Ol' Deficit Hawk George Does It Again

Today, January 28, 2010, the United States Senate took up the amendment to impose pay- as-you-go requirements on the United States Congress. This requirement, known as PAYGO, was credited by President Obama with helping achieve balanced budgets in Wednesday's State of the Union speech.

It works like this: If you are a Representative or a Senator and you want to propose a new Federal program, you have to come up the way to pay for the program. If you want to propose tax cuts, then you have to come up with spending cuts to balance out the tax cuts. Sounds simple, right? I mean if you were a deficit hawk, which is how George Voinovich describes himself, then you should love this idea.

Except, of course, George, along with the other 39 Republicans voted "Nay." Now why would they do that? Well, here's the situation they are in: They want to propose more and more tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, but they don't want to cut Federal programs to pay for the tax-cuts. Instead they want to keep running up the Federal deficit.

So once again, we see, just like we saw in 2001 and in 2003 with Bush's reckless tax cuts for the rich, which Ol' Deficit Hawk supported, that George Voinovich's claims to want a balanced budget are just so much Deficit Hawk bird poo.

John Edwards Proposes Tax Hike on Wealthy to Pay for Health Plan

John Edwards is releasing a health care plan on Monday that will provide for a tax hike mainly on the wealthy to pay for expanded health insurance. He is one of the first politicians to admit that taxes might have to rise to solve America's health care problems. Although he is for raising taxes, his plan apparently doesn't call for a single-payer system. His aim is to bring insurance to the uninsured, lower health care costs and bring competition to the markets. He would expand the Medicaid plan and ask employers to either provide health coverage or buy into what Edwards is calling "health markets." He also called for more focus on collecting taxes that are legally due, but are not now being collected. If you click on the link in this entry's title, you can read more about the Edwards plan.