The leaders in the Republican party are constantly complaining that the Democrats are trying to start a class war with all their comments about how the rich are getting a free ride in the U.S. But what they don’t say is that they are doing what they accuse their opponents of but in a different area. They are constantly trying to incite voters against the older generations saying that we have gobbled up all the resources and left the debt to others.
I hear comments on this blog and in almost daily news articles that seniors are gobbling up the healthcare dollars on themselves and there is very little left for others. That is simply pitting one group of citizens against another. In reality the U.S., if we follow the examples of the rest of the developed world, should be easily able to provide quality healthcare for all its citizens. There is no need to say if one group has healthcare then another can’t have it. Beside being untrue it is very obnoxious.
But this is not the only place where my conservative friends seem to lack compassion. Their current budget that just passed the house reneges on the promise of 10% pentagon cuts because of the super committee’s failure to come to any agreements. Instead their budget shows no decease in military spending. They want to get the deficit under control by cutting spending on things like feeding poor kids a free breakfast so they can have at least one nourishing meal a day. They want to cut spending on HeadStart which provides pre-school opportunities to kids of single parents below the poverty scale. They want to cut food stamps to the poorest of the poor.
I simply cannot understand the process my conservative friends go through to justify these cuts in place of keeping their promise to reduce our extremely bloated military budgets. It is beyond my beliefs. If anything their budgets should justifiably incite a class warfare in this country. It seems the compassion for anything besides the super-rich and the military contractors is quickly disappearing from the Republican party and that is very depressing to me. I dream of the day when the voters will finally say “enough is enough” but I just don’t see that day coming anytime soon….
RJ's Corner 
It really is baffling. The greed and corruption spreads like a virus. We recently watched our Minnesota state legislature pass a bill to build a new Vikings football stadium commiting about 500 million dollars and numerous other concessions to the team. We watched the debates on local cable and heard a number of honest common sense arguments (mostly Democrats) against all this expense, but in the end the deals were struck in a closed door “conference committee” meeting. The same people benefit from this deal that always do…the rich and powerful. And we just built a Twins baseball stadium a couple of years ago using sales taxes and other tricks. In the meantime the state has deferred payments to the schools for the last two or three years and won’t pay them back because they need the money to keep the state government running. We had the legislature ready to shut down the state government over disagreements and money shortfalls last session. They will probably do it again next time. It’s crazy…yet now we will have a first class – state of the art stadium for football. Oh, and did I mention….a large part of the funding will come from an expansion of gambling and electronic pulltabs! Of course this is risky business so there’s a backup plan – guess who will pay then?
Depressing indeed.
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We share very similar State histories. Here in Indiana we just finished a new football stadium. I don’t watch sports at all but I think either the last Super Bowl or the one before that was played there. Mitch Daniels our governor says he is paying for it with lottery funds and he also sold off the State owned toll road to an Austrian company resulting in many billions of dollars lost in future revenues.
He also, like Wisconsin, disbanded bargaining rights for State employees with hardly a wimper for Hoosiers. Like Minnesota our education budgets have been slashed to the bone. Yes, it is depressing indeed…..
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