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Government
is like Family
by
Gene Lyons
So your mortgage payment’s overdue
and you’re lying awake at 4 a.m. wondering where the money’s
going to come from when the kitchen smoke alarm starts beeping. What to
do? If you’re like the two jokers
who jumped the gun on Obama’s ballyhooed deficit-reduction commission
while he was visiting Asia,
you’d jump out of bed, ignore the fire, back the car out of the garage
and slap a “For Sale” sign on the windshield.
Mission accomplished!
Never mind that the nation currently has 9.6 million unemployed, and
upwards of 25 million either out of work,
struggling to make do with part-time jobs, or who have simply given up.
The really big problem facing the nation
is that Social Security may exhaust its reserves 25 years from now.
Why, it’s an emergency.
All of Washington’s Serious People say so. Katie Couric was at her
gravest interviewing Erskine Bowles and
Alan Simpson on “CBS Evening News.” “In Focus: Debt and Deficit,” they
called it. Except Katie’s focus
wasn’t so hot. The broadcast pegged this year’s deficit at a record
$1.5 trillion. The actual OMB projection
is $1.29 trillion, marginally lower than the FY2001 shortfall left by
the Bush administration.
Hey, what’s a couple hundred
billion?
No matter. Over on CNN, co-hosts John King and Ali Velshi assured each
other that deficit reduction will be
the single biggest political issue over the next two years. "The
American people are ahead of their government
and their politicians on this," King said. "Because Ali you know this,
over the past two or three years, every
family in America has had to make incredibly difficult choices and do
things they didn’t want to do. And so
they look at Washington and they say, why won’t you do things that you
don’t want to do, why don’t you
…do something about this and be grown-ups?"
Yes, it’s perfectly obvious. The thing to do is cut government
spending, reduce demand,
put more people out of work. Prosperity will come roaring back.
Everybody pretends they get it, but most talking heads on TV are millionaires and they want
the government to fund their lavish lifestyle with money we're forced to borrow from China.
Even our wise and brave president doesn't get it.
Yesterday he announced a freeze on government salaries which will save $5B over two years.
But Obama, they say, is ready to green light the Bush tax breaks for the super-rich
which means we have to borrow another $700B from China.
So our wise and brave president is SAVING the $5B and BORROWING another $700B,
which is a net fuckup of $695 billion dollars - I hope the Teabaggers are happy.
The Daily Brew and Tally might be angry that I mentioned this because they don't like Obama criticism.
One more thing:
Those outrageous government salaries that thre GOP and the Teabaggers hate?
I read somewhere that many doctors at Walter Reed were making about $110K a year
which is a lot of money if you're broke and unemployed but that's not much money
for a young medical doctor living on the East Coast with college loans to repay.
Since Obama became president, those doctor's salaries went to around $170K which is
fine with me because who wants our soldiers treated by the cheapest doctors in America?
So, a Shot of Cuervo to our wise and brave president for surrendering once again to the snarling dogs,
saving the $5B while sending the $700B to the people who are already drowning in money.
