This is definitely worth reading.If you're having a bad day, I highly encourage you to spend some quality time with the Republican budget proposal. It's reads like what would happen if The Onion put together a budget. "Area Man Releases Proposal for 2010 Federal Spending Priorities." (Though, to paraphrase William F. Buckley, it turns out that I'd prefer a federal budget written by an area man than the first six names on the House Republican Leadership roster.)That's right, Republicans have produced a "budget" with no numbers in it. As in, how much they propose spending, on what, and how they're going to pay for it. But what else would we expect from the party that, under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, ran up trillions of dollars in budget deficits as they pursued their supply side/trickle down/Laffer curve fantasies? Not much.
Bush, famously, described his first budget by saying, "It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." Indeed it was, and did. This isn't. There are no numbers. Let me repeat that: The Republican budget proposal does not say how much money they would raise, or spend. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a "budget" as "an estimate of income and expenditure for a set period of time." This is not a budget...
Anyway, read Ezra Klein's entire takedown here, and enjoy his diagram of the Republican "budget molecule." I can't wait to hear Eric Cantor try to explain that one, maybe how it relates to what he learned from Britney Spears? Heh.
