Should Congress have begun working on cutting expenditures, including entitlements? Sure. Can you blame both Republicans and Democrats? Yes. Just how equal or unequal is the intransigence of each party? While Democrats do treat entitlement programs as sacred cows, the Republicans have a broader theme: they go after culturally vulnerable programs in their efforts to remake America into their idea of the 1950s. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were to submit a bill to bring Howdy Doody back.
Everything Republicans want to cut has to do with rolling back the New Deal and the Sixties. They want to restrict women’s freedom by cutting programs of women’s health, job training, education, etc. The idea is to make women dependent on men again.
They want to reduce spending that helps minorities, esp Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. Again, the purpose is to return us to the Fifties when a Black person could not walk down the street outside the “Black part of town”.
Public schools are targets because they are no longer the purveyors of a culture we might label Middle American: middle class, Protestant, native-born, and very WASP. For some bizarre reasons, lots of Catholics, Jews, and Mormons join them – self-destructive, I would say.
Anything to do with conservation has to be couched in terms of hunting and fishing for the GOP. Nature is viewed as something to be developed and owned, not as something of value in and of itself.
I’ll go on at a later date. Just remember, the Republican of today is ideological: militantly Christian, anti-union, anti-intellectual, xenophobic and nativist, and generally Southern with a lower-than-average educational level. Most do not “believe” in evolution, thinking it is a faith like theirs, something you don’t need evidence for but merely have “faith” in.