The Disingenuous Republican Budget

To me it's no coincidence that the Republican Party increasingly has a problem when it comes to a lack of truth and veracity - the party is merely mirroring the dishonesty and extremism of its Christianist base. A group that is, in my view, among the most dishonest and truth challenged on the planet. Ezra Klein looks at this problem in the Washington Post in the context of the latest budget proposal being floated by the GOP which seems to assume that the public is completely made up of moron (perhaps an accurate assumption with the Tea Party crowd). Truth be told, the number simply do not add up. Simple math exposes the lie. Here are some column highlights:

The Republicans have a problem: Their budget promises don’t add up. They’ve committed to new tax cuts. They’ve proposed spending more on defense. They’ve promised they won’t change retirement programs for the current generation of seniors. But they’ve also promised to cut the deficit, and fast.

That’s left them with one option: deep cuts to programs for the poor. That’s what you see in the Ryan budget. It’s the basis for the Romney budget. It’s what Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul and Rick Santorum have proposed. But there’s a problem with that, too. Cutting programs for the poor isn’t popular. So Republicans have come up with a solution: Don’t call them “cuts.”

The Ryan budget’s section on these cuts is titled “Repairing the Social Safety Net.” It explains that “the welfare reforms of the 1990s, despite their success, were never extended beyond cash welfare to other means-tested programs.” It proposes to extend the welfare reform model to Medicaid, to food stamps and other unnamed “low-income assistance programs.” Romney’s proposal is almost identical.

[I]n the Romney and Ryan proposals, the grants to states would grow much more slowly. Medicaid, for instance, would see its budget increase at the rate of inflation, not at the rate of health-care costs.

In 1996, before welfare reform passed, 68 of 100 families living in poverty with children received welfare benefits. In 2010, two years into the worst economy since the Great Depression, only 27 of every 100 such families were receiving benefits. And that’s not because they were all holding good jobs or because states had somehow managed to make the grants go further. Quite the opposite, actually. . . . The end result is that fewer families get welfare. That’s not a “reform.” It’s a cut.

In Saturday’s New York Times, Jason DeParle looked at Arizona, which has cut its welfare caseloads in half since the recession. “The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet,” DeParle reported. “They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.”

You can argue that the money that used to fund welfare is better spent on other priorities, or that fewer Americans should have access to Medicaid and food stamps. But that’s the argument we’re having here, and it’s the argument Republicans need to own up to making. Their proposal is to cut services in those areas to fund tax cuts, deficit reduction and defense spending. The Democrats’ proposal is to raise taxes, cut defense spending and do somewhat less deficit reduction to protect programs for the poor and other government services. That’s the choice voters face in 2012. There are no free lunches. Just ask those single mothers in Arizona.

What I find most outrageous, of course, is that the Republicans who are pushing for budgets that treat many citizens as disposable trash are the very same ones who profess their religiosity on their sleeve. In reality, they obviously have nothing but contempt for Christ's Gospel message.