From The Raw Story:
The House Republicans have released a document with its recommendations for "Operation Offset," which details how to pay for the recovery from Katrina without eliminating the tax cuts for the wealthy they've instituted in the last few years.
The top suggestions, and the biggest immediate savings, are to delay the Welfare for Drug Companies Medicare Prescription Drug Bill for one year to save nearly $31 billion, and to remove all pork-barrel earmarked funds from the recently passed highway bill to save $25 billion.
The document breaks out the recommendations into the different sections of the Federal budget. Those top savings above are part of the 69% of the total cuts in Title I, "Tough Options." The next greatest savings, 21%, are achievable by cuts in Title III, "Reprioritization." Title IV, "Corporate Welfare" provides 5% of the cuts.
Title I: Tough Choices for Tough Times. It's laudable that they will recommending cutting the earmarked pork projects, although a little bit of fantasy involved in budgeting on actually being able to get the Republican dominated House and Senate to pass this. Fortunately, the Republicans don't count on this in the future: 80% of the ten-year savings comes from Medicare and Medicaid.
Title III: Reprioritization of Federal Spending. Each of the other sections of the budgeted is targeted for 10-16 cuts. This section with the benign-sounding name has 65 cuts suggested.The top fantasy savings of $8.5 billion will be achieved if we just "Verify Income of Earned Income Tax Credit Participants." This figure is based on the belief that 1/3 of the total amount spent on EIC is going to people who are lying about their income. After all, we all know that they are poor because they are lazy and dishonest, right? And poor people cheating on their taxes is probably a bigger cost to the government than rich people doing so, don't you think?
Title V: Eliminating Corporate Welfare. With a title like that, you'd think some big boondoggles like no-bid Halliburton contracts were on the chopping block, right? Think again. Many of the items on this list are environmental programs: renewable energy, clean coal, researching energy efficient cars and trucks, hydrogen fuel development, etc. Whether or not you believe that Katrina was bad because of climate change, we do know that our fossil fuel use is changing the climate in a way that more severe weather is in our future. But let's eliminate funding that might reduce this tendency in order to pay for the damage cause by severe weather, OK?
Meanwhile, permanently eliminating the Estate Tax for those 500 or so people affected by it every year is still on the agenda.