GOP House Bill Seeks to Slash Spending - And Damage Economy

Personally, I increasingly feel that the GOP's principal motivation is to destroy the U.S. economy in the hope that as the economy tanks voters will somehow take out their wrath on Obama rather than the GOP which has worked at the state and federal level to slash government employment and leave schools, fire departments and  police forces undermanned.  In the process there is no recognition that each fired government worker, teacher, fireman, or police officer represents a family that will be left struggling to survive financially.  There is also a total disconnect from the reality that with all of these laid off workers, consumer spending will plummet and consumers who are employed will cut back on spending as they worry about their own job security.  The result is a downward spiral with more average Americans poised to lose their homes - which pushes a still devastated housing market lower - and unable to provide for their families.  Meanwhile, the GOP proclaims itself as the party of faith and Christianity even as the Gospel message is flushed down the toilet.  The hypocrisy and callousness is enough to make one want to vomit.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the latest GOP blue print to make the economy worse even as the hypocrites claim they seek to save it.  Not surprisingly leading the effort is Eric Cantor of Virginia who makes the most tawdry whore look like a pillar of truth and veracity.  Here are highlights:

Financial regulators would lose hundreds of millions of dollars needed to implement the new Wall Street regulatory law. The Internal Revenue Service’s budget would not be increased, with a prohibition on cash transfers to implement the health care law. President Obama’s energy-efficiency and renewable energy efforts would be gutted, along with international climate change programs. And regulations to force new efficiency standards in federal buildings would be blocked.
 

Quietly, the House Appropriations Committee is working hard to undo much of the president’s first-term ambitions — or at least provoke a showdown with the White House ahead of the fall election. 

On Tuesday, the committee introduced a new agriculture spending bill that slashes the administration’s request for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission by 41 percent as the agency gears up to begin regulation of the $300 trillion swaps market, assigned it by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulatory law. On Wednesday, the House moved toward final passage of an energy and water spending bill that would bring spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy to its lowest level since 2006, during the more oil-friendly Bush years. 

At the root of the shearing is the House’s decision to cut domestic spending over all by $19 billion below the levels set last summer in the deal to end the debt-ceiling imbroglio. Senate Democrats and Republicans have pledged to abide by those caps, and Mr. Obama has threatened to veto any bill that cuts spending to the lower House level.  

And it jabs at the administration’s “green energy” efforts in a host of ways, curtailing eligibility for its program to “weatherize” homes, blocking implementation of new regulations to make federal buildings more energy-efficient, and cutting the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by $886 million below the president’s budget request and $428 million below this year’s level. Solar and building efficiency programs would be cut in half. 

“The result of the House bill is to effectively put the interests of Wall Street ahead of those of the American public,” Mr. Gensler said Tuesday in a statement. 

Also on Tuesday, the committee introduced its financial services appropriations bill which also takes aim at White House achievements. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s requested $245 million increase was whittled down to $50 million, with the proviso that the extra money be spent on technology, not Dodd-Frank implementation.