O My America — The Dowry

by Lawrence Bush

“Sell the Holy Scrolls in the synagogue to give a poor girl a dowry.” —Jewish proverb

What does this proverb mean? It means go into hock to help the poor.

It means fuck the Republicans and their deficit-cutting, and the Democrats, too, for allowing the Big Lie to grow bigger every day.

You want to save Social Security? Raise the ceiling on FICA taxes so that people who earn $250,000 a year aren’t just paying on the first $100,000. That’ll solve the problem for the next fifty years. Simple.

You want to lower the deficit? Increase the revenues coming into the government by investing in job creation. Not by cutting winter fuel subsidies and letting old people in Vermont freeze to death.

For heaven’s sake!! We’re spending a billion dollars per week in Afghanistan. We’re spending $9.9 billion in 2011 on “unclassified space programs,” i.e., missile defense boondoggles. Obama’s just asked for a record $708 billion in defense spending for 2011. And then he wants to freeze federal workers’ pay for five years — and cut fuel subsidies?

Here’s what Jerrold Nadler said on Brian Lehrer’s wonderful show on WNYC this morning:

The first priority is to get people back to work and get the economy moving, that by itself will reduce the deficit more than anything else. We can worry about the deficit afterwards . . . Any time you reduce spending and you reduce the amount of money in circulation... it goes against your goal of reducing unemployment. . . . The current budget battle is an attempt by the Republicans to roll back everything that we have done in government since FDR, since the New Deal . . . It’s nonsense.