House Republicans still think slashing a quarter of a billion dollars from the Social Security Administration budget is a wonderful idea that will cause the American people to shower their love upon them! (Or, more precisely, get them to appear "serious" before the corporate donors who've had their knives out for Social Security since the beginning.) $250 million isn't much in the context of some $4 trillion annually in federal spending, but spending on people always gives you bang for your buck, and that missing $250 million means more field office closures and more obstacles to good Americans getting the help they need. And cutting SSA spending hardly seems like a good idea when more and more Americans use Social Security. Hence the Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell Congress to abandon its plan to cut the Social Security Administration's budget. Remember: you worked for it, you paid into it, you fought for it, and you deserve to use it when you need it -- far more than right-wingers "deserve" to experiment upon us with their twisted anti-government philosophy.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Census Bureau to stop counting prisoners as "inhabitants" of the districts in which they've been imprisoned, then CREDO still helps you do that. Yes, it may sound commonsensical to count prisoners as being a part of a district in which they're "living" more or less, but prison isn't a "home" in any meaningful sense, and prisoners already serve a sentence, with the loss of freedom that sentence requires; heaping additional, unearned punishments upon them -- such as diluting their political power by putting them in a district where they're counted but unheard -- is unconstitutional and cruel. You'd also find it easy to imagine, I'd think, states deciding to locate prisons in particular districts for the express purpose of diluting the political power either of prisoners or that district's other residents. It also stands to reason that, in a nation that still profiles people of color -- and imprisons them in numbers disproportionate to their population -- the Census Bureau's current practice is also de facto racist.
Finally, the EPA is re-evaluating its car fuel efficiency standards, and car-manufacturing corporations have started to push back against them -- though the automakers openly supported the standards years ago, and have had no discernable trouble meeting them thus far. It looks more and more to me like they only supported the standards (which would rise to nearly 55 MPG by 2025) so they could renege on that support during the planned 2016 review -- or that the Obama Administration may only have won automaker support by wink-wink pledging to cut the standards in that review. Of course, we get a say, too, hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell the EPA to keep fuel efficiency standards right where they are. And if folks tell you that automakers won't meet the 2025 target because people just prefer light trucks in greater quantities than the EPA thought, remind them that a) automakers said they'd do it; b) the technology exists for them to do it; c) it's a bit rich to act like automakers have nothing to do with consumer "preferences"; and d) that's not the can-do American spirit.
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