Highly Sensible Positions Taken by Congressional Right-wingers

1. Congress should focus all federal budget cutting efforts on non-defense discretionary spending, since it takes up such a huge portion of the budget (about 15%) compared with the meager spending on defense (20%), Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (collectively about 60%).

2. When cutting foreign aid, it makes sense to start with humanitarian programs and efforts to build civil society in developing countries rather than military aid to countries like Israel and Egypt, since it makes more sense to provide people with the ability to fight each other and help American arms manufacturers make money at the same time than to create more happy, peaceful societies where people will be less inclined to fight each other, even if the latter costs a lot less.

3. It makes sense to cut funding for climate research by NASA, because we are already absolutely certain humans couldn't possibly be affecting the climate, so there is no need to gather evidence in order to find out the truth on climate change.

4. It makes sense to eliminate government programs that provide home heating subsidies to the poor, grants to low-income college students, funding for health care for poor veterans, subsidies for urban mass transit systems to reduce use of cars and fossil fuels, and other things of this nature while retaining tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and tax breaks for oil companies, because putting more money into the pockets of oil company stockholders and other wealthy people is far more beneficial to the economy than providing any kind of assistance to the poor.

5. It makes sense to take away funding for public radio that provides news and information to millions, including almost as many conservatives as liberals, because we think it has a liberal bias and Americans don't need to have that many news sources anyway, even rural communities with only two or three news radio stations (after all, most of them will still have Fox News).http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

6. If we do decide to do anything about entitlement spending, we should start with Social Security, even thought it's the healthiest and has a large reserve to fall back on, because we don't like anything with the word "social" in it. Fortunately, with the help of President Obama, we've made sure it's technically losing money this year by cutting the payroll tax. We'll also be sure to fix it by cutting benefits rather than by raising the cap on the payroll tax, because it's better to ask poorer elderly people to work a few more years or make do with less than to ask rich people to pay more into the system.

7. Not only should we treat illegal immigrants as criminals on a par with murderers and rapists, but we should treat their children the same way, deporting them to countries they don't remember even if they are intelligent, skilled and hard-working.

8. While talking about the importance of balancing the budget, it makes sense to not only refuse to consider raising taxes, even on the wealthiest Americans, but also to talk about an amendment to the constitution requiring two-thirds support in Congress for any future tax increases, thus virtually ensuring that taxes can never be increased and the government can never do anything to increase revenue, thereby eliminating half of the potential tools for balancing the budget for the indefinite future.