Who needs school, health care, or food?

Propublica has released a comparison of the House and Senate versions of the stimulus bill, allowing us to easily compare the two versions.

What's different? In a nutshell, the compromisey Senate bill has huge cuts in aid to low income families (the poor are poor for a reason), including COBRA health care for the unemployed, hunger relief, job training and programs for the disabled; aid to states, including Medicaid; funds for energy, including energy efficiency projects (weaning ourselves off of oil is too expensive!) and twenty five billion dollars cut from educational funding, because, seriously, who needs smart people?

However, there are seventy five billion dollars more in tax cuts, so if the Senate bill ultimately becomes law, I guess we can all spend our $500 checks at Walmart while unemployed, illiterate, and burning coal to cook our cat food for dinner.

Stimulus package debate: Do Republicans want economy to fail?

So Obama's stimulus package, now filled with far more Republican-added tax breaks (which economists agree won't help the economy in the long term but which make Republicans look like they care about "main street"), is being debated in the Senate, with a vote expected tomorrow.

And even though economists (or, as the Republicans like to say, Socialists) maintain that direct spending on infrastructure is what is needed to stimulate the economy, Republicans continue to cut billions in proposed spending on education (who needs that?) and aid to states in the form of funds for health care, energy, roads, and other infrastructure. So ultimately, the bill that will be voted on (and which will be opposed by all but three moderate Republicans), will be a much worse bill, that will do far less, than the original House bill.

It's awfully easy to look at Republicans adding ridiculous amendments and removing important features from a bill they're going to oppose anyway, and think that they do it because they want the economy to fail. They certainly don't seem to want it to improve, given that their own proposal involves doing exactly the same thing that got us into this boat: cutting taxes for the wealthy. Because that will surely fix things this time.

And in other news, Obama bumped his head on Air Force One while traveling to sell the stimulus package to Americans!