Budget Conferees under Pressure to Strike Budget Deal: Congress remains at gridlock over how to fix the phony deficit crisis. With pressure to further slash government spending to reduce the deficit, which will throw even more people out of work and damage the already depressed economy, Congress digs themselves into a hole with each option more bleak than the next. While playing down the possibility of another government shutdown, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who co-chairs the Budget Conference Committee with his Senate counterpart Patty Murray, earlier this week said either the conference committee would come up with a deal or Congress would approve another stopgap bill to fund the government at the current levels. Ryan and Murray are still far apart on whether to ask the rich and corporations to pay their fair share of taxes or to cut benefits for the seniors and the disabled. Passing another short-term spending bill means keeping in place the current sequester and other devastating cuts. Even though sequestration is not popular among lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been telling budget negotiators to keep it, never mind that keeping sequestration in place through 2014 would cost the country up to 1.6 million jobs. His preferred plan would shift the cuts from the Defense Department to other government programs – education, transportation, research, social safety net, etc., – whose funding will reach the historic low by 2017. Lawmakers, many of whom claim job creation is their top priority, continue to fuel the fake deficit fire even when economists agree that slashing spending kills jobs and hurts the economic recovery.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 15:11:11 +0000
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