Repeal of the Education and Care for Children in Poverty Act

[The Duke]

I'm neutral on this, currently; does the GM have any report on any effects that this legislation has created?

Reason 1:  At present we have a budget deficit over  $500 billion dollars.  By July, this will need to be reduced to somewhere around the $200 billion dollar range (unless we declare war on some sh**tty country for the hell of it).

Of all the social programs that exist, this one and the Prescription Drug Reform that Congress passed in 2003 are the most aggregiously terrible of the two.  You will see me push for eliminating that next.  Hopefully, with those two eliminated, we won't have to raise taxes as much in July as we will presently have to.

I'm leaning towards supporting this purely because we seriously need to cut something, but I just wanted to make sure that it hasn't done any wonderful things that I'm unaware of.

I'll do a story on it.

[The Duke]

Since John Ford cannot find any useful provisions for this wasteful spending and there appear to be no more questions by any other Senators, I motion that we bring this bill to a vote.

This evening, PBC News will air a piece on the bill in question, Senators might want to wait for it before they vote.

As for useless defense spending, we eliminated certain programs I thought weren't that effective, like the FCS, but we always redirected the money to more useful things.  I can't name any major waste off the top of my head.  I always made it my first option to cut waste to fund my stuff, and asking the Senate for money was the second resort.

[The Duke]

Aye.

I will also be giving an editorial rebuttal to John Ford's (somewhat) biased piece sometime tonight.

"Its not biased, its humanitarian. "

-Walter Cronkite

Okay, so maybe Walter didn't stick his tongue out at the end of the statement, but the rest is true.  I didn't think it was biased.

[The Duke]

Ya how dare those poverty stricken children take tax dollars from more usefull things like tax cuts for the rich.

We currently have nearly a $503 billion deficit.  There are a lot of things that need to be cut in order to get that down to a reasonable level, and like John Ford says, even then a marginal tax increase may be necessary if there are simply not enough things we can cut without serious consequences.

Actually, Tom Hobbes said that.   I take no position on the issue.  My real opinion is that it would be hard to get people to agree on cutting most programs, and that in the end the only thing that will prove aggreable is a mix of tax hikes and spending cuts.