Obama, who Cenk reveals is really a Republican and who slinkerwink has exposed over and over again as a terrible politician with no courage, ability to persuade or even desire to make the lives of American's better - he is actually pushing FOR cuts to entitlements.
I for one am not going to work for him or give him any money. Romney or Perry with a
Republican Senate and speaker Boehner would be pretty much the same, so why waste my effort?
Obama claims we "must make cuts to entitlements in order to preserve their fiscal viability and to lay the groundwork for the investment that America needs" (I paraphrase)
Who he he KIDDING!? These are our RIGHTS! We paid into Social Security and Medicare and no one has the right to take them away.
Ok, I understand that our current budget deficit is 8% of GDP
http://www.cbo.gov/...
and yes - Social Security and Medicare are projected to increase from about 7.6% of GDP to about 11.5% combined by 2035.
http://www.ssa.gov/...
Why are we panicking? If we want to spend say another 4% of GDP on the things we care about: Education, poverty eradication, the environment - there is plenty of Money.
Sometimes I am tempted to believe the rightwing lie machine meme's about Obama's intelligence. How can he seem so smart and yet obviously buy into supply side nonsense about not raising taxes?
Follow my logic - today the federal government collects 14.4% of GDP in taxes of all kinds. (http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/...) In order to fund the budget deficit (8%), entitlement growth (4%) and our progressive priorities (say 4%) we just need to raise taxes from 14.4% of GDP to 30.4% of GDP.
Now I don't think we even need to do that, because of course our military is way too big. It is clear to me that if Obama would just try, I mean really really try, he could get the country to rally around cutting the military in half. Why do we need a marine corps anymore? What good does the airforce do in this day and age?
So - if he could just get 60 Senators and the republican house to cut defense spending by 50%, that would save us 2% of GDP!
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
So if we take the 30.4% of GDP we would need and subtract the 2% we get from cutting defense in half, we get a new tax burden of just 28.4%. This would mean that
every American would pay only double the taxes they pay now, or, if the President would just make the argument, we could probably convince the upper middle class and capitalist class to pay 3.5 times their current taxes!
If the President and the Democrats in congress would just make the strong progressive argument that we should double everyone's taxes, I would stand with them as passionately as I did in 2008 and we would surely regain our supermajorities in the house and Senate and keep the Presidency for 40 years.
