Radio Smart Talk for Tuesday, March 8: Congress and the White House avoided a federal government shutdown by extending a deadline to have a budget in place. Republicans in Congress have proposed a spending plan that contains some $60 billion in cuts while Democrats support a proposal with about one tenth that amount of reductions. Either way, the two parties appear to be heading toward a test of wills.
The budget is one national issue Congress deals with every day. Republican Congressman Todd Platts will appear on Tuesday's Radio Smart Talk to answer your questions.
Listen to the program:
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Please ask my Congressman, Todd Platts, which specific programs that benefit his constituents he is willing to cut. Thanks you.
The following two statements have been checked by politifact.com so we can believe they are true:
1) The tax-cut compromise costs 62.5 billion dollars over two years.
2)The tax-cut compromise adds more than $797 billion to the deficit over two years.
Given these facts, the fact that the Republicans are so adamant in reducing the deficit, and the fact that many needed and extremely worthy programs are going to be cut in the Republican budget proposal, how can you justify the extension of the tax cuts??
(For example, I have heard that heating assistance for the poor will be cut. Does that mean that they have to decide between freezing and starving? So it comes down to the fact that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.)
Please comment on the Republican position that maintains tax breaks for the 0.1 % of Americans who have amassed over 90% of the wealth in this country. Trickle-down economics has been soundly debunked. In reality, one bipartisan decision would funnel over 700 billion into federal coffers to help solve our fiscal problems. Over 80% of the big 100 corporations pay NO taxes! Are these corporations helping us given all the perks the Republicans have given them? No, they have simply found ways to assuage their greed by sending more jobs overseas simply to make more money, more loopholes and more offshore locations to shelter their billions from tax law..
Please ask him how extending tax cuts to the top 1% -- the super rich -- is necessary for the economy, when this is the biggest deficit reduction move we could make.
Thank you.
Did you vote for the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 as well as the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq despite the fact that these items added trillions to the national debt? What does the data show about the number of jobs that were created by the Bush tax cuts?
It may be that he has been lying to himself..... I don't know.
He sounds sincere, yet it doesn't take a genius to recognize that by spending more and more each year on "defense" we are literally spending ourselves into national bankruptcy, weakening the nation, creating future enemies by the millions.
Platts has backed virtually every war allocation unquestioningly . He may have voted against the smaller specific military expenditures, like jet engines, but he votes every time for the wars.
This tells me he is either deluded, or that he knows that we are steering the Ship of State onto the financial shoals and he thinks that is the proper method of docking a boat.
For people like Platts to talk about reducing social programs through defunding them while at the same time spending HUGE amounts on the military is worse than ingenuous------it is blatant lying through the teeth.
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