Which is really the only name you can give the Federal government’s budget season opened by the release of President Obama’s budget blueprint last Tuesday. The plan calls for letting the BushCo tax cuts expire (except for people making less than $250K), eliminating the tax subsidies for the oil and gas industry, raising taxes on hedge fund managers; and it calls for investments in public education and college, domestic energy production, the beginning of a fund to finance health care for the uninsured. It is a pretty strong plan (I do have some reservations about some of the energy initiatives) that begins to retilt the playing field back towards the middle class.
But this post is about the astonishing hypocrisy that has welcomed this blueprint for spending. For all of the sturm and drang coming from repubs and conservative Dems both about “reining in spending”, apparently we are in for months and months of whining about not cutting *my* spending. Take a look:
Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), for example, lashed out at Obama for “the same old big government budget that will spend too much, borrow too much, and tax too much.” He said: “I’m feeling a lot like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.”
But at the same time, Bond issued a statement criticizing Obama’s proposed cuts in the military’s C-17 aircraft program — cuts that happen to affect thousands of jobs in Missouri.
Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), called Obama’s budget “another massive budget filled with even more spending than last year’s record totals.”
But in the Lexington Herald-Leader back home, a McConnell spokesman made it clear that the senator opposes Obama’s proposal to slash coal subsidies by $2.3 billion over 10 years as part of his climate change legislation.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) slams Obama, saying that “instead of reigning in this out-of-control spending, the President has proposed a budget that would increase deficit spending by 35 percent over the next five years.”
But like other members of the Texas delegation, Cornyn takes exception to the spending cuts Obama has proposed to the NASA space program, which would affect jobs in Texas.
Or how about these:
While Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, said he was all for slowing federal spending, he has no appetite for the substantial cuts in farm programs proposed in President Obama’s new budget.
Representative Todd Akin, Republican of Missouri, issued a press release simultaneously lamenting the deficit spending outlined in the new budget and protesting cuts in Pentagon projects important to his state.
And Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a fiscal conservative and a senior Republican on the Budget Committee, vowed to resist reductions in space program spending that would flow back home.
Among them was Senator Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat who leads the Agriculture Committee.
“I am standing up for farmers and ranchers and all of rural America once again by opposing cuts that will harm the hardworking men and women who are the backbone of our rural economy,” Ms. Lincoln said in a statement that accused the White House of unfairly focusing on farm communities. “While I, too, believe we must reduce the federal deficit, we must all share in this responsibility.
Sen. Ben Nelson said Wednesday that President Barack Obama’s proposed spending freeze on nonmilitary discretionary spending is a good first step, but that more needs to be done to get the federal budget deficit under control.
[…]But when asked moments later about proposed cuts to farm payments and crop insurance, Nelson defended that spending, saying government belt-tightening must be done in a “responsible fashion.”“These programs are essential if we want to remain independent when it comes to our own food production so that we’re not in a position where we have to import food because it can be produced cheaper in other locations,” Nelson said.
There’s probably more of where that came from. But the point here is that for all of the performance art around cutting spending, what is certainly true is that none of these legislators will be willing to make the tough decisions to get there. Cutting government spending will always and everywhere hurt some group of people, some community. But I wonder when someone will ask these folks fighting to save NASA programs if they still think that the government doesn’t create any jobs.
There are things about this budget plan that are difficult — and way past due. This country hasn’t needed farm subsidies for a very long time (at least as they are currently built); or coal and gas subsidies; or even some of the DOD programs being fought for. And it gets a little easier to ask people to share the sacrifice if in fact EVERYONE is asked to sacrifice. Besides, if you spend alot of time demagoging the deficit, you need to sell all of the cuts that come up.