"We trimmed the fat, fried the bacon and milked the sacred cows," Nelson said as debate began.According to several senators, the revised version of the plan axed money for school construction and nearly $90 million for fighting pandemic flu, among other things.
Thank God that someone worth $10 million was able to cut "sacred cows" like school construction and flu prevention! Whatever would we do without such guardians of the public interest! More:
In the end, there were $96 billion of cuts - whittling the Senate bill to $780 billion - with about $50 billion of the cuts coming from the Collins-Nelson proposal. Most of the cuts came in school construction, teacher funding and higher education.A $15,000 tax credit for new home purchases, which was proposed by Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), remains in the measure.All the final details have not yet been released, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in an evening floor speech that Democrats "had to swallow real hard" to accept many of the cuts.
We don't need no education!
There is a very cute stereotype that bloggers (all one hundred million of us) are rich white kids from the suburbs. However, the truth is that of the four people in my "family unit" (me, Natasha, my brother and my sister-in-law who live n the apartment above me) two of us have lost our jobs in the last three months. Both of the jobs lost were in education related fields--so, yey that there is now virtually no education funding is in the stimulus! Work is spotty, and health insurance is spottier. Unless the COBRA benefits for the unemployed are reinstated in the conference report, we will have multiple people in our family unit without health insurance, too.
I've heard that you are supposed to get more conservative when you get older. The older I get, the more I am convinced that "moderates" like Susan Collins and Ben Nelson--so beloved by the media--are simply rich corporate hacks who seek to destroy the American middle class by subtler means than the likes of Bush.
This is a bill that literally hits home. I have nothing but antipathy for the fudruckers who sought these cuts. When we kick their ass on the electoral field in two, four of six years, the media will undoubtedly call us ideological extremists taking out our psychological frustrations on decent moderates who keep American civility afloat. The good thing is that the voters who get rid of them will know the real reason. People like Susan Collins and Ben Nelosn are destroying lives. At the very least, they deserve to be out of a job as a result.
Let's fix this in the conference. This is an open thread on the stimulus.
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[Source: RETROGRESSING - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]
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