Choreographed Budget Cave In - The Money Party Stabs Citizens in the Back
By Michael Collins
So this is how it is going to be:
"After putting controversial cuts to Social Security and Medicare on the table in negotiations with congressional Republicans over a plan to raise the nation's debt ceiling, President Obama still doesn't have a deal in the works." Chris Moody, Yahoo News, July 7
Who told President Obama to put "controversial cuts on Social Security and Medicare on the table"? Hasn't the president seen his public opinion polling numbers lately? He is consistently at or below 50% job approval. (Image)
Didn't he pay attention to the special congressional election in the highly conservative, long-time Republican upstate New York district that elected a Democrat for the first time in years?
Isn't the President Obama aware that there's an election coming up; that many of the people he is so willingly and openly betraying rely on Social Security to live and Medicare to stay alive?
What planet does he live on? (Unless this is what he truly desires.)
PermalinkChoreographed Budget Cave In - The Money Party Stabs Citizens in the Back
By Michael Collins
So this is how it is going to be:
"After putting controversial cuts to Social Security and Medicare on the table in negotiations with congressional Republicans over a plan to raise the nation's debt ceiling, President Obama still doesn't have a deal in the works." Chris Moody, Yahoo News, July 7
Who told President Obama to put "controversial cuts on Social Security and Medicare on the table"? Hasn't the president seen his public opinion polling numbers lately? He is consistently at or below 50% job approval. (Image)
Didn't he pay attention to the special congressional election in the highly conservative, long-time Republican upstate New York district that elected a Democrat for the first time in years?
Isn't the President Obama aware that there's an election coming up; that many of the people he is so willingly and openly betraying rely on Social Security to live and Medicare to stay alive?
What planet does he live on? (Unless this is what he truly desires.)
Decline and Fall - Why Would Anybody Believe Standard and Poor's?
We are in the midst of a bum's rush - the quick eviction of a less than desirable in an unpleasantly abrupt fashion. The problem is we're the bums. Our eviction from the political process is all based the word of a firm that helped fuel the housing bubble, trigger the financial collapse, and found itself indicted by the State of Connecticut for "unfair, deceptive, and illegal business practices" in 2008.
Last week, credit rating agency Standard and Poor's threatened to downgrade the AAA credit rating of the United States of America by issuing a "negative" finding on the 'long term credit outlook" for the country. The firm's report said that Congress wasn't working diligently enough to reduce the budget deficit. The nation had better fix things quick or, as S&P threatened, "there is at least a one-in-three likelihood that we could lower our long-term rating on the U.S. within two years [2013]." The mere threat of a reduced credit rating brought calls for quick and decisive action on proposals for deficit reduction.
The Era of Pain Avoidance is Over
By Numerian
Erskin Bowles: former Chief of Staff to President Clinton and prior to that a North Carolina businessman. Alan Simpson: at age 79, fourteen years senior to Erskin Bowles, and a former Republican senator from Wyoming. Alice Rivlin: also age 79, and Clinton’s former budget director. Peter Domenici: age 79, and a former Republican senator from New Mexico. These four people are the principal players in a set of competing proposals to do something about the US federal debt. They all have what Washington calls “gravitas”, which is a certain respectability that comes with age and experience. They also display that precious quality of “bipartisanship” which makes them supposedly immune from political bias. That’s why you get these Republican-Democrat partnerships: Simpson-Bowles, and Domenici-Rivlin. You would trust these people, wouldn’t you, to give you the cold, hard truth that politicians cannot deliver?
You shouldn’t. These people are good at delivering cold, hard truths in terms of areas of the budget to cut, and new sources of revenue to tap, which together over the long run will bring deficits down to zero and reduce the interest burden of the national debt to something manageable. But they won’t give you a vision of America under these new fiscal conditions. Reading through their proposals, we are left to imagine what America would be like in such a permanent state of austerity.
XML Feeds