POLITICS - Understatement on GOP Budget Plan

An UNDERSTATEMENT....

"Obama Calls GOP Budget Plan 'Prescription for Decline'" PBS Newshour 4/3/2012

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Budget politics and the 2012 campaign merged today, as President Obama lit into Republicans and their priorities. His main target was the House Republican budget plan. It would cut the deficit by $3.3 trillion in the next decade, over and above the $4 trillion in savings in the Obama budget.

The president addressed the Associated Press annual meeting in Washington.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: For much of the last century, we have been having the same argument with folks who keep peddling some version of trickle-down economics. They keep telling us that if we convert more of our investments in education and research and health care into tax cuts, especially for the wealthy, our economy will grow stronger.

They keep telling us that if we just strip away more regulations, and let businesses pollute more and treat workers and consumers with impunity, that somehow we'd all be better off. We're told that when the wealthy become even wealthier and corporations are allowed to maximize their profits by whatever means necessary, it's good for America and that their success will automatically translate into more jobs and prosperity for everybody else. That's the theory.

Now, the problem for advocates of this theory is that we've tried their approach on a massive scale. The results of their experiment are there for all to see.

Instead of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal. And yet this isn't a budget supported by some small rump group in the Republican Party. This is now the party's governing platform. This is what they're running on.

One of my potential opponents, Gov. Romney, has said that he hoped a similar version of this plan from last year would be introduced as a bill on day one of his presidency.

This congressional Republican budget is something different altogether. It is a Trojan horse disguised as deficit reduction plans. It is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who's willing to work for it, a place where prosperity doesn't trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of middle class.

And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that's built to last, education and training, research and development, our infrastructure, it is a prescription for decline.