Budget talks: This is getting nasty

Exactly. They've already played this card.

 

The areas which can be cut in the budget that are real money are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid (in that order) and defense. One of the reasons, make that the biggest reason, those programs are big is that they are POPULAR. As Obama will learn in 2012, and the Republicans in the elections after that, voters will turn like hungover wolverines on pols who cut them.
Voters don't give a damn about the deficit or the size of government. They use that as a synonym for "the economy sucks," which it does. And which it will continue to do for the foreseeable future, meaning whatever surrender document Obama signs will help him not one bit, nor will Republicans get credit for shrinking government.

 

Not posting this for any particular reason, other than reading this thread and thinking about the cliff we're heading towards made me think about it:

 

It's not just a matter of merely cutting -- it's where you cut, and where you spend. The problem is, we're cutting in areas that are actual investment -- education, infrastructure, and the like. You want a real stimulus? Take $800 billion, make none of it tax cuts, and spend it on fixing every road, bridge and sewer you can. Use it for tuition assistance. Run a deficit now with the idea that it will, indeed, stimulate growth later, if nothing else in the tax money you get back from all the jobs that will support in the short term, and the future growth you will get from being able to watch it rain without fearing your road will buckle, your bridge will collapse and your sewer will overflow.

Yet, the Tea Party has sold the bill of goods that spending on ANYTHING is wrong. Except, perhaps, if it helps their corporate cronies. Let's look at the real money behind the Tea Party. For shorthand, I'll say "Koch Brothers." They are the rich who have determined that disinvestment in the U.S. serves their interest. Why invest in the U.S. when you can easily move stuff to China, and shit all over the Earth and its people with impunity? The Koch Brothers types have decided they don't NEED America anymore. Hell, if things get bad, they can buy extra security.

Meanwhile, this comes as there is spending that we can't help but watch grow -- unless we want to throw the old and sick in the street (thus, the Koch Brothers might need to spend more on security and whatever else is needed to keep them away). The population is aging, and there's nothing anyone in Congress or the President can do about that. Half the voting-age population is over 45 -- the first time that's ever happened in America. Hell, there are a lot of Americans who figure, fuck education, because my kids don't go to school anymore. Just make sure my senior gated community is clean and free of non-old people, and my portfolio is rising, and I'm good.

It cracks me up when people say, oh, we only got out of the Depression because of World War II. You know what World War II was? A MASSIVE government stimulus program that built the U.S.'s industrial base (while, in happy coincidence, destroying most everyone else's). Then we had a MASSIVE government stimulus -- the GI Bill -- so those WWII vets could get an education, get a decent job, and buy a house in the 'burbs that was made possible thanks to another MASSIVE government stimulus -- the interstate highway system, and all the federal stuff that made housing more plentiful and affordable.

So it's hilarious, these older folks who showed up to health reform meetings to yell at people, like the government had been their enemy all their lives. And yet, we can't get a real MASSIVE government stimulus program that will help create the prosperity those folks enjoyed, because the Tea Party rabble, taking Reagan's message to its zenith, has enough people convinced that any government spending is bad. At some point, the U.S. government and economy can't be Gannett -- eventually it has to grow. But we can't even have that conversation, because we have politicians going to the mat and willing to drive the economy off a cliff on something as previously perfunctory as raising the debt ceiling.

 

OK, say you eliminate SS, Medicare and Medicaid. Then what? What are we as a country going to do with all these seniors suddenly thrust into poverty? All the seniors and poor who no longer have access to health care, and are now clogging emergency departments getting free care because the law says you have to treat them there, thus killing a lot of hospitals, or, if you change the law saying hospitals DON'T have to treat them anymore, having the poor spreading disease and dying in the street?

Eliminating all of that sounds great in theory, but in practice, what are you going to do to replace it, other than tell people, good luck?

 

Shorter Ragu: Invent a time machine and take out Franklin Roosevelt before he takes office.

 

I remember the good old days when tea parties were for little girls with imaginary friends.

I just got back from a two-week vacation in wilds of Colorado. During the 10-hour drive out, news on the radio was about the deficit fight and a possible solution. The drive back was about the same; perhaps a little warmer.

 

That's the end game, Bob. Old people are expected to be poor, get sick and die quicker. Poor people are expected to die as children if possible. Ragu is proposing that Americans, on average, live shorter more miserable lives. That's what happened in Russia after the fall of Communism (not that health was great before). It's not the marker of a society going anywhere good, and surely not anywhere democratic in the small "d" sense. I don't think it's policy that can be imposed without the use of raw force.
Ragu's denials that's what he means ring very, very hollow. He's in the thrall of an ideology as inhumane as Lenin's -- just from the opposite direction.

 

True, but FDR certainly got the entitlement ball rolling.

Besides, I was just making a joke.