Day: February 21, 2011

Shared Sacrifice

Just in case you thought the Social Security stinger on this post was unsupported, EJ Dionne provides:

Lori Montgomery reported in The Post last week that a bipartisan group of senators thinks a sensible deficit reduction package would involve lifting the Social Security retirement age to 69 and reforming taxes, purportedly to raise revenue, in a way that would cut the top income tax rate for the wealthy from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Only a body dominated by millionaires could define “shared sacrifice” as telling nurses’ aides and coal miners they have to work until age 69 while sharply cutting tax rates on wealthy people. I see why conservative Republicans like this. I honestly don’t get why Democrats – “the party of the people,” I’ve heard – would come near such an idea.

Absolutely right. I’d only quarrel with the title: “The Tea Party is Winning.” Nope. It is the plutocrats and banksters that invented the Tea Party out of whole cloth to gather useful drones to advance their preferred distraction campaign that are winning. The folks that make up the broader Tea Party itself are losing right along with the rest of us filthy proles. And once they undermine the entire non-military discretionary budget to their own detriment, then they hope to get serious and finally eliminate their own Social Security, after which they will go lie down in the streets to die, free from all unnecessary governmental inconveniences.

Shared Sacrifice

Newsflash: Democrats Help Conservatives

George Lakoff represents:

Democrats help conservatives when they function as policy wonks – talking policy without communicating the moral values behind the policies. They help conservatives when they neglect to remind us that pensions are deferred payments for work done. “Benefits” are pay for work, not a handout. Pensions and benefits are arranged by contract. If there is not enough money for them, it is because the contracted funds have been taken by conservative officials and given to wealthy people and corporations instead of to the people who have earned them.

Yep. This is the neutron bomb of the pension debate, and The Democrat never, ever deigns to pick it up and use it. There is simply no rational defense within the “true conservative” worldview for the elimination of pensions. And yet we see that trotted forward as a “serious person” position over and over and over again. It is, in fact, the utter failure of the market to regulate itself.
Two parties willingly entered a contract; one party decided not to live up to their end, systematically and with malice aforethought underfunding the pensions to make quarterlies look better or election-year budgets seem sounder than they were; now the other party, the one that did their part and often took cuts in other areas specifically in exchange for better retirement packages, is simply told to suck it while the latter party sops up even more of the money the two had agreed to divide in some way. This is inherently and indisputably a failure of the market principle, enabled by GOP and to the sole benefit of the very same plutocrats who put us in this ditch to begin with. It’s no coincidence that Wall Street is earning a ridiculously high 15% vig on the management of the very pension fund that’s in trouble in WI. What a surprise. By making these tough cuts, I’m sure we can get that right up to 20%, though…here boys, take some tax credits and corporate welfare handouts.

And what’s most disturbing of all: this is emerging as the fundamental shape of the Social Security debate.

Newsflash: Democrats Help Conservatives