A Brief Word From The Rational

Tomorrow President Obama announces his debt reduction program and will send this to the Super Committee. During the negotiations with John Boehner for the grand bargain, the President had proposed a deal to cut the national debt by $4 trillion through a combination of cuts and tax increases. Boehner walked away. The proposal being put forth tomorrow will call for a reduction of the national debt by $3 trillion.

Most importantly for all the Democrats screaming about President Obama negotiating in secret with Boehner wiuthout the consultation of congressional Democrats, there will be no proposal to change Social Security (because the President agrees with this blog) and no calls to raise the age for Medicare to 67 as speculated.

If you take the $917 billion saved in the tortuous August debt ceiling talks with the President's new proposal, you are pretty muich where the White House was in the beginning. The Super Committee is mandated to cut $1.2 trillion from the debt or else automatic triggers kick in to reduce the debt by $1.5 trillion through cuts to Defense and Medicare.

The President will announce that he will veto any proposal from the Super Commitee that doesn't include revenues.

The President will call for a minimum income tax on those earning $1 million a year--or on 0.3% of the population. He will call for a repeal or the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 per year. He will also call for the end of subsidies to the olil industry, tax breaks on corporate jets and new taxes on hedge fund managers. Despite screams you can anticipate, these taxes don't begin until 2013.

Paul Ryan, the father of Vouchercare, has already denounced the Buffett Tax, the millionaire minimum alternative tax, as "class warfare".

Let's be clear--nothing substantive will occur with this Congress. The President may get some of this plan because Republicans are in panic about defense spending. But both his jobs plan and this deficit reduction plan taken together are excellent proposals for moving the country forward. One wonders what America would have looked like if the Republican Party had not taken a blood oath to oppose President Obama one month before he took the oath of office. We could have debated in 2012 about policy differences and not be given a choice between democracy and a fascist state.

President Obama's speeches present a plan and a direction. By the time the election rolls around, he will have presented something to deal with every major problem facing the country. That is quite an achievement. His fate will ultimately lie with various games being set up now to alter the 2012 election and with the economy in general. But at the end of the day, he will have at least argued for a change someone could believe in.

It has been the position of this blog that almost every problem facing the country has a solution and ideas to solve those problems have already been formulated. But the challenge is whether the country can deal with that. So far, the country looks and acts like a mentally ill patient.