NO Thanks! No “Bipartisan Budget Deals”!

"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school for more than 30 cities, …two finely equipped hospitals, or 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million barrels of wheat. We pay for a new destroyer with new homes that could have housed 8,000 people…Under a cloud of threatening war it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” - Dwight Eisenhower, April, 1953.

Call me a curmudgeon, or just plain cynical at the whole U.S. monied political system and distrustful of the two parties that amount to two sides of the same corporate party lobbyist coin. But I do not want any “grand” debt deals especially designed in any “bipartisan” way (which Grover Norquist once described as “date rape” by Reepos, of the Demos.) as espoused four days ago by Sen. Michael Bennett and his “gang of six” in The Denver Post.

Yet every where you turned the channel, including this morning, you heard monied Goombahs- like Warren Buffet- blabbing that, oh yes, we must ‘deal with entitlements”! Says WHO? The Neoliberal yappers and their political nabobs mostly in the pocket of billionaire Peter G. Peterson (who’s had a boner to gut Social Security since the end of the Reagan era). .

As blogger William Rivers Pitt put in his smirking chimp.com post today: .

A bunch of billionaires are working hammer and tong with their bottomless pockets, their hired Congressional stooges, their idolaters in the press, and all those useful idiots who hate government but love Medicare and always vote, to destroy Social Security and Medicare because government programs that actually work really well are the enemy, and must be scourged. .

At the forefront of this crusade is the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which has already spent a billion dollars trying to convince Congress to come together on a "Grand Bargain" that eviscerates the social safety net represented by Social Security and Medicare, which are only the two most successful and important government programs besides the GI Bill.”.

Pitt went on to call out Peterson's “wingman” - billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller,( formerly of Duquesne Capital), who’s plowing millions of smackeroos into trying to convince young people that Social Security is the prime reason they're looking down the barrel at an increasingly grim economic future. According to a Wall Street Journal columnist (James Freeman), Druckenmiller "has been touring college campuses promoting a message of income redistribution you don't hear out of Washington. It's how federal entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are letting Mr. Druckenmiller's generation rip off all those doting Barack Obama voters in Generation X, Y and Z."

Unmentioned by Drucko is the real reason the Millennials are looking at an impoverished future: the massive and bloated war-national security state which can afford to piss $800 billion a year away on F-35 bombers, killer drones, and a spy structure to peek in on every American and every other government on the planet – including the emails of the other nations' leaders. One security moron quoted in The Guardian actually had the chutzpah to assert: “Well, the FRENCH do it too to our people!” Hey dumbo, you actually have the balls to obscure the fact that the NSA security budget – including black operations – dwarfs the French spy system by several orders of magnitude!
.
Millennials and those who love and value them would be better served by focusing on Robert Kuttner’s take on Drucko in The American Prospect :

”Where to start? If you itemize all the reasons why recent college graduates face a wretched economy, Social Security doesn't even make the list. What does make the list are unreliable jobs that pay lousy wages, the aftereffects of a financial bubble created on Wall Street, and unaffordable college that leaves graduates starting life with more than a trillion dollars worth of debt.

The biggest lie in Druckenmiller's crusade is the premise that the income distribution problem is somehow generational and that he, as a billionaire, has anything whatever in common with most college students or most recipients of Social Security. One of his pitches to students is that Social Security is excessive because he, a very wealthy man, receives it but doesn't need it.

But for the vast majority of the elderly, Social Security is a lifeline, and a meager one at that. Some two-thirds of all seniors depend on Social Security for half of their income. Fully 46 percent of elderly widows and other unmarried seniors depend on Social Security for at least 90 percent of their income. The entire projected 75-year shortfall in the Social Security trust funds that conservatives make such a big deal about is around one percent of GDP per year. We could make it up with modest tax increases on wealthy people like Druckenmiller. "

We could also stand to cut back on our bloated military! I mean, come on, does the U.S. REALLY need 702 military 'installations' in 63 foreign countries (it has 4,471 bases altogether), according to the Defense Department's annual budget statement? ( Figures that don't include bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.) We're talking about our military presence in nations like Germany, South Korea, and Japan. ALL of these represent redundant costs since the wars that incepted the bases are now more than a half century over! While the total cost of these bases is kept secret, the best analysis I've seen estimates their ten-year cost at approximately $1 trillion. Cut that fat and waste, and Social Security and Medicare can easily be left alone – apart from the fact they haven’t contributed to the existing deficits! The wars and tax cuts have!

Yet the Neolib pro-market uber Alles rats keep beating the drums for a new “deal” to appease the Tea Baggers – who now have the lowest favorable ratings (according to recent polls) since their inception.
.
As opposed to stealth cuts, like the Chained CPI to Social Security, what we really need is an INCREASE in the COLA based on the fact the existing index is predicated on a lowballed estimate of inflation (it excludes fuel, food and meds). Ask any senior, seriously, if he believes the forthcoming COLA increase (based on the supposed 1.6% inflation increase) is real and he will say, “Yeah, about as real as Santy Claus or elves!”

Real inflation, factoring in costs like prescription drugs, food, energy and housing is more like 4% which means that is what the COLA ought to be. And the thought of cutting it even more via chained CPI? Let Peter Peterson and his rogues try to live off it! Since when did billionaries start running this country and determining its budgetary priorities? Well, maybe since we turned into a corporate-billionaire Oligarchy, as Sen. Bernie Sanders puts it in the November 'Playboy' interview!

The "Gang of Six" Solution is IDIOTIC!

Well, today's Wall Street Journal laid out the warp and woof of the "Gang of Six" solution to the mounting deficits and debt problems, even as the front page of the Journal reported ('Layoffs Deepen Gloom') that job losses are even greater with companies at their lowest hiring levels in months. As the article noted:

"Consumer spending is a central worry.." and businesses are worried about the "effects of a challenging economy on consumer spending habits

In other words, unemployment is increasing again because of alling aggregate demand, because mainly the consumer demand is not keeping pace. In response, nervous companies (like 'Cracker Barrel') are paring down their work forces not increasing them. So, if this is the case, why on Earth would any sane politico - Reep or Demo- institute a deficit reduction program that ensures an even more challenging economy, and consumer spending tightening even more - with further employer retrenchment? Why do that?

Well, people need to ask the Gang of Six, the coalition of 3 Repub Senators and 3 Dem counterparts (all conservative) who put this mish mash plan together. These turkeys are actually claiming it will deliver tax revenues (about $1 trillion) even as it ensures large tax cuts for the wealthiest stay in place. I would like to know where these meatheads took their math courses, if they took any at all. Sounds like VOODOO math to me, the type that used to be prevalent with Arthur Laffer's moronic Laffer curve during the Reagan supply side era. (Which alas, got reincarnated during the Bush II era to our nation's collective detriment).

So what else is on tap in this insipid plan? According to the Journal (The Gang of Six Play, editorial, p.A16):

- The home owners mortgage interest deduction will be removed.

- No fix for the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) which will crunch at least 30 million ordinary earning Americans at great extra cost

- Extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest beyond 2013.

- Cutting Medicare by $650b

- Cutting Social Security by $250 b

- removing the child tax credit for average wage earners - no more claiming kid deductions

Most interesting is the AMT change. For those who aren't aware, the AMT was added to the tax code in 1969, as a sort of parallel code with its own rates and tough rules limiting what can be deducted. The AMT was originally intended to make sure the very wealthy didn't avoid paying taxes entirely. However, it never achieved that goal since the super-rich have clever advisers who are always two or three steps ahead of the IRS. Instead it has gradually ensnared more and more average Americans, ratcheting their taxes upward.

Fortunately, over the past ten years or so, congress has provided last minute AMT patches to rescue middle class tax payers. Those not rescued often pay an additional 15-20% in income taxes. That is significantly less money in their pockets, meaning they will tighten their belts even more...meaning companies looking for free-spending consumers will have a lonnnng wait! And in return, they'll shutter doors and lay off workers!

This a prime example of how government rarely ever really cuts taxes for anyone but the rich and powerful. Four years ago the Tax Policy Center noted that because the Bush tax cuts didn't include any provisions to rein in the AMT, the U.S. Treasury Dept. forecast that the number of households paying it would soar from 1.3 million in 2000 to 35.6 million by 2010.

By 2011, 36.4% of all taxpayers would be paying the alternative tax, estimates the Tax Policy Center, and it would add an average of $3,751 annually to their tax bill.

The fact is that the Bush tax cuts (which the Gang of 6 wants to extend beyond 2013)are of little or no use to the hoi polloi. They get back virtually nada and what they do get back (an average pittance of maybe $350 a year for middle income earners) is eaten away by the AMT or Alternative Minimum Tax. (See Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign To Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich and Cheat Everybody Else, 2003, by David Cay Johnston'.) Note especially (p. 113) Johnston notes how the AMT in 2000 pulled in only $9.6 billion, but in 2010 would've taken in $141.4 billion- all out of middle class hides. Thus, in 2010 alone, "8.6 million middle income households were denied their entire Bush tax cuts because of the AMT"

In other words, what we have with the compliments of the Gang of Six is robbing from the poorer and giving to the wealthier...probably so they can purchase more gold-embossed his and hers toilets!

Any math halfwit, who's taken only elementary arithmetic, can see the only serious way to make "ends meet" is to repeal the Bush tax cuts. Indeed, with budget deficits now exploding and ever more demands on national resources, there is no other alternative.

While the GOOPers keep on with their spending cuts fetish, any math person knows that it will not meet the country's demands...especially if it aims to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq even more years.

Thus, the Gang of Six plan is one which, to me, is dead in the water. As desperate as Mr. Obama may be for a debt ceilng raise solution, this is not it. Nor is this any kind of a "compromise" (which topic Mr. Obama gave a clever discourse on to some university students some days ago). What we have on offer now is a giveaway by his side, not a compromise. To employ his own jargon, it is carrying a gallon of water nine-tenths of the way up a steep hill while the Reeps cackle like the jackals they are- then switching hands and carrying it the rest of the way! Mr. Obama needs to understand earlier rather than later that the Reeps are incapable of compromise, only "date rape" - as Grover Norquist (the Repukes' real leader) quaintly put it some years back.

There is a better "medicine" available for what ails the nation than this Gang of Fools pseudo -solution tilted toward corporatism and the rich. One does not ingest strychnine to get rid of wasting disease or starvation! Unless, of course, he really wants to kill the patient...the sole aim of the reptiles.

Why the Republicans are Terrorists

Let's not mince words here, by any standard the current incarnation of the Republican Party - hostages that they are to deranged maniacs that rival al Qaeda (in financial terms) - are terrorists pure and simple. They are prepared to blow up our entire economy if they don't get 100% their own way. That is to say, a deal that raises no new taxes and only embraces spending cuts - ranging from $1.5 trillion (The McConnell solution) to $3.7 trillion (the new 'Gang of Six' solution).

In either of these cases expect the U.S. economy to likely be saved from default (given the Rs have had a gun to the head of the country for over 2 months) but to go into the economic crapper as soon as the cuts begin. Even now, it isn't clear the Tea Party maniacs will accept even these 'heads you lose, tails I win' deals - since they regard McConnell as a "lily livered sellout" (to quote one TP in today's WSJ) and regard the 'Gang of 6' solution as anathema because some 26% of it is tax increases.(But not real tax increases, merely closing some loopholes for the wealthiest and letting some of the Bush tax cuts expire next year- mainly for the top 0.0001% income earners, making $1.5 m or more each year.)

To hear Tea Bagger Nation tell it,they'd prefer the GOP let the default happen, wrecking the good name of the country. These morons actually believe it's no biggie, and all will be well in the aftermath. But what do you expect from economic retards? Okay, let me qualify that, Reep-tards!

In actual fact, the situation is simple: $172 billion will come into U.S. treasury coffers by the debt ceiling increase due date (Aug. 2) and there will be $306 billion in bills due at the same time. There are no good options here, and any fools who disbelieve in zero sum mathematics had best transport themselves to Oz and join the Munchkins on the Yellow Brick Road.

By Option 1 we can pay off the Treasury bills' interest to bond holders (i.e. those who've already lent us trillions, like the Chinese - to fund our stupid military adventures) and also pay recipients of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and unemployment benefits. By now, you've paid out $172.6 billion which is all the money you have.

This means you can't pay for: troop salaries (they'll have to depend on care kits from home), VA issues and demands, federal worker salaries, EPA or IRS refunds. Making it even more catastrophic, we will need to roll over $500 billion in maturing bonds, or face no more loans from those stiffed bond holders, period.

By Option 2, all defense contractors are paid and VA benefits, claims settled, as well as enabling congressional yearly pay raises, federal workers' pay, HUD, IRS refunds, and the usual corporate welfare subsidies (about $33 billion/yr) ...but granny and gramps don't receive their Social Security or Medicare benefits.

Option 3 allows the debt ceiling to increase, but only at the cost of capitulating to GOP extortion by allowing massive incremental spending cuts that will cripple the economy (by attacking the already weak aggregate demand) and engendering massive unemployment ...even as Social Security is transitioned to a "chained CPI" COLA basis - assuring gramps and granny are stuck on cat food the rest of their days, while food stamps beneficiaries will see their benefits cut ...and they and their kids will likely go hungry.

Bear in mind most of these recipients are working, not slackers, it's just that their pay can't cover all their needs which is disgraceful. According to The Economist (July 16, p. 29) only 14% of food stamp households have incomes above the poverty line. The average family has only $101 in savings. Last year food stamp expense rose to $65 billion from $35 billion in 2008. Most GOP spending cut proposals want to cut this in half - or back to 2008 levels, despite the fact that nearly twice as many people need them. So unless they can find jobs that pay for their food, we can expect tens of millions, more than half children, to suffer hunger and malnutrition.

Meanwhile, the Repukes' preservation of tax cuts for the wealthiest will mean they can keep on purchasing new Bentleys, 100k blood diamonds...or the latest craze...matching his and hers gold-embossed toilets for every bedroom in their 14-room haciendas.

Why ordinary working people keep voting for these slime is beyond me.

As I said, Terrorists!