Let the budget battle begin; congressional leaders dig in for long fight

[alp227]

Source: The Washington Post

Congressional leaders dug in Sunday for a lengthy battle over the nation’s solvency as lawmakers determine how much debt the Treasury can accumulate and whether to reform the expensive entitlement programs of Medicare and Medicaid.

After two weeks of sometimes tumultuous meetings with constituents at home, lawmakers return to the Capitol’s fiscal wars this week. They must consider whether to raise the federal debt ceiling beyond $14.3 trillion in exchange for still undefined budget-tightening reforms — a debate that is certain to linger well past the preliminary deadline of May 16. That delay has already prompted Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to use accounting moves that would allow the United States to continue to make payments without exceeding the debt ceiling. But he would run out of possibilities in early July.

Setting the stage for negotiations that could last well into the summer, Democrats and Republicans criticized one another Sunday over which reforms to attach to legislation extending the debt limit, with Democrats adamant that higher taxes on the wealthy and revoked tax privileges for oil companies be a part of a broad deficit-reduction package. Most Republicans refuse to consider higher taxes as part of any final deal and demand the focus be on slashing entitlement spending.

“A lot of people think this is sort of like the magic fairy dust of budgets, that we can just make a small amount of people pay some more taxes and it will fix all of our problems. Well, let’s keep our eye on the ball. The eye on the ball is spending. And the sooner we get this thing under control, the better off everybody is going to be,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) said on ABC News’ “This Week With Christiane Amanpour”.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/let_the_budget_battle_begin_congressional_leaders_dig_in_for_long_fight/2011/04/29/AFVhqITF_singlePage.html

[AdHocSolver]

1. Medicare is not an "entitlement" program. It is an INVESTMENT in PUBLIC HEALTH.

For all of Lakoff's talk about framing the issues, neither Democrats nor any other progressives understand nor act upon it.

In fact, education, research and development, Social Security, infrastructure, and health care are NOT unnecessary expenses, but investments in America.

The wealthy class derides these expenditures because they want to steal these funds to enrich themselves by transferring public sector funds to themselves through tax breaks for the rich and privatization.

From an economic standpoint, tax breaks for the already wealthy and corporations are wasteful because they extract money from the economy. Wealthy people who don't pay their fair share of the tax load are like hoarders. They extract the life's blood of an economy, its circulating medium of exchange that we call "money".

The driving force of any economy is DEMAND. Demand arises when people have money to spend. To be able to spend money in such a way as to stimulate the economy, the mass of the people need income, which for most people means a job.

Lack of affordable health insurance (such as most other industrialized countries have) contributes to a weak U.S. economy for the same reasons. Huge amounts of money that would go for actual health care are siphoned off and hoarded by insurance companies as profit. If the money were actually spent on health care, it would be a great stimulus to the economy.

[krkaufman]

2. Time for Obama to use some of his newfound political capital...

... and ram tax increases on the rich down Congress' throat. As a starter.