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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 7/20/11

The Biggest Red Herring Yet

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Well and good. New York Times reports today that there's a new deficit reduction plan on the table that has even resonated with Eric Cantor, though he "stopped far short of endorsing it."

This "compromise" aims to sharply reduce entitlement expenditures in the process of saving $4 trillion over the next decade. The president is "buoyed," the Times reported.

It's sort of like antichoice. Favor the unborn future over the living: the elderly, the disabled, veterans, the poor.

I, too, am concerned about the future and how we pampered baby boomers did so much damage to the economy. What about Bush 43? Oh, that's right. He's a boomer.

Good bye, Obamacare, no doubt. Unless the prez has struck a secret bargain to trade entitlements for health care. If so, they're all putting on a great act.

A quick fix will be necessary, but the "bipartisan compromise" is only four pages long now, and it needs to be two thousand pages long to qualify as legislation, correct? Even with the support of "staunch" Republicans? No way to add all that legalismus in two weeks. Oh, well.

Meanwhile, there's the deficit cap to increase, a yearly reflex nobody quibbled about until Obama took office.

Why???

Because the Republicans needed a red herring to throw into the face of Obamacare and job assistance and they're drooling over all that money in trust--Entitlements--that is no pejorative term. WE ARE ENTITLED to those institutions--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. I'm surprised that the GOP didn't come up with an offensive euphemism more appropriate to their ideology: "medicharity"? "senile security"?

Someone should remind the Republicans that there are Republican senior citizens, too, who will suffer from the spending slashes. Republican mentally and physically disabled citizens, even Republican poor people.

And, zowee, right in the midst of all the public outcry comes another despicable red herring, Rupert Murdoch, king of infotainment, to interfere with public focus on the debt crisis.

Watch that shocking yellow headlining dwindle once August 2 comes along and something or other happens to the budget controversy to save the United States from rocking the world into hell, nuking its economy.

Our entitlements are our bank accounts, our savings. Draw on them, gov, to continue droning Afghanistan on your charge account and to pay for having decimated Iraq--nothing left to destroy now: no infrastructure, but instead collapsing Halliburton-built drywall structures (if that) built in the name of reconstructing that poor country, to the tune of billions and billions of inflated dollars.

What a profit: $26 per Styrofoam sectioned plate in the mess hall. Uncle Sam treated. The soldiers couldn't afford it. How many soldiers' incomes would it take to pay a CEO in this country (paraphrase of an online query)?

The Republicans are not even borrowing from our entitlements--they're cutting and modifying them . . . to "strengthen them," Mr. President?

The whole issue surfaced as the latest round in the rush toward "neofeudalism" (not my coinage).

Let us toil, thrown out of "paradise," for pennies when we're employed and taxed to death, while the top 1 percent eat cake.

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Marta Steele Social Media Pages: Facebook page url on login Profile not filled in       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Marta Steele is an author/editor/blogger who has been writing for Opednews.com since 2006. She is also author of the 2012 book "Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, (more...)
 

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