In mid-April the Peoria Journal Star ran a story about a Tea Party rally that, from the looks of the crowd pictured, barely had more people than the journalists covering it. That’s OK, but there had been mostly silence about a series of labor rallies of more than 600 people at the County Courthouse. The paper’s uncritical coverage and the Tea Partiers themselves beg the question: What would a Tea Party-type budget reform mean for Peoria? Specifically, how would these take-no-prisoners deficit hawks attack Peoria County, which, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, received $1.7 billion in federal spending on direct expenditures or obligations in 2009?

There are hints in U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan’s House plan, which claims to cut $4 trillion from federal spending over the next decade by sacrificing programs (two-thirds of which come from programs serving people of limited means). But the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says “by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.” Further, fact-checking by theWashington Post found Ryan’s proposal has “dubious assertions, questionable assumptions and fishy figures.” Most sobering, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimates the Republican budget plan would cost Americans 1.7 million jobs by 2014 – with 900,000 jobs lost next year. The progressive Economic Policy Institute is more pessimistic, predicting a loss of 2.2 million jobs in two years.

In mid-April, the House of Representatives passed this assault on vital programs, including Medicare, to pay for massive giveaways to millionaires – while doing almost nothing to balance the budget. The bill was passed without even a single Democratic vote. U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Peoria) voted for the measure.

Of course, a budget that’s passed the House isn’t law. But the danger is that the Senate will try to compromise in a way that meets Tea Party-swayed Republicans halfway. Why? Ryan (and Schock and Bobby Schilling [R-Rock Island] and 235 other House Republicans) would change Medicare so seniors would receive vouchers to help buy private insurance, vouchers that eventually would lose value as health-care costs increase. They’d fundamentally change or gut popular government services, such as Medicaid (half of which spending goes to long-term care for the aged), food stamps, school lunches and even open-government initiatives such as USASpending.gov. That way, Ryan, Schock and the rest can continue 30 years of tax breaks for the wealthy – which were never affordable or effective.

In Peoria County, the U.S. Government spent $1,740,319,663 in Fiscal Year 2009, according to the Census Bureau’s posting of the Consolidated Federal Funds Report. That’s $4.7 million per day in Peoria County – $195,833 per hour. Some Tea Partiers might argue that that’s proof of waste – unless they or someone they know is affected, of course.

Those numbers include more than $474 million in Social Security retirement, disability and survivors payments, and about $399 million in Medicare hospital, supplementary and drug payments. There’s $9.3 million in school lunch and the food for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) programs, and $30 million for highway construction.

Also, an additional $2 billion is spent in Peoria County for items listed as defense spending, direct loans and insurance, which includes $344 million in defense spending, $50 million in student loans, $2.5 million in small business loans, and $158 million in crop and flood insurance. Add the $1.7 billion in direct expenditures and the $2 billion in defense and other federal assistance, and the total is $3.8 billion ($3,835,304,606, to be exact). Put another way, Peoria County has a population of 186,494 people, so the federal government spends $20,565.29 per capita annually here.

Some Tea Party folks might say, “Give ME $20,000 and I’ll make do.” But would the elderly make do? Would highways be built? Would youngsters get lunch at schools? Would farmers cope with floods or worse?

“We can’t just think of ourselves,” President Obama said. “We have to think about the country. We have to think about our fellow citizens with whom we share a community.”

There is a deficit and a debt. The current budget (Fiscal Year 2011) spends about $3.5 trillion and receives $2 trillion in tax revenues. The difference of $1.5 trillion ($1,500 billion) is this year’s deficit. The U.S. Treasury must borrow that from bondholders, even foreign lenders. The recent compromise that cut spending $38 billion was much ado about nothing. It reduces this year’s deficit from $1,500 billion to $1,462 billion: big deal.

In Washington, politicians claim to be worried about deficits but conveniently forget why they happened. Most recently, the Great Recession increased unemployment and, therefore, cut income tax receipts, and the Bush and Obama administrations both borrowed more to bail out banks and Wall Street. (Politicians are inadvertently or intentionally misreading public opinion about the issue. Most polling shows more concern with jobs creation than the deficit. In March, a CBS News Poll found that 51% of the country finds the economy/jobs as the most important problem, compared with 7% for the deficit/debt.)

A third contributor to the deficit/debt dates to the 1980s: Giving tax breaks to wealthy individuals or corporations – the benefactors of elected officials. The national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan, and tripled again under George W. Bush. And now the GOP is worried – and still wants to repeat past policy errors

In 1981, the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) said, “The big tax cut was too big, and there is now no revenue growth left. And so the politics of the coming decade risk becoming an endless, joyless, pointless squabble about how big the budget cuts must be in order that the budget deficit not be even bigger.”

So concern about the deficit should concede that creating more loopholes for taxpayers who can afford to share the cost of government programs is harmful, volunteer to share any sacrifices made (again, billions is spent in Peoria County), and consider that a jobs program would make unemployed Americans taxpayers and consumers again.

“The underlying problem isn’t the budget deficit,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently wrote. “It’s that so much income and wealth are going to the top that most Americans don’t have the purchasing power to sustain a strong recovery.”

Contact Bill at bill.knight@hotmail.com