Robert Creamer
Earth to Boehner... come in! When you look carefully at Republican Speaker John Boehner's spending proposal for the rest of 2011 you'd think these guys must have been hanging out on one of those newly-discovered exo-planets on the outer edger of our solar system.
The Republican proposal, HR1, actually proposes cuts in the Head Start program that would mean:
- 218,000 children from low income families will lose Head Start/Early Head Start services;
- 16,000 Head Start/Early Head Start classrooms will close;
- 55,000 Head Start/Early Head Start teachers and staff will lose their jobs;
- 150,000 low-income families and their children will lose assistance in paying for child care.
They say they need to make these cuts because we must "tighten our belts" to cut spending because "America is broke." But at the very same time they voted to cut Head Start, the Republicans voted tocontinue $4 billion worth of subsidies to Big Oil. That's right, they want to continue to hand over $4 billion of the taxpayers' money to companies like Exxon-Mobil, the most profitable company in human history.
These subsidies are suppose to provide an incentive for them to produce more oil -- as if the price of oil that closed yesterday at $105.02 per barrel does not do the trick.
In the last quarter of 2010, Exxon-Mobil's profits surged 53% to $9.25 billion on the strength of rising oil prices and increased demand for petroleum products. That means Exxon-Mobil is earning profit at a rate of about $37 billion per year.
