Forget Big Bird. What about the Snuffleupagus in the room?
Big Bird is not the problem. The problem is Snuffleupagus.
The threat presented by Romney’s budget is not in the few cuts he has specified but in the vastly larger amount of unseen cuts he has yet to identify.
At the Denver debate, Romney said he would eliminate Obamacare (doing so would actually increase the budget deficit, because of related tax hikes) and the public-broadcasting subsidy, which is $445 million a year — or little more than one one-hundredth of 1 percent of federal spending. But Romney proposes to cut federal spending by trillions of dollars — more than $5?trillion over the next decade, assuming he follows the sort of blueprint laid out by his running mate, Paul Ryan. That threatens much more than Muppets and monsters. Human lives are at stake.
As if to remind us of this, Rep. Darrell Issa, the indefatigable Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has called a hearing for noon Wednesday even though Congress is in a weeks-long recess. The emergency cause for the hearing? Probing “The Security Failures of Benghazi” — lapses in diplomatic security that led to the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.
The purpose of the pre-election hearing, presumably, is to embarrass the administration for inadequate diplomatic security. But Issa seems unaware of the irony that diplomatic security is inadequate partly because of budget cuts forced by his fellow Republicans in Congress. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-forget-about-big-bird/2012/10/09/5f9a411c-1258-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html
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