We are at a pivotal moment in American history, and many Americans watching the deficit talks in Washington are confused, perplexed, angry and frustrated.
This country, which has paid its debts from Day 1, must pay its debts. Anyone who says it is not a big deal for this country to default clearly does not understand what he or she is talking about. This is a nation whose faith and credit has been the gold standard of countries throughout the world. Some people simply say we're not going to pay our debt, that there's nothing to really worry about. Those are people who are wishing our economy harm for political reasons, and those are people whose attitudes will have terrible consequences for virtually every working family in this country in terms of higher interest rates, in terms of significant job loss, in terms of making a very unstable global economy even more unstable.
Our right-wing friends in the House of Representatives have given us an option. What they have said is end Medicare as we know it and force elderly people, many of whom don't have the money, to pay substantially more for their health care. So when you're 70 under their plan and you get sick and you don't have a whole lot of income, we don't know what happens to you. They forget to tell us that if their plan was passed you're going to have to pay a heck of a lot more for the prescription drugs you're getting today. They we're going to throw millions of kids off health insurance. If your mom or dad is in a nursing home and that nursing home bill is paid significantly by Medicaid and Medicaid isn't paying anymore, they forgot to tell us what happens to your mom or dad in that nursing home. What happens?
And what happens today if you are unemployed and you're not able to get unemployment extension? What happens if you are a middle-class family desperately trying to send their kids to college and you make savage cuts to Pell grants and you can't go to college? What does it mean for the nation if we are not bringing forth young people that have the education that they need? They forgot to tell us that. And if you are one of the growing number of senior citizens in this country who are going hungry, they want to cut nutrition programs. And on and on it goes. Every program that has any significance to working families, the sick, the elderly, the children, the poor, they are going to cut in the midst of a recession when real unemployment is already at 15 percent and the middle class is disappearing and poverty is increasing. That's their idea.
Shouldn't the wealthiest Americans and the most profitable corporations contribute to deficit reduction rather than just the elderly and the sick and working families? They say no. They're going to defend the richest people in this country -- millionaires and billionaires -- and make sure they don't pay a nickel more in taxes. We're going to make sure there is no tax reform so we can continue to lose $100 billion every single year because wealthy people and corporations stash their money in tax havens in the Cayman Islands or Bermuda, and that's just fine. We'll protect those tax breaks while we savage programs for working families.
Those are the choices that our right-wing Republican friends are giving us. Default with horrendous economic consequences for working families in this country and for the entire global economy or massive cuts to programs that working families desperately need.
Neither of those options is acceptable to me. Neither are those options acceptable to the vast majority of the people in this country. Every single poll that I have seen says that the American people want shared sacrifice. They don't want or believe that deficit reduction can simply come down on the backs of the weak and the vulnerable, the elderly, the children, and the poor. They believe that the wealthy and large corporations also have to participate.
In all honesty, I also must tell you that I have been disappointed by President Obama's role in these discussions. He has brought forth and idea which I categorically reject, that we should make significant cuts in Social Security, that when someone when someone reaches the age of 85, they would lose $1,000 as opposed to what they would have otherwise gotten. This senator is not going to balance our budget on the backs of an 85-year-old person who's earning $14,000 a year. And this senator does not agree with the president that we should raise eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 67, because I don't know what happens to millions of people who have worked their whole lives, finally reach 65 anticipating Medicare but it's not going to be there for them.
One of the most important lessons in all of this is that elections have consequences. Many people now are beginning to catch on to that. It is no secret that our right-wing Republican colleagues did very well in November 2010. They captured the House of Representatives.
If you believe that we have to start investing in America and creating the millions of jobs that this country desperately needs, elections have consequences. If you believe that we have to address the deficit crisis in a way that is responsible, in a way that asks the wealthy and large corporations also to play a role, in a way that calls for cuts in defense spending and bringing our troops home as soon as possible from Afghanistan and Iraq, you have got to be involved in the political process.
In my view a group of people in the House whose views represent a small minority of the American people are holding this Congress hostage. It is time for the American people to stand up and say, enough is enough; the function of the United States Congress is to represent all of our people and not just the wealthy and powerful.
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To default, so that only your pledges are kept = socialism!!!!
The GOP are going against what they truly believe, and that is to control spending. But they voted in
the Ryan Bill, which will increase our dept trillions of $. The GOP also say that they believe in the
constitution. Well the constitution says that congress must pay its dept. In reality the GOP don't be-
lieve in nothing, but getting reelected, and the Grover Norquist Pledge. Which to me is "NOTHING"!!!
STRIKE3
Really really like that helmet! Hoplite?
Since the inception of the Reagan and Bush era policies of "trickle down", "supply side" economics, the middle class has been systematically eliminated from existence. In 1980, 10% of the nations income went to the top 1% - in 2008, that number rose to 20%. From 1979 - 2006, the average income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose a staggering 364%, nearly 25 times more than the growth of the median household income. 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans. Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
Meanwhile: Between 2001 and 2007, the real income of the median working-age household decreased by 1.9%, a loss of $1,107, despite productivity increasing by 18.5% over that time. Republicans are the party of "redistribution of wealth" (from the middle class to the wealthy).
House Republicans support their Senate colleagues' plan for major Social Security cuts? Some already do.
For all the drastic spending cuts in GOP Rep. Paul Ryan's proposed 2012 budget, there's one major government program that it barely touches: Social Security. Now Republicans in both houses of Congress are preparing to dig into that sacrosanct entitlement as well.
On Wednesday morning, shortly before Obama's big deficit speech, three Republican senators unveiled a plan to cut $6.2 trillion by paring back Social Security over the next two decades. Under a proposal unveiled by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), the qualifying age for Social Security would rise from 67 to 70 by 2032, while benefits for everyone earning more than an average of $43,000 over their lifetime would be reduced. Graham took pains to explain that he wasn't pushing for privatization but also slammed any tax increases to shore up Social Security, saying such a move would "destroy America." "It's much better to give up benefits on the end side than pay taxes now," he explained.
.short read: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/republican-social-security-cuts
We now find that when Social Security was paying its way the tax rate was much higher...We also find that today most of our legislators have been bought and paid for by the lobbyist of the mega Corporations " Best Government the Corporations can Buy"
The legislators in turn for big money supplied thru campaign finance has turned around and created OFF SHORE Accts. so that today the people that are making all the money pay the least.
http://www.payupnow.org/
The people fought hard for Social Security and Medicare and won't give it up because some in the GOP are telling us that it's for the best. They need to stop pushing more corporate tax cuts and represent THE PEOPLE, not corporations.
Investors start a business to create a product or service in hopes of earning a better return than in a risk free bank. Taxes are a cost of doing business, like all costs, form the basis of the selling price. Increase the cost, the price goes up. If the return is safer and better back in the bank then that is where it will go. Soak the rich corporations? Well that is a socialist mantra, and class warfare (workers of the world rise up) that has infected the american left. Of course unions aren't big business are they - guess I don't know what that is!
Take away a man's income and I will show you someone who's NOBODY !!!
The micro view would be of those individuals such as typewriter repairmen, whose economic lives are disrupted until they readjust to the new reality.
Free Trade is what Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado does with one another. The future is matching that globally and the poor are being lifted up from the kind of grinding poverty we should all be concerned about.
In this scenario, most of the people to have gotten us into this mess are still active participants of Congress; it's because of the laws they proposed, wrote, legislated and ennacted, we now find ourselves in the mess we're in with millions now homeless.
...and because of the lack of jobs, hundreds of our veterans are now coming home to un-employment and through no fault of their own, now find themselves decorating our urban sttreets in the form of the un-employed.
Now we turn to the very same people that messed things up LQQKIN' for solutions...
What is it they said about doing the same thing over and over again - while expecting different rsults ???.
Is that the definition of stupidity ?
The idea of "economy" had, until the last century, always implied an efficiently run household that minimized waste. Then the 20th century brought into being "the consumer society" and thereafter we have developed an economic theory and practice is to maximize waste in order to maintain demand.
In my opinion, that is an @ss-backward view of economics based on the presumption of infinite resources and endless growth. That is realistically unsustainable. It is the economics of a cancerous cell.
Realistically, we live on a finite planet, and we depend on a complex biosphere that we don't completely understand, to maintain the conditions that allows us to exist. We must do whatever we possibly can to restore the air water and soil, because if we don't, we're toast.
If we are to continue to exist, we will need to change our idea about our economy as we move from the consumer society to the conserver society. It's not an easy transition for us to make, but it is the transition we'll eventually have to make, hopefully before it's too late, if it isn't too late already.