Monday, October 17, 2005

Ready For The Next Round Of Reverberating Katrina Body Blows? This Week They're Coming From Congressional Republicans.

The arch-conservatives in the Republican Party, lead by an outfit called the "Republican Study Committee," is set to hack and slash domestic programs up to $50 billion in order to pay for Katrina relief. Pushed by the RSC, Congressional Republicans are now moving to make massive cuts to Medicaid and food stamps. They are also posturing themselves to make wholesale, across-the-board cuts to other domestic programs. If I were taking odds, I would bet that Salemtown's Community Block Grant gets hit hard by the rightwing gutting of domestic programs if the arch-conservatives succeed. At the same time, they are considering cutting $70 billion in taxes for the rich.

This is simply a matter of taking from programs that support the more vulnerable in society and our local communities to give to New Orleans because Congress failed a long time ago to front the money to make the Big Easy's levees safer. So, Republicans are now making up by taking revenues from local communities to give to a single local community, while cutting the taxes of the rich.

If you thought higher gas and utility prices were the only cascading effects of Katrina, just wait until the Republican habit of raising revenues for the rich and sticking it to everybody else gets rolling. Their brightest idea in Katrina's aftermath seems to be to divide and conquer.

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