As the much-hyped “sequester” is upon us, and the two apparent wayward political fronts are deeply entrenched against each other, the question is, who is going to blink first?
At one side is the T-party led Republicans who are totally bent upon preserving the interest of the superrich, on the other side is Wall Street led Democrats who pretend to be the savior of the little guys.
So why is this showdown?
Does it matter who wins?
To be honest, it does. Truth is, today’s Democratic Party is well on the right of our father’s Republican Party—the party of Eisenhower was more progressive in comparison. The other day Obama himself admitted on a Spanish language TV that he would be called a moderate Republican only a few decades ago. And as a good moderate Republican, he is making efforts to arrive at a compromise.
This morning’s White House meeting lasted less than an hour, making sure that no new deal is happening before the government shutdowns start in less than four weeks. The anti-tax conservatives make it sound like there is no revenue problem and the solution lies in cutting spendings that benefit the middle class and the poor.
So far Obama has acted very credibly. Describing the Republican efforts in the Senate, he said, “They voted to let the entire burden of deficit reduction fall squarely on the middle class.”
The strange thing is that polls show Obama has lost some public support in his handling of the economy. People have short memory, the self-destruction that the nation has embarked upon only began with Reagan tax cuts. Of course, to redress the shortfall of revenues from the reduction of top tax brackets Regan raised taxes on the middle class eight times or so.
Bill Clinton had shown that with only a nominal rise of few percentage points on the top tax brackets the nations’ economic health could be restored in a short time, but it seems ever body has forgotten that lesson and no one is making that case.
Obama forwarded a plan to raise $580 billion in new revenue over 10 years by eliminating the tax loop holes, the idea that was much touted by Mitt Romney in the last Presidential election. In exchange for the new tax revenues, Obama offered to reduce spending in health care programs such as Medicare by $400 billion over 10 years, change an inflation formula for government benefits by accepting the concept of chained CPI index that would result in lower cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security and other programs, but the GOP stood ground to save their masters, the 1% whom the serve, and rejected the idea.
Yet, the media is portraying Obama as the recalcitrant one!
So much for the liberal media!!!
