Asked why the House tea party Republicans’ recklessly crafted budget bills called for cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the National Weather Service (NWS) and is charged with tsunami warnings as well as preparing for and reacting to disasters, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., trotted out the GOP spin that the deficit can only be resolved by cutting spending:
Q: Given the size of the disaster is not over, of course, but given the size of it and the robust response that the world is trying to make in rescue, just looking at some of the budget lines that are cut in the Republicans’ [Continuing Resolution to temporarily fund the government]: $415 billion for international disaster assistance, USAID is cut; National Weather Service, NOAA cut $455 million. When a disaster like this happens, do you have any concerns that, while everything is on the table and we’re making necessary cuts, that the United States’ ability to respond to disasters like in Japan could be hampered if those cuts go through?
CANTOR: Look, I think that all of us need to be tempered by the fact that we’ve got to stop spending money we don’t have. I mean, essentially what you’re saying is, go borrow money from the Japanese so we can go and spend it there to help the Japanese.
Cantor, a master of Washingtonspeak, claimed that the “cuts” to NOAA and other disaster preparedness programs were really just a 10 percent reduction in 20 percent budget increases in funding from 2008 to 2010.
We’re cutting NOAA’s budget, Cantor continued, but that doesn’t mean we support less preparedness.
No, that’s really what he said:
CANTOR: Nowhere have we indicated that we’re directing NOAA not to emphasize the services it provides for the safety, health and welfare of Americans … I’m told that this point was raised by some employees at NOAA, who made it known that they didn’t believe the cuts were needed. Again, we all have to do more with less here.
Had the cuts his tea party members demanded gone through they would have led to furloughs, at least, at the tsunami warning centers, according to National Weather Service Employees Organization President Dan Sobien. “The National Weather Service has the responsibility of warning about tsunami’s also,” Sobien told the Huffington Post. “It is true that there is no plan to not fund the tsunami buoys. Everyone knows you just can’t do that. Still if those [House] cuts go through there will be furloughs at both of the tsunami warning centers that protect the whole country and, in fact, the whole world.”
“We all have to do more with less here?” Not “all” of us — not hardly.
The top 400 American families are not “doing more with less.” The nation’s wealth been redistributed upwards, with these richest 400 families now controlling more wealth than the bottom 100 million families combined — $1.27 trillion, or $3.175 billion per family among the 400, versus $1.22 trillion, or $12,200 per family at the bottom.
And why is it we can’t afford disaster preparedness, yet we have to “borrow money from the Japanese” and communist China to fund [PDF] $100 billion-plus cost of the war in Afghanistan this year.
There doesn’t appear to be polling on how many people favor disaster preparedness, but it’s probably quite high. On the other hand, the war — which is now it’s tenth year, and so the longest-ever U.S. war — is wildly unpopular. A new Washington Post/ABC poll found that 73 percent of Americans support withdrawing from Afghanistan this summer — including 78 percent of independents, 56 percent of Republicans and 87 percent of Democrats.
Republicans like to use kitchen table analogies when talking about the federal budget. American families have to make tough choices about their finances, they say, and therefore so should Washington.
The tea party Republicans have made “tough choices” in their budget, all right — their cuts are “tough” for the groups they hate — women, children (as opposed to zygotes and fetuses), the poor, elderly and sick — and, in the case of NOAA and the tsunami preparedness programs — the Left Coast.
But to use their kitchen table analogy, cutting disaster preparedness while borrowing funding for Afghanistan is like cutting fire and burglar alarms on the family home to save a few bucks at the same time dad is charging thousands of dollars for a sky box at the Super Bowl on his credit card.
Republican malfeasance and ineptitude caused the financial meltdown in 2008. Now, four months after swing voters put them back into control of the House, they are using budget cuts to play ideological games that could well lead to the second Republican economic meltdown in three years.
For the nation’s sake, let’s just hope the swing voters are paying attention.
Ending the war in Afghanistan will likely matter little in significantly lowering the cost of US involvement there. The war in Iraq “ended” with the withdrawal of the last US combat troops in August, 2010. BUT, and that is a hell of a but, the United States is still paying the cost of 180,000 private contractors doing who-knows-what, in Iraq. There are approximately 20,000 such private contractors in Afghanistan, and at such time as US combat troops are removed from that location, expect the number of contractors to increase, probably by about 100,000, or more.
And just where will those troops be going? Home? Perhaps. But given current mid east events, Libya and maybe Bahrain are certainly possibilities.
Diverting the cost of these mid east adventures to something important or actually necessary to the well-being of American citizens, is a pipe dream. This has been one of the three great disappointments of the Obama administration (along with the failure to investigate and prosecute the crimes of the bush administration, and to close Guantanamo).
As scary as any of these tea bagger proposals to end funding for such necessary services as earthquake preparedness and tsunami warnings are, remember that mainstream pre-tea bag republicans have traditionally made fun of such programs, cutting budgets whenever they were able. Do not forget that great tv moment in Feb., 2009, prior to the actual start of the tea bag movement, when Louisiana’s republican governor Bobby Jindal, on national television in a party response to a Presidential address, in all seriousness, told the American public that volcano monitoring was “wasteful spending”.
so what? Native indians and africans survived thousands of years without weather prediction,NOAA,USAID.americans can survive too.