Does the GOP Care?

I am watching the efforts of the GOP to get our deficit under control with a sense of sadness.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s a good and necessary thing to spend within one’s means, and to have such an amazing deficit is scary. I keep thinking that it’s the Bush tax cuts that helped get us to this point.

But all I hear from toe GOP lawmakers is that we have to cut spending. There has been nothing said about making corporations pay their fair share of taxes, and I don’t get it. Even less, I don’t appreciate it.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey wants to cut spending on Medicaid, that government arm which allows poor people, many of whom are either old or very young, to get health care. I heard a report that a woman, 56 years old with multiple health problems, will lose her health care coverage at the end of July of this year.

Why can’t the GOP see that cutting programs and benefits for “the least of these” is not only wrong but immoral? It is as immoral as allowing, maybe even encouraging, huge and wealthy corporations to find loopholes so that they can avoid paying taxes while realizing bigger and bigger profits.

The rich, then, get richer and the poor get poorer …and dumped on.

I have heard that funds for education and housing and all kinds of programs that help the poor are in trouble, and yet, I hear nothing from the GOP that says they care about the people who will be so negatively affected.

If a country ignores its underclasses, trouble is sure to follow. People can only be ignored and trounced upon for so long before they rise up. We like to think of ourselves as exempt from that kind of thing, but economic oppression brings bad results, wherever it is practiced.

While we cut programs for the poor, and allow wealthy corporations to go tax free, reluctantly even discuss cutting spending in defense. The wars we are fighting in Iran and Afghanistan (and now, Libya) are costing us billions of dollars a day! Surely, someone sees something wrong in that snapshot?

“The American dream” is becoming more and more elusive for more and more people, and the ranks of the poor and working poor are swelling. Do our lawmakers know this and if they do, do they care?

It would seem not, as the shouts for spending cuts grow louder and louder, pushing more and more people to the margins of a society which is becoming more and more plutocratic every day.

Just a candid observation.