From Alternet: Conservatives have a legislative agenda for 2011 that will hurt your ability to get or keep a job, your neighborhood's ability to recover from the recession and this country's ability to regain its footing in the global economy. To keep conservatives from enacting policies that will kill a nascent economic recovery, progressives will have to organize against these top 10 economy killers.1. Repeal of Health-Care Reform: Republicans have placed "repealing Obamacare" at the top of their legislative agenda for 2011. If they succeed, the economy is going to come down with multiple serious illnesses—at least 24, according to a report released this month by Rep. Peter Stark of the House Ways and Means Committee. Among them: a $143 billion increase in the deficit by losing the savings the reforms created, an increase the number of uninsured by 30 million people…
2. Diminish the Federal Government's Ability to Support Job-Creation: Since the right can't complain about inflation—there is none—the enemy is "quantitative easing," the Fed's bid to pour liquidity into the economy in hopes that fuels investment and jobs. Take away quantitative easing and there's literally nothing left in the economic policy playbook to keep the economy from slipping back into recession.
3. Slash Federal Infrastructure Spending: while countries such as China race ahead on infrastructure investment, conservative governors are being heralded as heroes for rejecting high-speed rail money and killing a rail tunnel on the nation's busiest rail corridor leading into New York City. Conservative ideologues are once again proposing to end most federal transportation spending.
4. Dismantle Medicare (and Give Seniors "Vouchers"): Ryan's voucherization of Medicare, however, would control costs not by restraining insurance companies or health-care corporations but by keeping the value of the voucher below the increase in health care costs, thus shifting increasing out-of-pocket costs onto seniors themselves. Conservatives say this means government won't be rationing care to seniors. With vouchers, seniors will forced to ration care on their own.
5. Undo Financial Reform, and Let the Predators Run
6. Support Big Oil and Kill Green Jobs: The right's mantra is that the EPA regulations will increase utility bills and kill jobs. The truth is that the regulations will create new jobs in clean-energy industries and, most importantly, save the planet. Just as Rep. Spencer Bachus thinks government should "serve the banks," conservatives would seem to be fine with EPA serving the polluters.
7. Don't Just Cut Government Waste; Cripple Government: From the beginning of the Reagan Revolution the plan was to create deficits to cripple government, not to cut “waste.” Reagan said the idea was to “cut the government’s allowance.” George W. Bush said turning Clinton’s surpluses into huge deficits was "incredibly positive news" because it would put government in "a fiscal straitjacket."
8. Amp up the Insecurity in Social Security: Conservatives have wanted to kill the New Deal for a long time. Now they have a historic window of opportunity. Unless the President and other Democrats stand up for Social Security, it’s going to be needlessly gutted in the name of “deficit reduction”—even though it doesn’t contribute to the deficit.
9. Starve Public Education: Here is an easy way to keep the rich rich and the less well-off part of the permanent underclass: continue the decades-long conservative-led assault on public education.
10. Don't Ask the Rich to Help Reduce the Deficit; Ask Low-Income Americans Instead Republicans want to make their "cutgo" scheme the law of Congress, in which new spending authorized by Congress must be offset by cuts elsewhere but cannot be offset by tax increases or fees on anyone. But new tax cuts would not have to be offset by spending reductions. That should finish off any molecule of credibility they had left on their feigned concern about the deficit.
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