’ Spending

Buck Banks

I wish I could tell you it was going to be pretty and polite, and it would all be finished a month before we’d ever get to the debt ceiling. Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way.

— Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), quoted by the Idaho Statesman, vowing to Republican supporters that he would cut entitlement spending as part of this fall’s budget fights.

Budget Showdowns Have Not Changed the Size of Government

Buck Banks

$3.455 trillion

Amount the federal government will spend in 2013, following 2.5 years of budget battles. According to the Washington Post: “That figure is down from 2010 — the year that worries about government spending helped bring on a tea party uprising, a Republican takeover in the House and then a series of ulcer-causing showdowns in Congress. But it is not down by that much. Back then, the government spent a whopping $3.457 trillion.”

Sullivan Says GOP Heading for Sequestration Trap Set by Obama

Buck Banks

I believe that is indeed Obama’s long game here. The precedent is the Gingrich government shutdown, which stopped his revolution in its tracks and gave Bill Clinton new political life. When cops are furloughed, when scientists complain about research cuts, when the military-industrial complex revs up its lobbying engines, I just don’t see how the sequester works politically for the GOP. It exists entirely because of their fixation on immediate austerity – despite the awful consequences that policy option has spawned in Europe.

— Andrew Sullivan, asserting that Republicans will suffer politically if the sequestration cuts go into effect on March 1.

SSDD: Republicans Proposed Same Cuts in 1995

Trish

Let me read you a news story about some of the proposed budget cuts. Republicans are proposing cuts in youth training and education programs, foreign aid, assistance to homeless youth, federal subsidies to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Head Start, energy assistance for the needy to pay their fuel bills. That’s a list from 1995. So Republicans now are proposing a very similar list of cuts that go after the programs that they have always targeted, things that conservative voters don’t like very much, that liberal voters do. So in that sense there is Republican unity.

Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal Constitution columnist, appearing recently on NPR’s “Tell Me More.”