Impending shutdown is not about balancing the budget

HOUSE REPUBLICANS are trying to claim the White House and Democratic-controlled Senate will be responsible for the federal government shutdown that will occur at midnight tonight unless both houses agree on a continuing resolution.

Don’t fall for it. Just as in Wisconsin, radical elements of the Republican Party are refusing to compromise on budget cuts intended to harm working families. The cuts they have proposed will kill over 700,000 jobs. That’s not according to liberal economists in universities. That is what Wall Street's own Moody’s Research has predicted.

When House Speaker John Boehner was given this estimate and several others that put the total loss even higher, his response was, “So be it.” As far as Boehner and the Republicans are concerned, now that their rich donors have their tax breaks, the only way to balance the budget is to make workers pay with their jobs.

After all, the shutdown won’t hurt those same Republican lawmakers. Members of Congress are considered essential employees who continue getting paid even during the shutdown. The people who won’t get paid are retirees on Social Security or Railroad Retirement, health care providers who treat patients on Medicare, and front-line workers at every agency that assists working families.

“Working people expect our elected leaders to put creating jobs first,” said AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, in a press statement. “Yet since Republicans took power in this Congress, they have done just the opposite. They have passed one bill after another that kills jobs, and they have pursued an ideological agenda that has nothing to do with jobs.”

Call your representatives and let them know you expect them to do the right thing. It is not right to ask the middle class and poor to be the only ones sacrificing during this economic downturn. And it is doubly wrong to use our fiscal crisis as an excuse to pass a budget that would destroy Social Security and Medicare and put hundreds of thousands of workers on the street.