Fools on the Hill.

When the entire financial system went into meltdown, largely because of the very policies which the Republicans had been espousing for the past thirty years - less regulation, less taxation, allow the market to work things out, - I had expected them to be in a bit of a pickle as to how to move forward. After all, almost everything they had been pushing for the past three decades had just turned into shit in their hands.

So I wondered what their actual budget, as opposed to the original one they published with no numbers, might actually state their policies to be.

It turns out they've decided to behave as if the market collapse didn't happen and as if the principles they have always ran on are as sound today as they ever were.

Just in time for April Fools' Day, and in time for congressional debate on the Obama administration's non-pamphletized budget proposal, comes the "details" GOP members failed to supply last week. Virtually every element contained within is a bad rehash of all the failed Republican ideas from the last couple of decades. In short, it's like the return of a bad headache: smaller government, lower taxes, drill everything, and trust us.

Specifically, the new GOP budget proposal involves killing the recently-passed stimulus package in 2010, killing the Obama administration's budget proposal outright, placing a freeze on all non-defense and non-veteran spending, privatizing Medicare, cutting corporate tax rates to 25 percent, and increasing offshore oil drilling.

The GOP plan to privatize Medicare, specifically, has inspired hoots from virtually every corner.

It really is like they have learned nothing. They are actually planning more tax cuts for the rich whilst gutting Medicare. That sounds like an approach the Republicans have never offered before.

Austan Goolsbee, a member of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, told MSNBC that, "thought it was most appropriate that this thing came out on April Fools' Day because this thing is the biggest April Fools' Joke and cruelest that we have had in years. If you look at what they are doing ... they are calling for putting in a multi-trillion dollar additional tax cut for the highest income Americans, they are now talking about privatizing Medicare turning it into a voucher so that they can cut it substantially. That's not the reform of an entitlement - it is the gutting of a program."

That's a worse April Fools joke than Miss Universe's visit to Guantanamo bay.

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Tags: Republicans, budget