Friday, March 27, 2009

a budget with no numbers

I didn't watch the GOP's rollout of their "budget," but from how it sounds, I'm imagining John Boehner and Mitch McConnell hopping out of a clown car on the way to the podium. From Ezra Klein:
Bush, famously, described his first budget by saying, "It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." Indeed it was, and did. This isn't. There are no numbers. Let me repeat that: The Republican budget proposal does not say how much money they would raise, or spend. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a "budget" as "an estimate of income and expenditure for a set period of time." This is not a budget. It talks about balancing the budget but doesn't explain how. It advocates tax cuts but doesn't estimate their costs. It promises to cut programs but doesn't name them. The threat going around the Capitol is that some impish Democratic chairman will ask the CBO to try and score the Republican proposal.
...
The Republican proposal, as you might expect, doesn't actually have a health care plan. But it does have this: "Republicans will be on the side of quality versus mediocrity, affordability versus unsustainable debt, and freedom of care versus bureaucrats in control. And we will be on the side of patients, doctors, and the American people." They are also in favor of good things rather than bad things, moving forward rather than going backwards, the hobbits rather than the orcs, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

I have to keep beating this drum until they do something, anything to prove me wrong: the Republicans just are not serious about governing. An honest, sober, diligent personality could really take the administration to task on a number of issues (the knee-jerk dismissal of nationalizing banks and reluctance to overturn Bush era policies on secrecy are two that come to mind), but these Republicans just don't have anything productive to contribute.

1 comment:

Mr. Dickerson said...

“We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.”

Kang in '12