A little Costco thingie, a Jabra Cruiser II, that lets you make or receive “hands free” phone calls has turned out to have an added feature that is changing our lives. It will connect wirelessly with an iPhone and play whatever you have through the car radio. With a drive of about an hour each way from Kaaawa into town and back, it’s opened up a whole new world.

I now start the day at the iTunes Store, update podcasts that I’ve subscribed to, and sync them with my phone.

Now, in addition to HPR, we can choose to listen to the latest from Rachel Maddow, Democracy Now, and a bunch of others.

That was how we happened to listen to Rachel Maddow’s riff on the budget proposal from the Congressional Progressive Caucus in a program originally broadcast last Friday (4/22). You can find the transcript online.

Substantively, the overall effect of the Paul Ryan Republican budget over the next 10 years would be to add $6 trillion more to the national debt. Add, to make the debt $6 trillion worse. That‘s what happens when you cut rich people‘s taxes back to what they were in the ‘30s.

And while Republicans just lard all of that onto the deficit and the debt, they are simultaneous saying they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling. So, they are very happy to raise the debt, but they‘re not all interested in raising the thing that allows us to take on more debt.

In metaphor land, that would be steering your car directly at a brick wall while going very fast and refusing to turn the wheel. In the Beltway, what this is called is courage.

Of the comprehensive budget plans released in Congress so far this year, the one that actually does the most about the deficit, that balances the budget 20 years earlier than Paul Ryan even tries to, that budget would let the Bush tax cuts expire. It would raise taxes on the very richest people in the country. It would cut defense spending which after all has doubled in the past year and was—sorry, in the past decade and was already the biggest thing in the discretionary budget. It would end those subsidies for the little orphan oil companies, and on health care costs, which is still the budget eating dragon in America, what we would get is a public option.

How does that sound compared to cutting taxes for the rich and dismantling Medicare thing?

She then interviewed Matt Miller, a columnist for the Washington Post. They discussed why a plan like this, which would balance the budget far sooner than either the GOP or Obama budgets, has such a hard time getting media traction.

Miller commented:

the basic mode of coverage, I think, is that, you know, the sort of establishment press act as stenographers to power. And you have the mainstream Democratic position obviously represented by the president and you have the opposition represented by Paul Ryan. And that sort of defines what the boundaries of debate are going to be because the media faithfully reflects those two poles of debate.

So, if you‘re are coming from outside those poles, or in this case, you know, what‘s interesting about the Progressive Caucus is they are more fiscally conservative than the current debate but they‘re more socially liberal in terms of investments they make in education, in infrastructure and jobs and they‘re more progressive in terms of what they‘re doing on upper income earners in the tax code. The Beltway, because they‘re not the official spokesman of the party like the president is, they tend to get ignored. And so, they have to be a little bit more creative publicity-wise to get attention for their ideas.

I would encourage you to watch Maddow’s segment on the Progressive Caucus budget, or read the transcript.

Then check out The People’s Budget at the Progressive Caucus web site, which includes technical background papers, and check comments on the caucus Facebook page.

Thanks to the Maui Democrats for reproducing this chart with data on the budget deficit, showing clearly that most of it can be attributed to the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic downturn, and measures taken to stimulate an economic recovery.

You might want to examine that chart along with “10 graphs that explain the state of our taxes,” from The Atlantic.

Both informative and challenging.