Word: gop
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Have pity on the Republicans in Congress. While their leaders were holding a press event under a large 'Stop Robbing Social Security' banner, their own accountants were wistfully admitting that the GOP budget would in fact be "robbing Social Security" to the tune of $7.6 billion next year. The Congressional Budget Office, using more respectable accounting, calculated an even higher number of about $18 billion. Faced with that kind of shortfall, the Congressional Republicans chose a desperate and despicable strategy: fix the numbers, and let any attendant suffering fall on the poor...
...GOP had pledged so often to balance the non-Social Security budget and stay within preset spending caps that something had to be done. With defense and highway spending on the rise, the brunt of the cuts fell on health, education, and social service programs, but billions of dollars still remained to be accounted...
...hours, on a monthly basis rather than at the start of the year. This means that the payments for October, November, and December of the year 2000 would go on the fiscal year 2001 budget, turning about $9 billion in costs into the next Congress' problem. That means that GOP leaders can claim to have a $400 million surplus without touching Social Security, as long as no one looks at next year's books...
...True, Bush did apply the classic GOP formula to education reform: States and localities, not the federal government, should decide how and where to spend Washington?s education dollars. But here?s the rub that may lead the Republicans back to the center of this issue ?- and rub some of them the wrong way: The states don?t get to run off without a chaperone. The proposal is filled with ways to let states use federal education dollars more freely, including passing them along to parents in the form of vouchers for private or charter schools. But in exchange, Bush...
...that this Congress has a lot to learn about public relations? The GOP wheeled out House golden boy J. C. Watts Thursday to explain that the re-jiggering only meant 12 monthly payments to these families (just like his own back in the Dust Bowl) instead of one lump sum. But factor in inflation, and whatever interest might be earned by socking the money away, and what the Republicans are offering is undeniably less money. Worse, it sounds heartless, especially within the context of an ugly budget that?s already breaking the fiscal bank in a hundred other ways. These...