OntheWilderSide

In Wake of Supercommittee Failure, Automatic Cuts to Domestic Spending Should be Scrapped, says Presidential Candidate Stein, Calls Entire Deficit Reduction Process Unjust and Undemocratic. 

In the wake of the failed Supercommittee effort to cut the deficit, the Budget Control Act of 2011 is now slated to impose automatic cuts that are unjust and undemocratic, according to presidential candidate Jill Stein of the Green Party.

The automatic cuts were designed to impose job-killing austerity without having a single public vote that lets voters hold the politicians accountable. It’s opening the way to cutting Medicare, education, transportation and a wide array of community programs. The Democrat and Republican leaders who set up this committee in the first place need to back down. If they are interested in what’s best for the nation they will wipe the domestic cuts from the books and start over.

According to Stein, “The cause of our deficit is an array of tax giveaways to the wealthy, a profiteering health care system that leads the world in bureaucratic waste, and a hemorrhaging of money into costly foreign military adventures. The bipartisan agreement on these misguided priorities is striking. Despite his posture of sympathy and his attacks on his Republican rivals, President Obama’s actions embrace traditional Republican priorities.  

And the Republicans have responded by moving one step to the right, offering little more than failed conservative formulas and voodoo economics. The bipartisan solution that the two parties are struggling to formulate won’t solve the deficit problem. It will cost us jobs, and it fails the test of justice for ordinary Americans.”

Stein said that “Our first priority should be putting people back to work and giving people the help they need to get through the rest of the Bush/Obama recession. Deficit reduction schemes that kill jobs and push more people into poverty should be stopped in their tracks.”

Addressing the need for job creation, Stein called President Obama’s jobs bill “completely inadequate” and proposed a Green New Deal that wouldcreate 8 times the number of jobs sought by the President. “The President’s proposal is far too weak to impact the Bush/Obama recession. People shouldn’t have to wait year after year, seeing their families and communities suffer, while Wall Street continues to fatten itself with bailouts and tax giveaways. We need to end the high unemployment now.”

“The Budget Control Act fiasco is another example of the inability of the Democrats and Republicans to do what is right in a time of economic crisis. It was the two parties that together bailed out the financial elite, and promoted a trickle down economic policy that has utterly failed the average American. Now their Budget Control Act is going to cut programs that people need more than ever in times of economic distress.”

Stein suggesting expediting the Pentagon budget cuts as an alternative to cutting social support programs. And she charged that neither party Stein charged that neither party is answering the growing public demand to tax the rich.

“If we went back to the progressive tax rates of the 1950s and 1960s on corporations and the wealthy, government would have more money than needed to maintain Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security and to implement the public employment program that is now the only way to reduce unemployment quickly. Taxing corporations and the rich is exactly what FDR did to ease the nation’s economic suffering and work our way out of the Great Depression. We can’t solve the deficit problem without addressing the problem of the tax giveaways to the rich,” Stein noted.

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Filed under: 3rd party, Election 2012, grassroots democracy, Green Party, presidential, Press Release Tagged: | Deficit, Jill Stein, medicare