Hint: raise taxes on the rich

Mr. Obama’s time to lead on entitlements

WAPO says there’s no way to balance the budget without cuts in earned benefits like Social Security and Medicare, though neither has anything to do with the general budget and neither is "in trouble."

By "entitlements" it means earned benefits.

By "entitlements reform" it means cuts in the benefits to be paid to people who have earned every penny of what they get now, and more besides.

So did the Moonies buy the Post or did Murdoch?

Bear in mind that neither Social Security nor Medicare is any great shakes so far as actually redistributing from the rich to the rest of us goes.

And they still wouldn't be even if the cap came off and more got collected from the wealthy among us.

So far as "redistribution" goes - and this is not unlike what insurance companies and banks do - these programs use money currently being paid in to finance benefits being paid out and to maintain a fluid fund for rainy days, besides.

So what's the beef?

Programs like these diminish the desperation of the working class.

And whatever does that increases the price of labor.

Hence the plutes actively pursue the immiseration of the working people of the country.

That's an essential aim of the neoliberal project, of free marketeers, of conservatives, of capitalists.

But when we want to get back some of our own by taxing them they call it class war, theft, and mooching.

But not to worry.

Looks like Obama and his White House are planning to sell us out, cutting benefits and pushing up the retirement age, again, just as those meanies, the Republicans, want.

And who will remember when future GOP ads say the Democrats cut benefits and pushed up the retirement age that those wicked Republicans, why, they just made the Democrats do it?

Who will care?

David Plouffe's False Equivalency: Entitlement Cuts Are Quid Pro Quo for Breaking Norquist's Tax Pledge

God forbid we follow the example of those crazy French, setting retirement at 60, keeping the work week at 35 hours, and raising taxes on the incomes of the rich to 75%.

That would be so un-American!

Heck, that wouldn't even be liberalism!

Why, it would be socialism!

Tell me again why we voted for Obama?

Oh, right.

Lesser evil.

Gotcha.

But this is not really what I wanted, you know.

Neither I nor, very likely, anyone else, or nearly anyone else, who voted for O earlier this month.

If the chief point of democracy is to enable ordinary people to defend themselves from the rich and powerful - and it is - it sure looks like it's not working out as well, in America, as it is in lots of other countries.

It looks like, for us, it's not working out all that well, at all.

Time to reconsider this whole voting thing, again?

It's not what I do but what millions do that matters, anyway.

And they can certainly just as well do it, or not, without me.

What they do is and has always been and will always be out of my control, no matter what.

I might as well be voting in Cairo, as far as that goes, for all the good it does.

Or Tehran.

And we're almost at the point where paying attention is not only pointless - it was always that - but too depressing to go on.

Much like this blog.