Obama's Line in the Sand

President Obama entered the deficit battle last week with a speech outlining more what he would not do rather than what he would.

Medicare will not become a voucher program as long as he is President. This is a good answer. Social Security can be fixed. These are all answers we are looking for.

Are they true? I suspect so. Americans like Medicare and Social Security and one has to assume that the sooner or later people are going to understand the clear divide between rich and poor, left and right and so on.

A battleship cost 15 to 20 billion dollars. A cruise missile such as what was launched at Libya costs millions, and so on and so on. Our military spending is the most bloated thing in the world. Why tea party followers have visions of cutting the budget but do not want to touch the military I do not understand.

In a month or so the debt ceiling will have to be raised? It will be interesting to see if it will happen without a melodramatic fight from the right or worse an actual credit crisis. How far will the right go.

I realized the other day that there was a two path highway with the Bush tax cuts. First was to give the rich a huge tax cut but even more insidious was the real outcome. To get us into such a deficit that we would have to cut the entitlement programs Republicans have hated since, well, forever. This is the plan, it has been the plan and remains the plan.

Vote Republican all you want. But know that. Republicans want an oligarchy and they are on their way. Democrats are dumb and make mistakes and can be self righteous but in the end the difference is like that between a child that fibs because he wants something good to happen and a serial killer. To be clear lots of good Americans are Republicans. I would caution to say 90 percent of Republicans want what we want, which is a better country. The fact is that they are being manipulated to an extend by men that are simply put...as close to evil and ruthless as we might see on this earth.

I saw on Sunday morning this week a story about the highest American tax brackets. In WWII that rate was 90 percent, in the seventies it had fallen into the sixties, Reagan for all his revolution only brought it to 50 percent. Bush's tax cuts brought it to 35 percent and is along with Afghanistan and Iraq ( wars unpaid for because no sacrifice was asked for) the reason for us moving from a surplus at the end of the Clinton era to the trillion dollar deficits of today. The Republicans talk about Obama's plan to redistribute the wealth of this country. Let us be clear, the Bush tax cuts were a massive redistribution program. It moved money into the hands of the wealthiest in unpaid taxes onto the backs of all Americans in a deficit budget.

Cut the military in half, single payer health care, increase the payroll social security tax. I am not a liberal. I consider myself a moderate. These just appear so common sense it makes one wonder why I am so out of step. Am I really that out of step.

If I am then I hope that Obama's line in the sand is real and not just something he will keep erasing.