Barack H. Obama wrote an editorial today:
Go 'big' on debt deal
By President Obama
USA TODAY Forum
July 21, 2011
Neither party is blameless for the decisions that led to this debt, but both parties have a responsibility to come together and solve the problem.
Except that the Republicans are far more to blame, given that they cut taxes with a chainsaw and spent federal treasure as if it were mere sawdust on empire and megabusiness. But, that would be too partisan to mention, no? Partisan, as in acting like a member of the party which you head. Some bankster's or wingnut's fee-fees might get hurt.
Every day, families are figuring out how to stretch their paychecks a little further, sacrifice what they can't afford, and budget only for what's truly important. It's time for Washington to do the same.
The federal government is like a family the same way that corporations are people and that money is speech.
tax relief
Frank Luntz, that you?
Still, some of the cuts would target worthwhile programs that do a lot of good for our country.
Wow, sounds like just the right kind of stuff to cut! Like, stimulus spending to get the economy going, put people to work, help them have the opportunity to raise their standard of living, and set up the conditions to have tax revenue close the budget gap — we can't afford any of that crap. Cut, cut, cut!
Before [...] Before [...] Before we ask seniors to pay more for Medicare, we should ask people like me to give up tax breaks they don't need and never asked for.
Except the deals you're encouraging aren't "before," they're "in exchange for." Or even the reverse chronology, first the cuttin' cart, and then maybe at some indeterminate future date we'll argue about some as-yet-undefined revenue horse.
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But right now, we have the opportunity to do something big and meaningful.
Yeah, like repair our roads and bridges, safeguard and celebrate our parks and preserves, build a nationwide fast passenger railroad, modernize our power grid, switch from extractive energy to renewable power, educate the next generation, provide our elders with an enjoyable retirement at a respectable age, revitalize small manufacturing, shrink our hideous global military and economic empire, launch a new space adventure, bust the trusts of our day and put in place the rules to actually make enterprise more free... and in so doing, put money in the pockets of people with modest means doing meaningful things, get investment money out of corporate war chests through workers' hands, and restore the conditions for balancing the federal budget — the very thing that all this "debt ceiling" hoopla is supposedly about in the first place.
But no! Austerity. We "go big" on securing even more money and power for the very wealthiest captains of industry, double down on putting the screws to the poor and middle class, and beseech them to thank Big Brother for so benevolently and charitably prying their resources out of their hands so that he can wield an ever-embiggened crowbar.
Know what would be meaningful? D, for Delano. He explained it just fine, in terms everyone can understand. Instead, we get H, for Hoover. Barack Hoover Obama.
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The irony is that if Obama were to pull a Hoover in the sense of doing nothing, by ignoring the unconstitutional and already implicitly Congressionally superseded "debt limit" and by letting the Bush tax cuts for fat cats expire, that too would start to balance the budget and solve the woes Obama seems to deem so important.