Tuesday, July 20, 2010

How government works

Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obey (D-WI), explains how appropriations for the peasant class and budget negotiations work in this man's America. On education and government cheese:
We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get.

Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.
And these are supposedly the liberal communist socialists who are going to drown the American ideal in a bathtub full of government handouts. Karl Marx scoffs at their contempt for the proles.

With battles like this against a Democratic White House, it's hard to see why Obey would want to retire. Oh, no wait, it isn't. This seems to be the kind of stuff that would erode your soul over the course of four decades in Congress.

Ah well, hopefully the next guy in charge of the House Appropriations Committee won't be so concerned with poor people in a lousy economy eating. Or education. Seeing as he'll probably be a Republican, I think we can safely assume that to be the case.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have very willfully been ignoring ignoring the consequences of a Republican majority, but reading your post gave me a horrible flash.

If Obama has behaved this timidly with House and Senate majorities, I shudder to think that he will be throwing even lower.

We are well and truly fucked.

But the good news is that since he'll be suggesting Republicans do what they want, they'll be busy so dismantling the federal government they won't have time to start impeachment hearings.

I think I'm going to take up drinking.