Mitts' Easy Ones

    There it is in a nutshell. The top five things Mitt will defund to get to that trillion dollars. The easy ones.
I'm going to dismiss the Affordable Care Act for this blog and write about it at a different time. There are some very good things in it and some not so good things but its a well known fact that doing away with it now would actually raise the deficit.
    That leaves Planned Parenthood, a program that last year performed 4.2M STD/STI tests, 3.6M contraception services, 1.5M cancer screenings, 1.1M pregnancy tests and prenatal services and, yes, 300,000 legal abortions without using federal funds.
    NPR/PBS, which consists of 900 community run radio stations and 354 community run TV stations.
    NEA, which distibutes grants to museums, theater and dance groups and historical societies throughout the country. Ohio received 13 grants this year, 5 in Columbus. (state-by-state grants can be found here: http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/11grants/states2/index_states2.html)
    Amtrak, which serves 30M riders a year and employs over 20,000 people.
    So according to Mitt, if we defund these programs and services that are used every single day of the year we should be well on our way to that trillion dollars. Not quite. These programs account for .0016% of that trillion dollars. Actually if we cut all these funds we will lower the deficit a trillion dollars in 750 years.
    $1.6B, thats what we pay for these programs every year and that amount has gone down for 5 years in a row. $1.6B, damn that sounds like alot of money, and it is, but its still 28 times less than what we shelled out out in foreign aid last year. Hell, we gave Israel and Egypt $3.6B in military aid alone. We handed over $8.7B to Afghanistan, one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Here's an idea, lets cut the aid to Pakistan in half and use it to fund these programs, they hate our guts anyway.
    4 of the top 10 ten companies in the US are oil cos. We gave them $4B.
    We subsidized farmers to the tune of $22B last year with 67% of that money going to millionaires. Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springstein, Ted Turner and Scottie Pippin were some of the recipients of your tax dollars. Oh, and lets not forget the 23 members of Congress who received farm subsidies. I'm sure they're grateful.
    Here's a good one, on average, millionaires write-off $3.5B a year in gambling debts. The average debt incurred by the gambling millionaires: $504,000.
    So in Mitts word we need to end the services and programs that save lives, transport and employ Americans, and sometimes just make our lives a little better. The easy ones.

    As for that money we borrow from China, that goes to pay the interest we owe for the unfunded Iraq war. $554B to be exact.
   
   Foreign aid info is easily found with a google search. Millionaire info came a report put together by Sen.Tom Coburn, a conservative republican from Oklahoma. http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=bb1c90bc-660c-477e-91e6-91c970fbee1f