David Price: “You know, our friends over at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities have asked the rather obvious question, where…”

“You know, our friends over at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities have asked the rather obvious question, where did that $9 trillion go? Remember that fiscal reversal? And the answer to that is that the biggest chunk of it did go to those Bush tax cuts. A good portion of it has gone to increased defense and security spending after 9/11. Some of it comes from the bad economy and the fact that we have had a very sluggish recovery. {time} 1900 But you know what is not on the list is the sort of cuts that are being proposed by our Republican friends in this reconciliation bill, and that is domestic discretionary spending or for that matter domestic nondiscretionary spending. The country is not going broke because we are spending too much on food stamps, and the country is not going broke because we are doing too much cancer research or having too many after school programs, and yet that is where the Republicans choose to get religion on fiscal responsibility, in the very areas where the blame does not lie. So this Hurricane Katrina exercise is just more of the same. They are saying that the offsets for Hurricane Katrina are going to come from these areas that people desperately need, while leaving the main culprits in our budget meltdown untouched. That is simply unacceptable.”