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With five Republicans joining Democrats in opposition, the Senate easily rejected a House-passed budget plan Wednesday calling for deep cuts in domestic appropriations and major restructuring of Medicare, the government-backed healthcare program for the elderly.
While I am totally in favor of deficit reduction, there are items that I deem untouchable, such as medical care for our wounded soldiers, and medical care for our seniors. This GOP attempt to gut Medicare as we know it violates decency itself. Want to balance the budget? There are plenty of places to do that, beginning with the oil companies, the military industrial complex, and corporations such as GE, which did not pay a penny in taxes last year, and even got giveaways from the government to boot. These are your real welfare chiselers, not our senior citizens. And for those who loudly profess to the world to be Christians, I offer you this - Jesus himself said that whatever is done unto "the least of these" is done unto him. He never said to give money away to the rich, while telling the poor, disabled, and elderly to suck it up.
And, on a religious note, I happen to believe that Jesus will return, and I also believe that, as it says in the Bible, when he does return, some will gain everlasting life, while others will gain everlasting shame. Jesus has never been a personal cosmic gofer for the monied elites, who stand up in churches and wave, saying "look at how righteous I am", while at the same time, forcing only the poor, disabled, and elderly to bear the burden of balancing the budget. And Jesus has some words for them too, which they had better heed:
"Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal."
-Matthew 25:45-46
I bring the religious aspect of this up in order to expose the false teaching that Jesus makes people wealthy, and that the poor are poor because they do not have the love of God in their hearts. Now should the government force rich people to give all their money away? Of course not, but if the love of Jesus is truly in them, they would do it on their own. Their greed is their undoing. Why attempt to amass a fortune for one's own self, when a generation of life is no more than a speck of "forever"? But that is what the monied elite do, and that is what ultimately makes them such tragic and pathetic people. They would choose to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, the disabled, and the elderly, and not ask GE or the oil companies to do their own fair share. And this, I am certain, is something that Jesus will remember, when the end of days finally arrives.
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