Bad Deeds for 7-16-2010

 

Top House Republican Wants Ban on All New Federal Regulations – House GOP Leader John Boehner said he supports a ban on all new federal regulations, after meeting Friday with business lobbyists. Boehner and Illinois Republicans Peter Roskam and Aaron Schock convened a group of nearly 20 Washington-based business leaders who represent various sectors – such as home builders, retailers and manufacturers – as part of their “America Speaking Out” initiative to gather ideas for the GOP legislative agenda. Republicans did not allow media coverage of their meeting.

This is a Republican agenda written for lobbyists by lobbyists. It’s basically a return to Bush policies under a GOP-controlled Congress. Only if you think the financial crisis is an ‘ant,’ would you think it a good thing for the country, as House Republicans do, to put forward the George Bush agenda on steroids, where Wall Street reform would be repealed, jobs would be outsourced overseas, and the Bush tax cuts would be extended for the super rich without being paid for.

(Translation: Republicans want business to be free to use lead in toys, put rotting Chinese drywall in houses, and gush as much oil into the oceans as they please. – JLV)

 

Boehner Wants Wall Street to Run Wild Again – Boehner’s call to stop new government regulations comes a day after he called for the repeal of the financial reform bill just hours before it was approved by the Senate. First Boehner wants to take away working families health care benefits. Now he also wants to return Wall Street and the big banks back to the power they had when they destroyed our economy. It could be no clearer for working families in 2010 that there is a clear choice between continuing to move forward to make the economy work for everyone again or go backwards to the Bush years where corporations and Wall Street ran wild.”

 

Republicans Are Killing Jobs To Save Their Own – To advance their political prospects, Republicans are pushing a job-killing agenda that America can’t afford: protecting tax breaks for CEOs who ship jobs overseas, while blocking tax cuts for small businesses and middle-class families. Democrats have run into nothing but a solid wall of Republican opposition at every turn,” Manley said, “even for common-sense measures like providing a safety net for Americans while they look for work, cutting taxes for small businesses and closing loopholes for CEOs that ship jobs overseas.

Economist Mark Zandi, a former adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), has said failing to reauthorize unemployment benefits would in fact endanger the economic recovery, and that Congress should not offset the cost of the benefits because doing so would diminish their stimulative effect. “The odds that the economy will slip back into the recession are still well below even,” Zandi said. “But if Congress is unable to provide this help, those odds will rise and become uncomfortably high.”

If they can stop the recovery from occurring, if they can create as much pain as possible, the cynical view is people will be angry and either drop out and not vote at all or vote against those in the majority. Don’t let it happen.

 

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Spreads Misinformation About Tax Cuts – Among the U.S. Chamber of Commerce proposals to stimulate job growth was a call for the Bush-era tax cuts, set to expire at the end of this year, to be extended. But many economic theorists say that, far from stimulating sustained economic growth, the Bush tax cuts widened the gap between rich and poor and created the strain on consumers that ended in the real estate market collapse of recent years.

The Congressional Budget Office has released reports showing that the tax cuts, enacted in 2001 and 2003, have contributed significantly to the US’s budget deficit. In at least one year since the cuts were enacted, the federal government would have run a surplus had the tax cuts not existed.
Extending the tax cuts for all earners would cost the federal government an estimated $2.2 trillion over 10 years; extending only the portion on people earning more than $250,000 would cost an estimated $678 billion over the same time period.

 

The NRA Protects A Potential Serial Killer – What does the leadership of the National Rifle Association have to do to finally convince anyone paying attention that they are extremist, self-interested, and devoid of all principle? Here’s an idea: they could blatantly lie about the law in an attempt to block authorities in Daytona Beach, Florida from accessing information that would help law enforcement catch a potential serial killer.

Oh wait, they’ve already done that.

Regards,

Jim