For the last several weeks, the Nation has been fixated on one particular issue that has covered headlines and news tickers and dominated media discussions: the debt limit. Once again, we Americans found ourselves wondering: Is this it? Is America finally about to crash and burn? I think most of us have probably lost count in just the last few years alone of how many times we have had to face that question.
But this time it didn’t come from some external threat, like a pandemic, or a bizarre foreign surveillance vessel flying right above our heads. It didn’t come from an environmental disaster, like a major train derailment due to corporate negligence that leaked harmful chemicals. No, this time it came from within; from the Republican Party (though, to be fair, this is far from the first time they have been the source of a national threat).
The Republicans have been unabashedly playing dangerous games with the debt limit, where the stakes are the stability of the country itself. They have been virtually holding the country hostage until they could get what they want. And what they want will have devastating consequences for many among the working class, especially low-income households, while at the same time giving absolutely unnecessary boosts to the wealthy. This is, of course, an age-old story that we are very familiar with at this point — the Republican Party pushing the poor down into the mud to allow the rich to step across their backs.
Chances are good, however, that if any Republican were to read the above paragraph they would scoff in disbelief, insisting that none of that is true. Indeed, the Republicans at the forefront of this “game” have been using all manner of terminology and particular phrasing to explain what it is that they want in such a way as to obscure what will actually happen.
“It’s never explicit, right?” said The Valley Labor Report host Jacob Morrison during last Saturday’s broadcast. “It’s always ‘cut the fluff, cut the fluff, cut the fluff! The government has so much waste, there’s so much going on that we don’t need to do, and so all we have to do is cut the fluff, and we can save trillions of dollars, that’s all it’s gonna take! There’s nothing material that’s gonna affect anybody, and in fact it’s gonna make your life better… somehow!’”
Likely surprising no one, this “fluff” does not include anything related to the military budget, which is the single greatest expense in US government spending — estimated by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to be $877 billion based on data collected over a one year period, from October 1st, 2021, to September 30, 2022; a staggering amount that is more than military-spending in the next ten countries (China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, Ukraine) combined. If there is any area of US spending that is bloated with “fluff” that could stand to be culled, it is our military-spending. But of course, this is the Republican Party we’re talking about, for whom “military cuts” isn’t even part of their vocabulary. And not only will there be no “fluff-cutting” with the military budget, Republicans are, on the contrary, working on increasing the military budget.
Instead they are choosing to hurt the working class and low-income households. How are they doing this? What do they actually mean by “cut the fluff”?
Sam Seder, host of The Majority Report, took to airwaves recently to read a list of some of these proposed cuts:
“If you cut discretionary spending to the level of fiscal year 2022, cap the rate of increase at one percent per year for an indeterminate period — maybe two years, this is what’s being floated — this is what it would do: …returning to fiscal year 2022 budget-levels would mean an immediate cut of 13% to every government agency and program. If defense and border cops are exempted from that cross-the-board cut, then the cut will be closer to 22%… 60,000 people would not be able to attend college, 200,000 children would get kicked off Headstart, 100,000 families would lose childcare, 1.2 million would be removed from WIC Nutrition Assistance, 125 air traffic control towers would be shut down, rail safety inspections would be cut back by 11,000 work days [with] 30,000 miles of track going uninspected, 640,000 families would lose rental assistance, 430,000 more would be evicted from Section 8 housing… That’s just a sampling.”
Watch the full discussion on YouTube: