Republicans are very serious about convincing Americans they're not the same old Republicans who hate everything. Case in point: they're voting on the Ryan budget in the House this week -- the budget that blows up Medicare, the one that gives more big tax cuts to the rich, the one that cuts good social programs to the bone. Yup, sure looks like they've turned over a new leaf to me. NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your House Rep to vote "no" on the Ryan budget and "yes" on the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget, a.k.a. the "Back to Work" budget, which would do a lot of terrific things, like taxing Wall Street speculation, hiking taxes on millionaire and billionaire income to over 45%, treating investment income the same as dividend income, cutting corporate deductions for moving jobs overseas, and letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices. Also, the "Back to Work" budget would simultaneously invest $2 trillion in three years and cut the deficit. If you invest in people, and not some CEO's gilded plumbing, you can do both.
Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell the Obama Administration's Department of Labor to extend minimum wage and overtime protections to home health care workers. Yes, these laws currently exclude these workers, though they do some of the hardest work anyone could do, which you know if you've ever taken care of a very sick relative. Now home health care CEOs claim that if we gave minimum wage and overtime to home health care workers, it would kill their business. Let me put this succinctly: if giving your workers minimum protections will kill your business, then your business deserves to die. And letting home health care workers make minimum wage and overtime will not only result in better care for sick folk, it'll result in fewer workers having to resort to public assistance programs like food stamps. Don't the folks who complain about people on public assistance all the time want fewer people on public assistance? Or do they prefer to dream that they, too, could make a lot of money exploiting other people? I prefer to believe the best of Americans, but some people make that so hard.
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