[Associated Press]
"What is more, it turns out that many of the cuts officially unveiled on Tuesday are illusory. Almost $18 billion — just less than half — involve simply mopping up pools of unused money spread across the budget. While still counting as cuts, the money from those pools can be used to shore up day-to-day agency budgets and other programs like health research. Admittedly, those cuts don't reduce the deficit.
There's a huge chunk of money here that is ... spending that wasn't about to go out the door, so the impact is going to be smaller than we anticipated based on what the purported size of the cuts were,' said Democratic budget expert Scott Lilly of the left-leaning Center for American Progress."
The bill is just the first round. Republicans are moving to pass a broader budget plan this Friday that calls for cuts across the budget — including Medicare and Medicaid — and a deeper round of cuts to apply to the agency budgets covered in the pending bill covering the next six months of government spending.
In the next round, it will be more difficult to protect programs like heating aid for the poor and subsidies for money-losing air travel to rural airports. But plenty of lawmakers and interest groups will try.
Like I said before, politics is about the appearance of doing something when nothing has actually been done. The next round of cuts will impact none other than the working class poor, i.e minorities. Isn't that something? In order to make the economy work, Republican's foolishly believe, we should give tax cuts to the top 1% of American's, who control 40% of the country's wealth. However, when it's time to tighten our belt the most needy, minorities, who are impacted. Wouldn't it make sense that if we provided jobs and better pay they would be less dependent upon the government assistance.
In the poll, those surveyed: [USA TODAY]
• Are split over whether there should be significant additional cuts in domestic spending: 47% say no, 45% yes. On this issue, there is a yawning divide between the parties.Democrats by 2-to-1 oppose more cuts; Republicans by 2-to-1 support them.
• Overwhelmingly oppose making major changes to Medicare. By 2-to-1, they support minor changes or none at all to control costs, rather than major changes or a complete overhaul. Even a third of Republicans say the government should not try to control the costs of Medicare.
• Favor imposing higher taxes on families with household incomes of $250,000 and above, as Obama has endorsed: 59% support the idea, 37% oppose it.
Still, the divide on the issue could make Republicans less likely to compromise on it. While 78% of Democrats favor higher taxes on top earners, 60% of Republicans oppose it.
The survey of 1,004 adults, taken Monday, has a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.
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