Tag Archives: Republican

President Obama urges Congress to stop the sequester — the harmful automatic cuts that threaten thousands of jobs and affect our national security from taking effect on March 1.

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Weekly Women’s Update: Averting the Sequester and Reducing the Deficit

02/24/2013 Nativegrl77

Greetings All-

We hope this message finds you well.

Just 7 days from now, Congress might permit a series of severe and automatic budget cuts, called the “sequester,” to go into effect. Read the President’s proposal to resolve the sequester and reduce our deficit by over $4 trillion dollars in a balanced way. You can also view the President’s remarks on the importance of Congress finding a balanced approach to deficit reduction that doesn’t harm our economy or the middle class.

Join us for a call about the sequester on Tuesday, February 26 at 10:30am. RSVP details are below.

President Obama was in Chicago last Friday to talk about the importance of making sure every child in America has every chance in life to succeed. The President laid out a plan to rebuild ladders of opportunity for every American who is willing to work hard and climb them.

The White House Champions of Change program highlights the stories and examples of citizens who are moving their communities forward. This March’s event will focus on Women Veterans’ contributions within the veterans’ community. Nominate a woman veteran as a Champion of Change by midnight on Tuesday, February 26.

Best wishes,

The White House Council on Women & Girls

Engage With The White House About The Sequester

You are invited to join a call with senior White House officials on Tuesday, February 26 at 10:30am EDT to discuss the President’s call for Congress to replace harmful cuts with a balanced approach to deficit reduction.

Participants must preregister for this teleconference at http://ems6.intellor.com?p=600025&do=register&t=1. Once the participant registers, a confirmation page will display dial-in numbers and a unique PIN, and the participant will also receive an email confirmation of this information. This call is off the record and not for press purposes.

President Obama: Automatic Budget Cuts Will Hurt Economy, Slow Recovery, and Put People Out of Work.

Just 7 days from now, Congress might permit a series of severe and automatic budget cuts, called the “sequester,” that will hurt our economic growth, add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls, and threaten military readiness. President Obama said Tuesday morning:

“Now, if Congress allows this meat-cleaver approach to take place, it will jeopardize our military readiness; it will eviscerate job-creating investments in education and energy and medical research. It won’t consider whether we’re cutting some bloated program that has outlived its usefulness, or a vital service that Americans depend on every single day. It doesn’t make those distinctions.”

But, these cuts don’t have to happen — Congress has the power to stop them. The President has called on Congress to find a balanced approach to deficit reduction that combines tax reform with additional spending reforms – an approach that doesn’t harm our economy or the middle class.

View the President’s complete remarks on the sequester here:

A Balanced Plan to Avert the Sequester and Reduce the Deficit

The President and Congressional Democrats have put forward solutions to avoid the sequester’s severe cuts and allow time for both sides to work on a long-term, balanced solution to our deficit challenges.

The President is serious about cutting spending, reforming entitlements and the tax code to reduce the deficit in a balanced way. The question is, will Congressional Republicans come to the table to get something done?

The President’s proposal resolves the sequester and reduces our deficit by over $4 trillion dollars in a balanced way- by cutting spending, finding savings in entitlement programs and asking the wealthiest to pay their fair share. As a result the deficit would be cut below its historic average and the debt would fall as a share of the economy over the next decade. View the President’s plan here.

We can’t just cut our way to prosperity. Even as we look for ways to reduce deficits over the long term, we must grow the economy in a way that strengthens the middle class and everyone willing to work hard to get into it.

We hope that Congressional Republicans come to the table for the sake of middle class families, our national security and our future today.

Deficits as a share of GDP

Giving Every Child a Chance in Life

President Obama was in Chicago on Friday to talk about the importance of making sure every child in America has every chance in life to succeed. Speaking at the Hyde Park Career Academy, which is less than a mile from the Obama’s home in that city, the President laid out a plan to rebuild ladders of opportunity for every American who is willing to work hard and climb them. This includes making sure every child in America has access to high-quality pre-K, and raising the minimum wage so that no family that works hard and relies on a minimum wage is living in poverty. But creating a path into the middle class also means transforming high-poverty communities into places of opportunity that can attract private investment, improve education, and create jobs.

Read the President’s remarks on his plan to make that happen.

Champions of Change: Women Veterans

The White House Champions of Change program highlights the stories and examples of citizens across the country who are “Winning the Future” with projects and initiatives that move their communities forward.

This March, the White House Office of Public Engagement will host a Champions of Change event for Women Veterans to highlight their contributions within the veterans’ community, especially female veterans who served in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn. We know many Women Veterans continue to role model leadership and a dedication to service, often continuing engagement within the veterans’ and military families’ community.

We are asking for your help to identify women veterans that may be “Champions of Change.”

For example, a champion’s work may entail:

Improving health care services available to women and children
Helping women veterans transition into the workforce
Leading programs to improve the well-being of young women
Developing a program to support victims of domestic violence or trauma
Helping engage and support Wounded Warriors transition to new careers
Providing services and support to eliminate homelessness

Nominate a woman veteran as a Champion of Change.

Please submit nominations by midnight on Tuesday, February 26

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Are you on the Sequester cut list ?

02/23/2013 Nativegrl77

ThinkProgress War Room

Budgets are statements of values and priorities. What the GOP is preparing to do in less than a week says a lot about their priorities. Instead of closing tax loopholes and making smart spending cuts, the GOP is going to let damaging across the board spending cuts kick in next Friday. These cuts will not only damage the economy, they’ll hurt individual families and communities across the country.

Check out what eliminating just two giveaways to the wealthy and corporation could pay for. For example, we could avoid painful cuts to investments in jobs and education just by ending a giveaway to corporate jet owners”

And we could stop harmful cuts to children and families with disabilities if we just stopped letting the wealthiest Americans get tax breaks for the vacation homes and yachts:

Instead of asking the wealthiest Americans and special interests like Big Oil and Wall Street to pay their fair share, Republicans are insisting that families, including the most vulnerable among us, shoulder the burden of reducing our deficit and debt.

BOTTOM LINE: There’s still a week left to avert the damaging and painful sequester cuts. All Republicans have to do is agree to a balanced approach that replaces the indiscriminate cuts with both new revenues and smarter, targeted spending cuts.

Evening Brief: Important Stories That You Might’ve Missed

Flying will be even more unpleasant thanks to the sequester (if you’re local airport isn’t simply closed).

House Republicans quietly introduce watered-down Violence Against Women Act.

Ted Cruz goes full Joe McCarthy.

5 important stories in Africa that don’t involve Oscar Pistorious.

Maryland is on the verge of repealing the death penalty.

Here’s 5 ways the sequester might make you sick.

New abortion bill in Indiana mandates two transvaginal probes.

Why taxes must go up.

How Republican activists are trying to use the courts to dismantle decades of progressive victories.

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

From the Middle Class Out

02/22/2013 Nativegrl77

ThinkProgress War Room

Creating an Economy That Works for Everyone

For the last thirty years, we’ve been experiencing one long, failed experiment in so-called trickle-down economics. In practice, this means that the rich have gotten richer (exponentially so) while the middle class has fallen further and further behind. Trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, the one goal that binds the GOP together, utterly failed to trickle down, stifled economic growth, and contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

We need a different model — an economy that grows from the middle class out. What does this mean? How does that work? One of our colleagues, Senior Economist Heather Boushey, lays it all out in a new video:

BOTTOM LINE: The wealthy and corporations simply aren’t paying their fair share so in order to reduce our deficit in a smart way and still make investments in the middle class, we need to get rid of hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful loopholes and giveaways in our tax code.

Evening Brief: Important Stories That You Might’ve Missed

57 terrible consequences of the sequester cuts that the GOP is allowing to kick in next week.

Bitter pill: why medical bills are killing us.

Oops: GOP senator accidentally gets behind Roe v. Wade.

Laura Bush supports marriage equality, she just doesn’t want anyone to know.

One top senator’s latest racist excuse for opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

The public takes President Obama’s side on major issues we need to deal with.

Anti-spending GOP reps wants taxpayer funds to turn George W. Bush’s boyhood home into a national park.

GOP rep won’t support pathway to citizenship because he wants to keep immigrants in “the dirtiest jobs.”

Austerity: still failing.

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Jobs V Loopholes

02/21/2013 Nativegrl77

By ThinkProgress War Room

7 Tax Loopholes the GOP Loves to Love

In less than two weeks the very damaging across the board “sequester” cuts will kick in unless Republicans agree to a replacement that is a balanced compromise including both new revenues from closing tax loopholes and smarter, more targeted spending cuts.

When it was convenient for them to do so, Republicans including Speaker Boehner and Mitt Romney argued vociferously for closing loopholes and ending wasteful giveaways in the tax code. But now that push is coming to shove, these Republicans are refusing to help protect the economy and jobs by replacing the sequester cuts with new revenues from closing loopholes.

This intransigence has real consequences. As the president laid out yesterday, these cuts will cause pain:

So these cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our economy. They will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls. This is not an abstraction — people will lose their jobs. The unemployment rate might tick up again.

Here’s a look at the top seven loopholes and giveaways that Republicans think are more important than protecting our economy, jobs, the middle class, and the most vulnerable among us:

Extra tax breaks enjoyed by the wealthiest Americans — $520 BILLION
Tax break for companies that ship jobs overseas — $168 BILLION
Special tax breaks for the largest oil companies — $25 BILLION
The loophole that allow people like Mitt Romney to pay a lower tax rate than middle-class workers — $21 BILLION
Tax deductions for vacation homes and yachts — $10 BILLION
The corporate jet loophole — $3 BILLION
Special write-offs for horse breeders (aka the Bluegrass Boondoggle) — $126 MILLION

BOTTOM LINE: The Republicans are choosing to protect millionaires and special interests like Big Oil and Wall Street instead of funding our military and programs vital for the middle class and the health of our economy.