As we first discussed a week ago, Rep. Cantor (E-VA)'s new bill, H.R. 3102, would cut food stamps by $40 billion over the next decade -- or twice as much as the House originally wanted to cut them back in June, and ten times as much as the Senate's Farm Bill would cut them. That $40 billion figure also represents approximately infinity times as much as I'd cut food stamps at a time like this, when real unemployment in this country is still just under 14% and corporations still won't hire folks despite their record-breaking profits! Imagine even considering such cuts, when almost one in four Americans report having some trouble putting food on the table! Then again, this is the Congress that actually increased farm subsidies to undeserving big corporations; it really is like they're telling us, the American people, to go screw ourselves. Well, the American people voted them into their jobs, and can always vote them out again, gerrymandered districts or not. The AFSCME helps you tell your Reps to reject Mr. Cantor's heartless bill.
Oh, but that's not the only wreckage Congress plans to leave: soon they'll vote on H.R. 1526, the so-called Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act (clearly the bill's authors forgot to put the word "healthily" at the beginning), which would set aside about a quarter of the land in our national forests as, ahem, "Reserve Revenue Areas" where loggers could go in, and dedicate some of that revenue toward rural schools. I can imagine the right-wing arguments behind this one -- you wouldn't want to be against rural schools, right? But of course it's entirely possible to oppose H.R. 1526 and still care about (and fund!) rural schools, because turning parts of our national forests into big logging areas isn't the only way to fund rural schools in areas where the logging industry has lagged -- which funding was the original purpose of the Secure Rural Schools Act that expired in 2012. You know that 91% tax bracket I keep going on about? Surely we could break off a piece of that for rural schools in depressed areas. So the Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose H.R. 1526 and thus keep our national forests safe and clean.
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