The House passed the fiscal 2008 budget on a largely party-line vote of 216-210. The nonbinding resolution would spend more money on health and education and other domestic spending programs that Democrats said have been ignored under six years of Republican control of Congress.Now, you wouldn't expect the Republicans to voice full-throated support to a Democratic budget, of course, but can't they at least come up with a novel criticism?
The budget sets spending and revenue goals, but it will be up to individual committees to act on specific legislation. The Senate has approved its version of the budget and the two chambers now have to work out their differences.
House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt, a South Carolina Democrat, said the spending blueprint for the fiscal year that begins October 1 sets the course for turning huge deficits over the last several years into a slight surplus by 2012.
Democrats criticized past Republican budgets and sought to deflect criticisms that their budget would raise taxes. "We have to return to fiscal sanity, we created a mess in the last six years," said Rep. Allen Boyd, a centrist Florida Democrat.
Republican opponents called it a blueprint "for the largest tax increase in history," because the budget does not extend President George W. Bush's tax cuts, which are set to expire in 2010.As if that's a bad thing. Look at the Federal Deficit, and look at how slowly these "magic tax cuts" have grown the economy, the very heart of supply-side economics: cut taxes, particularly on the rich, and the economy will boom.
As usual when it comes to Republican bromides, this is utter bullshit. The only time tax cuts created measurable growth without creating enormous deficits was back in the 1960s, when John Kennedy (who, it might be pointed out, was a liberal Democrat) cut the top marginal tax rate from 80%. This tax reform proposal created the biggest economic expansion in the nation's history, in world history, until the Clinton tax increase of 1993 created the economic boom that George Bush muffed with his series of failed tax cuts.
Cutting the fat is one thing: cutting muscle to lose weight is quite a different story, and we've seen over the past six years how miserably that's failed the people of the United States.
The funniest whine-without-cheese from the right, however, is this:
"They propose to control no spending. They propose to cut nothing," Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, said of the Democratic budget.Right. Like Republicans have been the ones wielding the axe to spending and appropriations and pork.
The largest increases in budget deficits in world history have come at the hands of Republicans. We must make no mistake about the economic danger this party of economic royalists poses to this nations good and welfare.
So, really, guys, try to come up with some new talking points. Yours are boring and old, and for the most part, irrelevant, and soon your national party will go the way of the New York State GOP: just a bump in the road towards the future.
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