House Speaker John Boehner has spent more than a month without doing any legislative work to create jobs. Now, he’s telling middle class workers who might lose their job upon passage of the House Republican budget, “So be it!” That GOP budget will take teachers out of the classroom, scientists out of the labs, and cops off the street. Is that your vision of America?
If you’ve looked up the word DICHOTOMY in a dictionary lately, you should now know that it can be clearly defined with a picture of our new speaker of the House. For those who may be unfamiliar with that term, it means: division into two usually contradictory parts, opinions, or actions. On one hand, Rep. Boehner is saying, “It’s all about jobs!” He implies that he and the GOP are all about creating them and that everything the Democrats are for, and have done, have resulted in nothing but “job-killing” policies and programs. However, if you listen closely, and analyze what it is they’re saying and proposing, it’s not the Democrats who are out there to “kill” jobs, it’s the GOP and their plutocratic friends.
The evidence? HR1 — Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act of 2011.
This onerous bill practically guts the Department of Education,
- Obliterates all training/retraining efforts for the unemployed and displaced (treating those Americans as if they were mere “throw-aways”,
- Prevents ANY monies from being used to create/enforce ANY regulations related to greenhouse gasses, prohibits the closure of Yucca Mountain,
- Drastically rips out aid-to-states monies darn near across the board,
- Rescinds monies for “the fence”,
- Defunds just about any hope rural America ever had of being able to get broadband internet coverage,
- Prohibits the use of any funding to implement the Health Care Reform Act,
- Seriously reduces funding for the National Institutes of Health
- Completely defunds AmeriCorps, NPR and the Public Broadcasting System
… but hey, there were some winners too … the nuclear weapon program, for one … that’s on the rise. Does that mean the GOP wants to start a nuclear war with Iran?
I took the bulk of the last three days to go through HR1, line-by-line and compare it to previously approved appropriations bills. You can see the results of that analysis, in spreadsheet form, by clicking here. If you really want to verify my analysis or want to review the original bills, you can find links to all of the relevant approved appropriations legislation passed by the 111th Congress by clicking this link.
People across this nation want “smaller” government? Do they think government is just bricks and mortar? It’s also “people” … and the jobs those people have that pays the bills … People who support the economy. We can’t solve our nation’s problems merely by “cutting the budget across the board” … those cuts need to be strategic with an eye on the future. If anything, the GOP’s proposed budget has told us what and who they value through the choice they made in “what” and “who” they don’t value.
The GOP keeps screaming their mantra … “JOBS, JOBS, JOBS.” The assumption was that they were for “creating” jobs. Well, they’ve just proven that not to be the case. They’re going after jobs on a monumental pace, not to create them, but to obliterate them!
As expected, two of the biggest losers in this appropriations bill are the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Department of Education (DE) —
The DE is the smallest cabinet-level department and as of Sept 2010, had only 4,536 employees on its payroll. And … despite what you’ve been hearing, the federal government and DE are NOT heavily involved in determining curricula or educational standards. Determining curricula taught in your local classrooms is the responsibility of state and local school districts. Even if we look at NCLB (No Child Left Behind), curricula/standards decisions still come back to the States and local school districts. NCLB supports standards-based education reform, based on the belief that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education. The Act requires States to develop assessments in basic skills to be given to all students in certain grades, if those States are to receive federal funding for schools. The Act does not assert a national achievement standard; instead, standards are set by each individual state.
The primary functions of the DE are to formulate and administer federal funding programs involving education, such as college financial aid, collect data on US schools, and to enforce federal educational laws regarding privacy and civil rights. So, if the GOP eliminates the DE, does that mean they intend to do away with student financial-aid loan programs? Okay … what kind of criteria might we expect the banks to use in determining whether to grant or deny a loan for a child’s education? You can most likely safely bet your last dollar that it won’t be based on “financial need” … but instead on the parent’s current ability to pay. Thus, if you and your kids are middle class and below, don’t expect to be able to get a loan to help your kids get a college education.
If the GOP’s budget proposal succeeds in passing, you’d see a 19% cut in education funds for the disadvantaged, 41% cut in School Improvement programs, a 36% cut in funds for Innovation and Improvement, a 51% cut in funds to Safe Schools and a 73% cut in funds for Special Education. But, if that wasn’t enough for you, they also rescinded ALL unobligated previously approved appropriations ($986,433,851) for education that they could have brought forward to fill some of the holes the GOP blasted through the Education budget. Given that Governor Sandoval is playing the same games with the State Education budgets, I sure hope you weren’t hoping for any grants from the Federal Government, the GOP “killed” them and a large number of jobs that were associated with those funding cuts.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) —
The EPA is an agency of the federal government that was proposed by President Richard Nixon. It began operation on Dec. 3, 1970. As of September 2010, the EPA employed 18,742 people whose primary responsibilities are for setting and enforcing national standards under a variety of environmental laws, in consultation with state, tribal, and local governments. It delegates some permitting, monitoring, and enforcement responsibility to U.S. states and Native American tribes.
These are the people who are responsible for ensuring our air is safe to breath, our water safe to drink, that raw sewage isn’t flowing down the stream or river running through our town, and that many other chemicals and pollutants aren’t lying about for any of us to come across. So what’s their logic in eliminating this Agency? Are they saying that business & industry can regulate themselves and that will work just fine? We all know that’s simply not the case, else why would we have created that agency in the first place? Is their logic that it should be relegated to each state, that it’s each state’s right and responsibility to do what they think is appropriate? Does that mean that Nevada, Oregon and Arizona better get ready to build parking lots at their border with California, because the cars people are driving in other states won’t meet California’s emission standards and won’t be permitted to be driven in California? Their logic defies me on this one, unless that is, they’re endorsing the potential pollution of our environment by businesses who want to rape and pillage our environment and not have to pay the true cost for the profits they’ll be able to reap.
If you look at the analysis, you’ll see that they cut $2.25B (45%) in State and Tribal assistance grants for Clean Water and Drinking Water projects, and they completely defunded a new ‘green, high performance” building for the EPA that would have been constructed in Las Vegas (and thus ‘jobs’), and they added a provision to the appropriations bill that prohibits the EPA from using appropriated budget funds for implementing, administering or enforcing any rules or guidance pertaining to green house gases. They also rescinded the availability of $300M in previously unobligated EPA balances. Look for polluters to go rampantly unchecked over the next two years should this budget reign the day.
The bottom line is, that the GOP keeps saying it’s all about the jobs, jobs, jobs. Well I wish they would better define “IT’S.” My question to them is just exactly what do you think “IT’S” truly about? Creating jobs … or obliterating them?