Jan Resseger reminds us of the traditional Masai greeting, “How are the children?” The assumption is that if the children are well, the village or society is well. Many of our children are not well. Too many live in poverty and lack adequate nutrition, decent medical care, and a safe place to live.
Sadly, as Jan explains, the Republican moderates who asked Biden to cut his COVID relief package focused their cuts on aid to children.
She begins:
This week a group of so-called moderate U.S. Senate Republicans proposed to negotiate with President Joe Biden about his proposed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan stimulus bill. But even the ten senators, who profess themselves to be moderates and who came forward with a $618 billion alternative proposal, proved themselves willing to neglect the needs of America’s children. The United States, the world’s richest nation, posts an alarming child poverty rate, but, apart from the voices of a handful of social justice advocates, any level of concern about child poverty is inaudible. Hardly anybody seems to have noticed that one of the great strengths of Biden’s American Rescue Plan is the President’s inclusion of funding for programs that would significantly ameliorate suffering among America’s poorest children.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Chuck Marr did recently recognize the significanceof the pro-child provisions in Biden’s new American Rescue Plan: “President Biden’s $1.9 trillion emergency relief plan includes a Child Tax Credit expansion that would lift 9.9 million children above or closer to the poverty line, including 2.3 million Black children, 4.1 million Latino children, and 441,000 Asian American children. It also would lift 1.1 million children out of ‘deep poverty,’ raising their family incomes above 50 percent of the poverty line. To do that, the Biden plan would make the credit fully available to 27 million children—including roughly half of all Black and Latino children—whose families now don’t get the full credit because their parents don’t earn enough….”
Do Republicans not care about our children? Why is military spending more desirable than spending to save the lives of the neediest and most helpless?
Everyone should read The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, which demonstrates that societies are happier when there is more equality.
The GOP is hopeless, all they are supposedly concerned with, a false phony concern, is the deficit, the deficit, the deficit. Baloney, they don’t give a damn about the deficit when the GOP is in charge. The GOP regularly gives huge tax breaks to the rich which….drum roll……..skyrockets the deficits. Bush the dumber inherited a surplus from Clinton and then squandered it with huge tax breaks for the rich during a time of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We have an obscenely bloated military budget that’s supposedly “protecting” a nation that is crumbling from within. Cut mililtary spending and redirect all those hundreds of billions to our children and familes – skills training, healthcare (including more hospitals and preventive care) better schools, etc. Undo that 2017 tax bill too that is Robin Hood in reverse.
The “offense” budget will not be reduced because the contractors own Congresss and there are just too many Americans making a killing…I mean living off of the military industrial complex.
Even Bernie Sanders cowtows to Lockheed Martin on the F35, a 1.5 billion dollar boondoggle because of the jobs it brings to Vermont.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/12/why-bernie-sanders-is-backing-a-15-trillion-military-boondoggle.html
Most of the engineers and scientists I went to school with stepped right into high paying, 40 hour per week jobs with great benefits and vacation time, working for military contractors because they could easily make twice what they could make in the private sector and had to work a lot fewer hours.
It’s been going for decadess and the people who benefit will never give it up.
The Republican Party is the party of big business and the affluent. Poor people are not their base or concern. As long as their children are protected and well cared for, they do not care about other people’s children. While some of the blue collar voters have drifted over to the party of Trump, they need to understand they have more in common with working families and poor than they do with most of the Republican Party. Democrats should hold firm on their proposal as the money spent will lead to a better, faster recovery. It will shore up the coffers of the states, and it will help those that have been unemployed by Covid as well as any dependent children. It may also serve to bring some of the blue collar voters back to the Democratic Party.