The Republican leadership was at it again today, cutting that wasteful spending from the Congressional budget. The were almost thwarted by moderates in their own party when late yesterday, the House of Representatives failed to pass a health care, education, and labor spending bill. That law would have cut spending from such wasteful programs like the Center for Disease Control (it’s not like health experts are worried about another flu pandemic or anything!), Head Start (get out of pre-school and get a job!), job training (this is, after all, why God gave us India) and drug abuse programs (isn’t that what prison is for?). Those wussy moderates, however, didn’t have the backbone to pass a bill aimed at cutting those kind of wasteful programs! (Although to be fair, they weren’t all opposing the bill for bleeding-heart liberal reasons. To quote the New York Times: “Bill Thomas, Republican of California, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said he objected because of an unexpected acceleration in the timetable for halting Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement for sexual impotence drugs.” The poor really don’t need education, job training, or drug abuse programs; they need Viagra.)
Thankfully, our conservative Republican “waste-busting” heroes came to the rescue today, when they passed $50 billion in cuts to such wasteful and unnecessary programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and student loans. Why should good, hard-working Americans have their tax dollars wasted on such obvious frivolity as feeding the poor, curing the sick, or providing education for our children? This is a faithful Christian nation after all; if God wanted them healthy, wealthy, or wise, He would have made them that way! Also, we should all be grateful that none of the truly important programs in the budget have gotten cut. All of those nice big road and bridge projects in that transportation bill last year are looking good. And while Congress bowed to pressure to cut funding to the two infamous “bridge to nowhere” projects in Alaska, you needn’t worry; the good, hard-working Alaskan people are still getting their half of a billion dollars, it just isn’t earmarked for those particular projects anymore.
In all seriousness, though, this is just the kind of thing that I’ve said before: when Congress cuts the budget, they very rarely cut out pork, and almost always cut broad social programs aimed at those who don’t vote in large numbers, in this case college students and the poor. It’s American politics 101. Congressmen win elections by providing tangible jobs, tax breaks, and social programs to the working and upper-classes, and that means big, expensive projects aimed at particular districts. The only ones who win elections by providing government assistance to poor, urban neighborhoods are those Congressmen who represent poor, urban neighborhoods. There just aren’t that many of those kind of Congressmen and they are almost all Democrats, which means they wield almost no power in a Republican controlled legislature.
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