Often the most conservative states are the least family-friendly. The National Partnership for Women and Families made this map report card to show which states have the worst policies for families and new parents. So much for “traditional family values”!
(Source: nationalpartnership.org)
(via think-progress)
But don’t call it class warfare, or you’ll hurt the Republican Party’s feelings!
Republican Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan is trying to hide just how devastating his budget plans would be for seniors on Medicare. Recently he falsely claimed House Republicans “passed a budget to save Medicare.” The reality is exactly the opposite.
Experts say the budget Ryan proposed last year would have ended Medicare as we know it, and now Ryan has pledged that this year’s House Republican budget will be the same as last year’s — one that ends Medicare.
In fact, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says that elderly people would pay more for health care under the Republican plan.
Too many seniors are already struggling - they can’t afford a plan that could almost double their health care costs.
Get Your Facts Straight, Paul Ryan, and Stop Trying to Gut Medicare!
Not exactly a fiscally responsible move, is it?
Democrats want to pay for their bill by closing a tax break loophole for millionaires and billionaires, which the GOP opposes. Instead, the GOP wants to take money out of a preventative health care fund. 7.4 million people will have to pay an additional $1,000 a year in interest starting in July if the Senate GOP continues to block Democratic efforts on the matter.
Tom Toles, “Bushonomics 2.0”
![The GOP’s Dead-End Path to Prosperity
The Ryan budget will not only fail to do what it claims, but in most cases will do just the opposite. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it, the budget is “the most fraudulent in American history…”
“[T]his budget is Robin Hood in reverse,” CBPP President Robert Greenstein says. “It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget…”
Lowering incomes, removing insurance, increasing individual burdens and boosting insecurity does not provide most Americans more freedom, but imprisons them in economic anxiety.
Greater inequality also increases illness and mortality, reduces social and economic mobility, lowers long-term economic growth, undermines democracy and contributes to higher crime rates. And recently a team of researchers, mainly from the University of California, Berkeley, found through seven different studies that upper-class individuals are more likely to behave unethically – lying, stealing, cheating – than the less affluent. Such behavior may be a major contributor to their wealth, but it also demonstrates that once they are wealthy, people are much less moral, and much more powerful. It’s a message apparently lost on right-wing Christians.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4bx5wY6tb1qztsh3o1_1280.jpg)
The GOP’s Dead-End Path to Prosperity
The Ryan budget will not only fail to do what it claims, but in most cases will do just the opposite. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it, the budget is “the most fraudulent in American history…”
“[T]his budget is Robin Hood in reverse,” CBPP President Robert Greenstein says. “It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget…”
Lowering incomes, removing insurance, increasing individual burdens and boosting insecurity does not provide most Americans more freedom, but imprisons them in economic anxiety.
Greater inequality also increases illness and mortality, reduces social and economic mobility, lowers long-term economic growth, undermines democracy and contributes to higher crime rates. And recently a team of researchers, mainly from the University of California, Berkeley, found through seven different studies that upper-class individuals are more likely to behave unethically – lying, stealing, cheating – than the less affluent. Such behavior may be a major contributor to their wealth, but it also demonstrates that once they are wealthy, people are much less moral, and much more powerful. It’s a message apparently lost on right-wing Christians.
On May 10, the U.S. House of Representatives approved far-reaching legislation to cut $310 billion from the deficit over the next 10 years.
About 25 percent of that cut, or $77 billion, comes directly from programs that assist poor and working Americans, while the military is protected from reductions, and tax breaks for upper-income people are preserved.
The programs cut include Medicaid and children’s health, hospitals that serve the low-income and uninsured, food stamps, school meals, a child tax credit for working immigrants, social services for the elderly such as Meals on Wheels and programs for abused or neglected children…
Why are we balancing the budget on the backs of the poor? We know that investments in programs that give a boost to poor children and working people and provide opportunities for job-training and education have a huge monetary return down the line.
This budget hits hard the people who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, to put food on their tables, to send their kids to college. Meanwhile oil moguls get subsidies and the 1 percent richest Americans get tax breaks.
“Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.”
