Friday, March 09, 2012

Why would anyone sign this pledge?

I am concerned.  Why would anyone sign a pledge that would make bigger cuts to Social Security than even the Paul Ryan budget plan?

According to a website called, CutCapandBalanceAct, Ohio Treasurer, and now Republican candidate for Senate, Josh Mandel signed the pledge.


TheMiddleClass website explained what Cut, Cap, and Balance would do:

...Robert Greenstein at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities writes that the legislation "stands out as one of the most ideologically extreme pieces of major budget legislation to come before Congress in years, if not decades." 

This legislation would not only requires a wholesale gutting of domestic spending programs in health care, education, the environment, economic development and aid to those in need, but would chisel into stone the Republican Party's manic opposition to anything that would increase revenues into the federal treasury. As Greenstein put it in his analysis, "an impoverished elderly widow living on Supplemental Security Income — which provides benefits that lift people to just 75 percent of the poverty line — could have her assistance cut back under the measure’s across-the-board budget cuts even as millionaire hedge-fund managers retained their lucrative carried-interest tax breaks."

....The America envisioned under this legislation is an America that does not invest in its future or its people. Its federal government would stand on the sidelines as its public schools crumbled, its universities continued to price themselves beyond the reach of middle-class families, its infrastructure decayed, its research fell behind that of the rest of the industrialized world and its people became increasingly impoverished, in spirit if not financially. It is indeed the most radical transformation of America that the mainstream of the Republican Party has ever put forward—a world where the rich are unfettered in their quest for ever larger shares of wealth and the middle class is officially abandoned. This is a vision of America's future that the American middle-class majority rejects.

Republican Josh Mandel supports this cockamamie plan.

****  Has Josh Mandel come up with his "rescue plan" for the American auto makers?  He is just a few years too late.