A Reality-Based Budget is a People's Budget

The elephant in the room that both Democrats and Republicans are desperately ignoring and hoping you won't notice is this:

President Obama's proposed budget is far to the right of anything resembling a budget that acknowledges economic reality.

That reality demands a budget that eschews spending cuts in favor of massive deficit spending to create 10 million infrastructure jobs, returns tax rates for the rich to those of the Reagan administration, and saves hundreds of billions by ending the criminal clusterfucks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

And such a budget actually exists! It has been submitted as a bill on the floor of the House of Representatives, and has more than 50 cosponsors.

Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation:

Yet in many ways his approach continues to legitimize the inside-the-beltway consensus that spending cuts must lead the way toward achieving fiscal responsibility. Just as the Simpson-Bowles Commission proposes, for every $1 raised by closing tax loopholes on wealthy Americans, the President proposes $2 in spending cuts. Two-thirds of those cuts would come from education, health and other social programs, while only one-third comes from the military budget. While the president speaks eloquently of his vision of “shared sacrifice,” in reality it is still a budget that hits the poor and the middle-class hardest while wealthy Americans and the military are asked to sacrifice far less.

An alternative approach that deserves more attention is the “People’s Budget” offered by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC). It will be introduced in the House on Thursday and it is the strongest rebuke—in the form of an amendment—to the unconscionable “Ryan Budget” for FY 2012. It’s a budget that gives the people—according to poll after poll—exactly what they want (something which shouldn’t be a rarity in a healthy, vibrant democracy).

The People’s Budget lays out what a robust progressive agenda looks like. It protects an already frayed social net and promotes a progressive tax policy that makes millionaires, billionaires, and big corporations pay their fair share. It doesn’t stop at cutting the low-hanging fruit at the Pentagon, instead it brings our troops home from two wars that cost trillions of dollars and do nothing to make the US safer, and resets and rethinks what real security means in the 21st century.

“The People’s Budget generates a government surplus by 2021 by closing tax loopholes, ending corporate giveaways to oil, gas and nuclear entities, bringing our troops home, and creating jobs that expand the American tax base,” said Representative Raúl Grijalva, co-chair of the CPC. “This is a sensible solution that listens to what the American people have said about where our budget priorities should be.”

SNIP

President Obama’s speech this week starts to move the budget debate in the right direction. But it’s up to the people and allies inside Congress to take the struggle to the next level, turning the tide on our democracy deficit which has produced—as Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently put it—a country “of the one percent, for the one percent, and by the one percent.”

Read the whole thing.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?