The president has boasted that his deal with the GOP will usher in an era featuring “the lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president.”
Um, Mr. President, you blithering idiot, the US population in 1960 at the end of Ike’s term was 179,323,175. The population in 2010 was 308,745,538, or not quite twice as many people. And yet you’re proud of cutting domestic spending to levels consistent with half the current population?
Then there’s this, also from the first article linked:
But Melinda Pierce, a lobbyist with the Sierra Club, says the plan could choke off funding needed to enforce the bedrock environmental-protection laws on the books, including . . . the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. “Remember, the Eisenhower era was before we passed the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act,” Pierce says. “There just won’t physically be the funds available to protect drinking water and to ensure there’s clean air to breathe.”
Yet you think it’s a good thing that domestic spending is now back to levels before those bills were passed?
Mr. President, you and your political advisers are trying to put lipstick on a dirty ugly smelly pig.
The MoJo article is unintentionally hilaripus.
Start with the picture up top of the decrepit book repository for the Detroit public schools. WHO do they think has been running Detroit, Michigan public schools for decades? Republicans?
The hysterical, shrill, and hyperbolic freakout of the left in this country is wholly unwarranted, for two reasons (at least).
1) The bill concentrates spending power in a “super Congress”, which, functionally, acts as a joint committee whose recommendations can not be overridden. Even previous iterations of Congress lacked this feature. This strikes me as a way to let spending get even further out of control, not less.
2) Spending cuts are largely nebulous, in the future, and in any event out past 2012, which was the whole point. The debt limit has been raised, and will continue to be raised.
I note in passing that there is a great deal of sidebar whinging about Medicare cuts, and in fact a petition to stop them (and cuts to Medicaid and Social Security). Anyone in favor of HIPAA (unless they so objected at the time), which I presume Alan Grayson was then, has no leg to stand on.