Schumer: Tea Party Wants Government Shutdown

By U.S. News Staff

April 6, 2011 RSS Feed Print

Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said the Tea Party members in Congress want a government shutdown and that they are pulling House Speaker John Boehner away from a budget compromise. "The Tea Party just continues to pull Speaker Boehner further back and back and back," Schumer told ABC's Good Morning America. "They're the people who say they don't want compromise. They're the people who say they relish a shutdown." Schumer, the chair of the Democratic Policy Committee and a key player in the budget battle, said Republicans and Democrats disagree on the right amount of budget cuts--Democrats want $33 billion and Republicans want $61 billion--and where the cuts should come from. Schumer said if Boehner can resist pressure from the Tea Party, "then I think we can have an agreement." The New York senator also hopes a government shutdown--which could come at the end of this week--can be avoided.

Tags:
deficit and national debt,
John Boehner,
Congress,
Chuck Schumer,
Tea Party

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Jsmith: If you are going to have government programs, you simply must have taxes on everyone, which are high enough to pay for them. That is all there is to it. Without adequate taxes on everyone - individuals and corporations, including on the wealthy and those who want to become wealthy, we would have to eliminate the following:

- no Federal Income Tax

- no Social Security

- no Medicare

- no Medicaid

- no Pensions for career Government civilian officials

- no Pensions for career Military

- no large standing Army, Navy, and Air Force

- complete reliance on State Militias for national defense

- no treaties which entangle the U.S. overseas

- no foreign wars

- no Student Financial Aid

- no adequate maintenance of the interstate highway system - that would be up to the States

- no EPA

- no FDA

- no farm subsidies

- no government grants and research subsidies for colleges and universities

- no National Endowment for the Arts

-no Departments of Education and Energy

The list goes on and on. The result would be a catastrophe of the sort America has not seen since the time of the "Grapes of Wrath" during the Great Depression. Is this what you want for America? I sure hope not.

Old Soldier of MO 8:42AM July 31, 2011

"Making the hard choices" is only a euphamism - a code phrase meaning "eliminating Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and not implementing Obama's Health Care Reform."

What are conservatives thinking. If they succeed, it will cause a humanitarian catastrophe.

The poor will find themselves living in 3rd world conditions, and there will be a massive die-off of both the poorest of the poor and the elderly ("Medicare Seniors.")

Listen, Tea Party members: The America you seem to want - of self-sustaining extended families "taking care of their own all by themselves," while living together or in close proximity in small towns and on family farms is gone forever. It died out in the decades after of World War II. You will never be able to get it back.

Old Soldier of MO 8:22AM July 31, 2011

Schumer is a moron.

He has no idea what anyone is thinking. His sole role in Congress is, apparently, to build strawmen that no one in the press challenges.

He says this crap because (1) the left doesn't think about anything he says, they just believe it, and (2) he doesn't have a plan besides raising taxes even higher than the confiscatory levels we have now.

I am not your slave, Chuck Schumer. I will never be your slave. My money, which I earned through hard work, is mine. Keep your paws off.

Jsmith of VA 1:34PM April 14, 2011

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