Putsch's First Budget
Even Wrapped in the Flag, It Still Stinks

By: Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Putsch's first budget is out, and if you need any evidence that Putsch and his junta are a bunch of mean, greedy, short-sighted, stupid bastards, the proof is all there in black and white.

Nine billion cut from highway spending. The sort of people propping up the junta don't use the highways much, and see no reason to spend their hard-stolen dollars on a bunch of plebes who were too stupid to stop them from stealing the government. Survival of the fittest. Fix your own damn potholes, chumps. Oh, and by the way, kiss Amtrak goodbye. It's one thing to give billions to the airlines, which Putsch's rich buddies use. Only common people use trains.

Twenty five percent cut in payroll taxes. Payroll taxes paid by employers, not employees. Why should employers have any obligation to employees? After all, if they weren't making a ton of money off those employees, they couldn't afford to hire them, and the employees would have to do something like work for themselves instead. Oh, and the government doesn't owe employees any. Ken Lay can steal $21 million and claim he's broke, but there's no reason why someone making $6.50 an hour and paying $800 a month rent can't fund their own insurance and pension.

Five billion cut in subsidies for farmers. Must be part of that "Freedom to Farm" nonsense Newt came up with to ensure that most arable land fell into the holdings of big agricultural corporations. Which, of course, get all kinds of tax subsidies not available to the guy with 640 acres and a John Deere.

Putsch even managed, while wrapping himself and his budget in the flag, to renege on promises made to New York City that funds for the WTC victims would be in addition to the $20 billion allocated to the city. In effect, Putsch wants to screw the city to the tune of $5.4 billion. That'll teach them to elect Democratic senators!

Putsch says we can pay for his $38 billion for the State Police (the storm troopers with the folksy name of "Homeland Security") and tens of billions more for Star Wars by holding spending on domestic items to 2%, and cutting those that Putsch finds useless, such as health screening programs for pregnant women and young children, or vaccine programs. All HIS friends can afford doctors. What's wrong with those people, anyway?

Along with health care, Putsch plans to cut Medicare and various other programs that provide heat for the elderly, transportation for schoolkids, facilities for kids with disabilities, legal services for the poor, and the space program.

Remember his state of the union promise to increase funding for Head Start? He lied.

His supporters will lie about the budget, just like they did when Reagan and Bush were attacked for their heartless budget cuts designed to feather the nests of their wealthy supporters at the expense of working Americans. They will claim that the cuts aren't cuts, because they are 2% increases in funding, and most people won't understand that it's a cut.

For those of you reading this who aren't real clear who that works, here's a simple explanation:

If a Department is allocated "X" for 2002 and spends all of it ("Y"), then next year, that same department gets X + 2%. For it not to be a cut, spending would have to be equal to or less than Y + 2%. But "Y" is affected by the number of people it covers, and inflation. If you assume that the population grows by 1.3%, and inflation is 3.5%, then Y is going to be Y + 1.3% + 3.5%, or Y + 4.8%. (For those algebraically inclined, I know the proper equation is Y * (Y+.013Y) * (Y + .035Y), but I didn't want to dick around with hundredths of a percent).

So X would lose ground to Y by a hair over 2.8%. When something buys less than it did last year, that's a cut, no matter how much you point to the 2%. All that does is reduce the amount of the cut.

But in the interests of efficient and streamlined government, Putsch wants to take the money saved by cheating young pregnant women and working families and shovel it to an entity whose own auditors cannot account for TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT of expenditures. That's right, folks. One out of every four tax dollars that goes to this outfit simply vanishes down a black hole. Arthur Anderson couldn't make these guys look efficient and organized. Fortunately, the auditors for the military have a bit more honesty.

I'm talking about the US military, the most bureaucratically hidebound, inefficient and wasteful entities on earth, and the ones responsible for most government waste.

Remember a few years ago the Republicans made a huge uproar about inefficiencies and fraud in the food stamp program. They screeched and yammered and howled endlessly about how vast amounts of money were being wasted and the program needed to be eliminated and on and on and on. Do you remember what the amount of the unaccounted-for funds came to?

Ten percent. Not twenty-five percent. Not twenty percent. Not even fifteen percent. Ten percent. About $2.8 billion dollars a year. It's since been cut to about three percent, and the Republicans are still whining.

The military simply loses that much every two weeks. And Putsch wants to nearly double their funding over the next eight years, to almost half a trillion a year. At that rate, assuming the vast amounts of money don't make them sloppy and inefficient, they'll be "losing" about $125 billion a year. Mostly to large defense contractors who make lavish donations to GOP campaigns, I suspect, given the general level of corruption in America today.

But Putsch will gleefully run medicare and social security into the ground, crow that it failed because it was inefficient, and turn it over to his buddies who will provide the social services at a fat profit at the expense of the taxpayer. And if Americans die during that transition, well, they were only workers, anyway. If they were worth saving, they would have been rich, like Putsch and his buddies are.

Does that sound like class warfare? You betcha. Only I'm not fighting class warfare: I'm fighting BACK. Putsch wants to screw us so he can give OUR money to HIS buddies to use against us, and it's time we said "enough is enough".

The Democrats in the House are making discouraging noises right now, eyeing those astronomical "job approval ratings" of Putsch's and sidling away from a confrontation. Do they think that if they don't stand and fight, Putsch will take pity on them and let them pretend to be powerful congressmen? Or have they simply given up?

The budget shows, to anyone who looks at it, the insatiable greed of Republicans, their willingness to wage class warfare, and their joy at the opportunity to gut the national treasury for their own personal gain.

What Enron did to investors and employees, Putsch plans to do to the rest of us.