budget

Our opponents have really reached a new low in Ohio. Anti-choice politicians are using the state budget to take essential funds away from low-income women and children and give them to anti-choice "crisis pregnancy centers" (CPCs) instead.

Republicans are determined to "fix" everything except what is really wrong with America. While trying yet again to repeal Obamacare and obsessing over every imagined scandal in the book they are refusing to pass a jobs bill to provide relief to working Americans. Worse yet is their obsession with the deficit. Sadly for Republicans, that "crisis" is over.

Washington remains focused on a “deficit problem” when there is no deficit problem. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the 2013 budget deficit will be down 60 percent as a share of gross domestic product from President Bush’s fiscal year 2009 deficit (from 10 percent to 4 percent of GDP).

We need a transformational president who will rouse Americans to address the challenges we face, not a transactional mediator who offers preemptive concessions to get a deal that ignores those challenges. Deficits are not our problem.

Why do policymakers focus so intently on the deficit issue? Because the small minority of wealthy individuals that see the deficit as the nation’s priority have more clout than the majority that didn’t.

If you’re living comfortably in your upper class lifestyle, you’re going to love Ryan’s budget plan.

Wednesday, by a vote of 29-2, the Texas Senate passed a budget that fails to restore all of the $5.4 billion cut from public education in the 2011 session. Democratic Senators Wendy Davis and Sylvia Garcia were the lone votes against it.

American corporations have every right to protect their legitimate interests, and protect themselves from injustice. But so long as they wield their great power with indifference to justice, the capitalist force in America no longer deserves the kind of moral respect we gave it during the long years of the Cold War.

It’s a popular analogy among fans of the political game to call Republicans the “Daddy Party” and assign “Mommy Party” to Democratic folk. Deadbeat dads are famous for withholding financial support from children. So Republicans seem to fit the mold here.

The bottom line is that Democrats have offered a compromise plan to avoid the sequester, one that is balanced between revenue increases (e.g., by closing tax loopholes which benefit the wealthiest Americans and corporations) and smart - not meat cleaver, like the current sequester calls for - spending cuts.