You Call This a Budget Deal?

Planned Parenthood may have been spared from the budget deal worked out in Washington over the weekend, but the deal still chomps the royal prong.

The National Science Foundation got its research funding cut by $43 million. Pell college grants and AmeriCorps were spared, but education spending and social programs were cut overall by $5.5 billion. Health care took one of the biggest hits from the Republican House majority. Talking Points Memo lays out the ugly numbers: $1 billion in cuts to programs preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, $600 million in cuts to community health care centers, and $78 million in research on controlling health care costs. (That's one cut I happen to agree with. How do you control health care costs? Here's the answer for free: Establish single-payer public medical insurance.) The GOP gleefully went after a provision of the health care law, eliminating entirely funding for health co-ops created by the law.

Funding for the Environmental Protection Agency was reduced by 16 percent, along with a $49 million cut to climate change programs and $149 million reduction in the budget of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. And, I also understand, grey wolves been taken off the endangered species list, allowing states to make lots of money to issue hunting licenses for them and allowing the feds not to spend money protecting them.

And then there is high-speed rail funding. While federal spending on high-speed rail from now until September 30 has been eliminated and $400 million of the funding appropriated for the program in the 2010 fiscal year has been rescinded, the Federal Railroad Commission has sought to soothe fears of rail advocates by saying that $2.5 billion appropriated by Congress for Fiscal Year 2010 means that there is now $2 billion in high-speed rail funding available, down from the $2.4 billion previously available because of the previously mentioned rescission of $400 million, with $100 million apparently already spent.

So, it turns out, we were actually kind of lucky.

Did everything get cut? No - military spending is up by $5 billion!

No two ways about it: This deal sucks. It does nothing to ensure the social well-being of the country and it does not spread the sacrifice fairly. The military spending increase, in case you haven't noticed - and you probably haven't - is only $500 million less than the education, health and labor cuts!

If I were in Congress, I'd vote against it.