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Budget War: No
Retreat, No Surrender
By Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
Published on DickMorris.com on April 4, 2011
It is a stupid, false choice to say that the Republicans in the House
have either to accept the split-the-difference compromise proposed by
the Senate on the Continuing Resolution battle or shut down the entire
federal government. Nonsense!
Instead, the Republicans should refuse to accept less than $61 billion
in cuts and -- if the Senate and Obama refuse -- should target for
shutdown a handful of specific and highly unpopular programs and
agencies. Why shut down the entire government? Zero fund
the State Department or Agency for International Development, thereby
suspending all foreign aid. Zero fund the Bonds for America
program where the feds pick up the local debt service payments for
states and cities. Zero fund the Highway construction
program. Any combination of some of these cuts can easily
generate $61 billion in cuts (less the $10 billion already cut).
The Obama Administration and the Democrats are posing two false choices
for the Republican Party and Speaker John Boehner shows every sign of
falling into both traps:
1. The Democrats want to pretend that the choice is between a
total government shutdown and compromising on the budget cuts.
It’s not.
2. They want to sell the notion that you cannot cut the deficit
without fundamental changes immediately in Social Security and
Medicare. Not true either. Block granting Medicaid and
rolling it back to 2008 levels, continuing with cuts in discretionary
spending, and limiting deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan to 60,000
troops by 2015 will immediately lower the deficit to less than 4% of
GDP from its current perch of 10%. See our book Revolt! for
details.
Please! Write your Republican Congressman and ask him or her to stand
firm. You got them elected! Don’t let them sell us out on a
split-the-difference compromise. Don’t let them tell us that the
Democrats can’t find $61 billion of cuts in a $3.7 trillion budget or
even in the $750 billion of nondefense discretionary spending.
That proposition is laughable.
And tell them not to shut down the government, just shut down the parts
we don’t like. If the Democrats want to shut down the government
in retaliation, a kind of lock-out in retaliation for a strike, let
them be our guests!
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