The "People's Budget" is the liberals' answer to House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan's 2012 budget proposal, which is "leading us down a road to ruin," according to caucus co-chairmen Reps. Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison. The "People's Budget," Grijalva and Ellison claim, would eliminate the deficit in just 10 years (Ryan's plan would take more than 25 years) while expanding, not cutting, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. "This budget saves the American people from the recklessness of the Republican majority," Grijalva and Ellison write in a letter to Rep. Chris Van Hollen, senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
Interesting enough, if you google “The People’s Budget”, you’ll find a wikipedia link to a 1909 British budget proposal that similarly introduced “many unprecedented taxes on the wealthy and radical social welfare programmes…” Hmmm. Anyway, here’s the details of the current proposal in a nutshell:
- Increase payroll taxes. Both sides.
- Reintroduce the tax hikes on small businesses that were threatened last year.
- Impose new tax hikes on highest bracket, reaching 47%.
- New taxes on foreign earnings.
- “Crisis responsibility fee.” Which sounds better than “Soak stockholders of banks for accepting TARP money tax.”
- “Financial speculation tax.” Which sounds better than “the twenty-first century equivalent of the Stamp Act:” it’s a tax on electronic stock transactions.
- $1,450,000,000,000 in new spending.
- Public option.
- Cuts to military.
Referring back to York’s piece, which elaborates on every Marxist spreading-of-the-wealth ploy in this proposal; rest assured, if Obama could, he’d go right along with this one in a heartbeat! Unfortunately, he can’t for obvious reasons of overwhelming rejection. So here’s where the ‘strategy’ that I mentioned earlier comes in, “Some strategists will argue that the "People's Budget" is good for Obama because it lets him position himself responsibly between what he will call the excesses of Ryan and the Progressive Caucus.” Where York reaches the conclusion that this makes Obama’s job tougher, I’d argue the opposite: this perfectly sets up his strategy that even with all the hoopla and drama we’re sure to witness, all Democrats will eventually fall right in line with the President and hope to sucker in enough Republicans to pass his proposal over Ryan’s…and at the current pace, it wouldn’t be surprising at all if the establishment efforts to compromise were led by the House leadership.
We’ll wait until tomorrow to see what Obama’s proposal entails…
