Yesterday, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan and his GOP cohorts in the House released their alternative budget. (This time with numbers!) The highlights are a freeze on discretionary spending, an utter absense of any common sense, and a chart from fantasy land. Here's what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had to say:
If you like this recession, you’ll love the Republican budget. And if their plan sounds familiar, it’s because it merely repeats the same mistakes of the past eight years – mistakes that have cost millions of Americans their jobs and plunged our nation into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
While the Democratic budget invests in health care, education and energy, the Republican budget will take cops off the streets and eliminate needed transportation projects that create jobs. While the Democratic budget cuts taxes for middle-class families, the Republican budget continues to give tax breaks disproportionately to multimillionaires and Big Oil companies. And while the Democratic budget is designed to help families keep their homes and get us out of this recession, the Republican budget will only make a bad situation worse.
What America needs now is a serious and responsible plan that invests in our future, cuts taxes for the middle class and cuts the Republican Deficit – which is exactly what the Democratic budget does.
In addition to Reid's statement, it's worth noting that the Republican budget proposes the sort of sustained policy error that could turn this Great Recession into an actual depression. In fact, America almost emerged from the Great Depression, only to be plunged back in by an attempt to balance the budget in the short term by cutting spending. Reid's statement may be too kind to the Republicans on one point - the GOP budget doesn't merely repeat the same mistakes of the past eight years, it's much, much worse at a time when the stakes are much higher.
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