If you ever had any doubt who the new crop of house Republicans were fighting for (hint: its not the American people), doubt no longer.

Republicans unveiled a budget plan on Wednesday that proposed a $1.6 billion cut to the Environmental Protection Agency, an agency whose authority they have sought to curtail, while business trade groups have complained about the burden placed on them by agency regulations. Politico also reported that the GOP’s proposal would hit the Energy Department hard, with a proposal to cut energy efficiency and renewable energy programs in half.

Rep. Fred Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has said he favors gutting EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions with a “legislative fix” rather than simply denying it funds. (See our overview of Upton’s positions on energy.) He told the Wall Street Journal that his disagreement with the EPA is: “You don’t subsidize different forms of power — you let the market run on its own.”

Energy subsidies are not a new thing, and efforts to remove them for oil and gas companies have repeatedly failed in recent years.

This week, when Senate Democrats wrote a letter challenging GOP lawmakers to end to tax subsidies for oil and gas companies—an agenda item that President Obama also referenced in his State of the Union speech—Republicans balked and equated ending those subsidies with raising taxes, which would “destroy American jobs.” (via)

According to Republicans in the house, when subsidies are for big oil, they are “job saving”, and removing them would be “taxes” but if they are subsides for renewable energy, then they are “wasteful spending”, and you “can’t pick winners.”

In a world ruled by logic we wouldn’t subsidize any company, and would simply seek to make sure the true cost of each industry was payed for by that company. So the products that polluted and destroyed would be more expensive than the ones that were clean and sustainable. Then we let the “invisible hand” of the market do the rest.

That is so far from what actually happens, the dirtiest companies get the most benefits, and the clean companies are unable to compete because of the system that is in place that favors the dirty ones. If coal power plants had to pay for all the asthma and mercury poisoning they caused there is no way that coal would be “cheap.”

The worst part is, they want to cut the money from the EPA, one of the most cost effective and successful government agencies. It is estimated that since 1970 the EPA has saved the American tax payer over 22 TRILLION dollars, and saved over 400,000 lives.

I guess if your main political argument is that government doesn’t work, and you find a government program that DOES work, you have to either change your argument or destroy that program. This is bald faced hypocrisy and it puts the health of the American people in danger.

Sick.