Start with the obvious: There are no cuts to America's bloated military budget, which was somewhere north of $660 billion in 2010, more than the rest of the world's defense spending combined. And there are no cuts to the sprawling, opaque Department of Homeland Security, which costs more than $50 billion a year. In maintaining global empire and expanding the security state, every dollar is sacred.
There are also no cuts to fossil-fuel or corn-ethanol subsidies. No corporate contributor to the Republican Party will find anything to fear. The bill might as well be called the Thumbing Liberals In the Eye Act of 2011. It's a laundry list of targets conservatives have been after for decades, most of which will make no appreciable difference to the nation's fiscal health.
Here are a few proposed cuts that might be of particular interest to Grist readers:
Energy Star Program: $52 million a year.
Intercity and High Speed Rail Grants: $2.5 billion a year.
DOE Weatherization Grants to States: $530 million a year.
Amtrak Subsidies: $1.565 billion a year. (There are no cuts to highway subsidies, of course.)
Technology Innovation Program: $70 million a year. (Wait, I thought support for innovation was "post-partisan"!)
Applied Research at Department of Energy: $1.27 billion a year.New Starts Transit: $2 billion a year.
Subsidies to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: $12.5 million a year.
Title X Family Planning: $318 million a year.
Appalachian Regional Commission: $76 million a year. (Why do we need this? They already have coal mines there!)
FreedomCAR and Fuel Partnership: $200 million a year.
Subsidy for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority: $150 million a year.
National Organic Certification Cost-Share Program: $56.2 million a year.
Read the whole story HERE.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment