The GOP Welfare State

Believe it or not, I am actually an independent when it comes to politics. However, since this Bush character and his class of idiots have been in the White House, I have found no reason to support anything that they have done or that they try to do.

Now we have the Republicans trying to cut $4.9 billion from education, training, employment and other services (Reuters)

... the White House’s five-year plan foresees $66 billion in cuts to Medicare, a program for the elderly, and $12 billion in cuts for Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor.

Reuters: Spratt said Bush’s plan projects a $61 billion budget surplus in 2012 while assuming only $50 billion in war costs in 2009 and none after that. This year, fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could total around $170 billion.

Bush’s budget also does not factor in permanently fixing a quirk in the U.S. tax code so that middle-class taxpayers do not get hit with tax bills designed for the wealthy. The fix could cost around $1 trillion.

Let’s look at where some of the cash for the Iraq war reconstruction has gone to, or not.

Seattle Times: Waxman wanted to know how the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) could have shipped $12 billion in cash from the Federal Reserve in New York to Baghdad and handed it over to Iraqi ministries with only the sketchiest accounting controls. The cash, all 363 tons of it, was shrink-wrapped into $400,000 bricks and carried on C-130 cargo planes.

"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?" Waxman asked. And with limited oversight, he said, "we have no way of knowing whether the cash shipped into the Green Zone ended up in enemy hands."

The special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, said in a January 2005 report that $8.8 billion was unaccounted for after being given to the Iraqi ministries.

If they’d have dropped me just one of those bricks I could have spent it better than the Republicans have and I would have had positive results!

Bush seems to forget that he doesn’t work for the Iraqis or the oil companies (?) or Israel or anyone else but the American people. At least he does, for now!

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