4 Things Our Government Should Stop Wasting Money On

[Joanne98]

A Tea Party-infused GOP is calling for major cuts to federal spending. But for most Republicans, the newfound concern with deficits is demonstrably cynical. Just look at the deafening silence from the Right that greeted the $1.2 trillion (and growing) deficit that President Bush ran up. Conservative fearmongering is mostly an excuse to plunder the safety net. “The idea that somehow we’re going to be Greece is just flat out silly,” says Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research. “Basically, it’s a cheap scare tactic to force austerity.”

Though catastrophic prophesies of a government gone bankrupt are paper tigers, there are still plenty of things progressives would like to see cut: a sprawling defense budget that funds two wars and hundreds of military bases world-wide; a criminal justice system that spends billions to lock up millions of (too often black) Americans; and corporate welfare in the form of subsidies for oil and gas companies, and for industrial agriculture. Harmful government spending is a much bigger problem than wasteful government spending. Positive social spending is all too scarce, and constantly under pressure.

While the Tea Party has presented itself as an anti-establishment force in politics, on policy, it has been establishment enhancing: “tough on the deficit” while spending billions on war, prisons and corporate welfare. When so-called fiscal conservatives support harmful government spending, progressives should point out the contradiction and hold them accountable.

Authentic libertarians do not have a major presence in the Republican Party. Not today and certainly not before last November. In the 2000s, Ron Paul, a critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the drug war, was marginalized within the Republican Party. Rand Paul, the congressman’s son, is the new Republican senator from Kentucky. The two are close, but Rand has without a doubt distanced himself from his father on foreign policy and the drug war, though he has done so quietly. He tends to emphasize the aspects of his father’s libertarianism that resonate within today’s Right and de-emphasizes or equivocates on the rest.

http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/149818/4_things_our_government_should_stop_wasting_money_on/

[damntexdem]

1. A few more things:

Egypt
Israel
corporate farm subsidies
persecuting Wikileaks and Assange

[Demeter]

2. ZOMBIE BANKS!

Let the Undead Die!