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In spite of Speaker Johnson’s (George Carlin would argue there’s never been a more appropriate name for what he and his majority does in practise) mob’s attempts at disguising their true priorities, it doesn’t exactly take someone of the calibre of Sherlock Holmes to figure out that the words that are coming out of their mouths don’t exactly match the reality of the budget blueprint recently passed by the House.

If you listen to the Republicans, they are absolutely adamant that they will not cut Medicaid or Medicare and will not touch Social Security or other social safety net programmes.

If you look at Title II of HR Concurrent Resolution 14 on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2025, it tells a very different story:

• (1) COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE.—The Committee on Agriculture shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction to reduce the deficit by not less than $230,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2025 through 2034.
• (3) COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND WORKFORCE.—The Committee on Education and Workforce shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction to reduce the deficit by not less than $330,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2025 through 2034.
• (4) COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE.—The Committee on Energy and Commerce shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction to reduce the deficit by not less than $880,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2025 through 2034.

In budget speak, those are instructions to the committees to reduce their spending in order to meet a desired target of $2T of deficit reduction. The only chance they have of coming close to that number is to massively cut the big ticket items in the jurisdiction of those committees which would be SNAP (food stamps), student loans and grants, and Medicaid respectively. Nothing else in those committee’s jurisdictions comes even close to the funding cuts that are demanded as part of the resolution so anyone that tries telling you they’re not massively cutting these programmes that primarily benefit lower income Americans that Republicans have hated for decades is absolutely lying to your face and expecting you to swallow that lie hook, line, and sinker.

Of course, look who are the big winners in this budget resolution and I doubt you’d be surprised that the fattest budgets get even more corpulent:

• (2) COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES.—The Committee on Armed Services shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction that increase the deficit by not more than $100,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2025 through 2034.
• (6) COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY.—The Committee on Homeland Security shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction that increase the deficit by not more than $90,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2025 through 2034.
• (7) COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY.—The Committee on the Judiciary shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction that increase the deficit by not more than $110,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2025 through 2034.
• (11) COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS.—The Committee on Ways and Means shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction that increase the deficit by not more than $4,500,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2025 through 2034.

That last one in particular is where the Republicans make their true intentions absolutely crystal clear for anyone who bothers to look.

Ways and Means formulates the budget on taxation and revenue and even though we’re supposed to believe that they’re all about finding abuse, waste, and fraud (their words!), they have absolutely no qualms about royally screwing the most vulnerable people in our country by massively bloating the debt another four trillion dollars.

Most of that would go to permanently extending the massive tax cuts (and attendant bloat in the national debt they’re constantly whingeing about!) that were enacted during President Trump’s first term…the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

You remember that one, don’t you? That’s the law that gave very modest tax cuts to everyone that wasn’t the top 1% whilst simultaneously taking away the vast majority of *YOUR* deductions pushing most people to a far less generous standard deduction on their tax returns.

And it should come as no shock that 83% of the trillions of tax cut benefits from the TCJA of 2017 that were spaffed onto the national debt went straight into the pockets of that very same top 1%. Of course, we heard the usual line about how they’d invest that money into the economy and the benefits of their investments would trickle down to us peons which is the same story we’ve been hearing since President Reagan popularised “trickle-down economics” and “supply-side economics”.

Sadly, plenty of the electorate still takes these people seriously when they say stupid things like that which have *NEVER* panned out in reality.

The rich keep getting richer and we’re left with the bill and a rather unfortunate pain in a notorious region of our bodies from the red, white, and blue full rogering we got.

This shouldn’t be news to anyone that was paying attention!

George Carlin saw this coming 20 years ago during his “Life Is Worth Losing” special…Trump and Musk and their co-conspirators in Congress and the Supreme Court are literally implementing every prediction that George made in his “American Dream” bit right in front of us right now:

The rest of the concurrent resolution has a couple more gems of the bovine faeces variety that are just as smelly:

• SEC. 4001. Policy statement on economic growth.
  • (a) Findings.—The House finds the following:
    • (3) The free market, where individuals pursue their own self-interests, has been responsible for greater advancements in quality of life and generation of wealth than any other form of economic system. Federal policies designed to grow the economy should thus allow market forces to operate unhindered rather than pick “winners” and “losers”.

I don’t know about you but it seems that the House is hell-bent on picking winners and losers in this budget resolution they want to try to ram through using the budget reconciliation process so they don’t have to defeat a cloture motion in the Senate which would stop this travesty of a budget dead in it’s tracks.

It’s a big club and we loser peons ain’t in it!

Then there’s this bit of truth because I absolutely agree that the deficits and the debt is a problem as is the completely out-of-control spending by Congress which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy and corporate interests. If I were to do my accounting anything like the Federal government does, I’d be in jail for fraud!

• SEC. 4002. Policy statement on mandatory spending reduction.
  • (a) Findings.—The House finds the following:
    • (1) The United States faces a significant debt crisis, with the national debt currently exceeding $36 trillion, or 123 percent of GDP.
    • (2) Since 2019, mandatory spending has increased by 59 percent.
    • (3) This debt poses a significant risk to the country’s long-term fiscal sustainability, with implications for future generations.
    • (4) Mandatory spending currently accounts for over 70 percent of the entire Federal budget.
    • (5) The deficit for fiscal year 2025 is projected to be $1.9 trillion, or 6.2 percent of GDP.
    • (6) This fiscal year, net interest will total $952 billion, or 3.2 percent of GDP.
  • (b) Policy on mandatory spending reduction.—It is the goal of this concurrent resolution to reduce mandatory spending by $2 trillion over the budget window. If the combined deficit reduction provided by authorizing committees is below this target, it is the policy of the Committee on the Budget of the House that the instruction provided to the Committee on Ways and Means of the House should be reduced by a commensurate amount to offset the difference.

So please educate this voter on how you plan to square this notion of admitting to out-of-control spending and the national debt being a “significant debt crisis” with this little bit at the end of of Title II:

• (c) Increase in statutory debt limit.—The Committee on Ways and Means shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction that increase the statutory debt limit by $4,000,000,000,000.

I may not be the brightest bulb in the box but that seems to be a hell of an increase to the national debt to facilitate tax cuts that will continue to overwhelmingly favour the rich and moneyed interests in this country at the expense of it’s most vulnerable citizens.

Please tell me why in the hell anyone with half a brain would ever vote for *ANY* politician that votes for this transparent and naked cash grab for their benefactors that bought them their fancy offices and gave them massive bribes to keep them bought?

Take all the time you need with that one.

I’ll leave it with this thought: you wretched bastards can make all the cuts to the social safety net you want under the guise of reducing expenditure but have you considered what is going to happen when those people who you’re booting off of Medicaid or whatever other subsidised government health insurance they may have get sick or have a life-threatening medical episode?

I’m sure the more crass and craven amongst you are hoping they’ll just curl up their toes and wait for the guy with the cart to come round to haul their carcass away…

Now, for those of us who live in this place called *REALITY*…those people are still going to call for the ambulance or somehow find their way to the emergency room at the local hospital and expect to be treated even though the hospital would just as soon they bugger off into the night and never be seen again.

They’re going to be treated because the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labour Act (EMTALA) has some really stiff penalties for hospitals that try dumping indigent patients off in Skid Row to die in a more convenient location.

The average emergency room is the most expensive place in order to get health care and they’re already overwhelmed by people using the ER as a primary care physician because they literally have no other choice.

The hospital will do it’s dead level best to shake down their poor and indigent patients for absolutely astronomical and bloated medical bills with amounts charged that are completely out of touch with reality unless they’re forced to use the CMS’ Prospective Payment System or risk no reimbursement from the government at all. They’ll have no problem hounding the poor patients mercilessly until they’re thrown into collections or worse for a debt they have no realistic ability to pay.

But those bills won’t go away and the taxpayers are going to be stuck with it whether it’s directly paid by the government or in the form of higher premiums and costs imposed upon patients and that’s not even talking about the rampant tax evasion with bogus losses written off against even more imaginary “costs” to shield their very profitable wards that do not have to accept indigent patients from being properly taxed.

And guess where those bloated bills are ultimately going to end up? Yep…the national debt! That favourite dumping ground for expenses incurred today that our great-great-great-grandchildren still won’t have a chance of paying off without triggering a massive global economic collapse.

At least if everyone had some rudimentary form of insurance cover to face their medical issues with a modicum of human dignity and much stronger regulations against chargemaster pricing, balance billing, and fraudulent accounting and tax evasion by hospitals and medical providers, Congress and the states might actually have a chance of reining in the ever rising costs of healthcare but do so in a humane way.

Congress could also stop paying the many multiples of the price per dose for drugs it buys (often much more expensive than that exact same drug sells for in other countries) and that alone would represent a massive saving that would go a long way toward reducing the deficits from mandatory spending.

It’d mean biting the hand that feeds your pockets and personal bank accounts but at some point, doing the right thing for the people of this country you supposedly represent should be far more important than doing just enough to keep your job with the rich people and corporations that have already bought your loyalty.

And if you’re truly serious about reducing the national debt, then for God’s sake don’t do it in the abjectly silly way you’re proposing where you “pay” for massive cuts in the social safety net to turn a fire hose of taxpayer money toward Scrooge McBillionaire’s vault containing their ocean of money and charge it to the national credit card!

I know you’re deathly afraid of Elon Musk and his billionaire buddies financing a primary opponent who can spend you under the table at the next election. Musk alone has enough to buy opponents for everyone he hates in Congress and still have hundreds of billions left over!

That’d be a very strong argument for reversing the travesty that was the Citizens United decision by the dodgy buggers on the other side of the street from your building so that you can actually go back to what Article I of the Constitution intended you to do: make laws, provide oversight of the Executive Branch, and have control of the appropriations process (not that Congress is particularly good at that last bit in terms of generally accepted accounting principles).

But it comes to this…you know what is being proposed is not only wrong, it is pure *EVIL*.

I accept that it’s a no-win scenario for you for if you vote against this outright theft of taxpayer funds, you can expect to lose your seat next election to an opponent with more money than God who will paint you as a traitor to your billionaire masters.

If you vote for it, you’ll not survive being tarred and feathered as a modern day reverse Robin Hood that even the most rabidly partisan voters could not support.

It’s a very simple decision when you get right down to it. At some point, your country and the oath you swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic (and we’ve certainly got plenty of domestic enemies in high office right now!) has to mean more than feathering your nest and lining your pockets with ill-gotten profits.

For our country’s sake, I hope you’re willing to make the right decision.

And how about fixing Citizens United whilst you’re at it so our government can’t be bought lock, stock, and barrel by the mega-wealthy ever again?