Okay, I just talked to a couple of people who work with the House progressive caucus, and they say they’re not backing down on cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. So if your congress critter is a member of the progressive caucus, let them know you support them in opposing any cuts and maybe they won’t screw us this time.
7 thoughts on “Encouraging news”
Comments are closed.
Forgive me for not believing them. In the end, they’ll get the Democratic votes they need and Pelosi herself will see to it. They always do and she always does.
I read once that Tip O’Neill told Jimmy Carter that he won seats running against Richard Nixon and he could win seats running against Carter just as well (paraphrasing). It’s a vast understatement to say that Nancy Pelosi is no Tip O’Neill.
Having said that, I’d love to be proven wrong. Unfortunately, predicting the “progressive caucus” will cave to Obama has yet to put me in that position.
I should’ve added that my complete lack of faith doesn’t mean it isn’t worth calling. It just means that I remember TARP, which was passed with Democratic votes after Obama whipped for it and after it had already failed to pass.
They’re going to changed the COLA CPI and say it isn’t a cut for SS. And the media will go along with that, and handle it as not being a cut. Here’s a run down on it someone just sent me from the WSJ:
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/07/07/switching-government-inflation-measure-could-yield-big-savings/
General strike? It would seem like this would be a good time.
Here’s a good comparison of the ‘chained CPI’, one that will refute the Obamabots and their chumps in the Progressive Caucus as to whether it’s a cut or not:
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2011/07/cost-of-living-and-cpi-chained.html
The thing is, your COLA each year automatically becomes part of your basis, like your ‘base pay’, so that each years reduction is a multiple of last year’s reduction, and makes the prior year’s reduction larger.
Bastille day is July 14th.
NewsHour tonight NewsHour tonight had a segment with Andrew Kohut, pollster, and Naftali Bendavid, congressional correspondent for the WSJ, discussing Obama’s grand bargaining. Video and transcript here. There are some good points to use with our spineless Dems.
Kohut pointed out several times that Obama and the Republicans are proposing things almost completely opposite what the public wants to have done. The public by two to one favors tax increases, some cuts, but not messing with the social safety nets (SS, Medicare and Medicaid). Affluent Republicans don’t mind if SS and Medicare are screwed with, but middle, lower, and poor Republicans do not want these TOUCHED.
(My emphasis, and please note how Woodruff reacts to Kohut saying people want one thing, Obama and R’s are doing the opposite, so the takeaway is — that it needs to be SPUN, “packaged.” Oh, she is a true Versailles courtier.)
Obama does not work for us. Repubs do not work for us. ConservaDems do not work for us. Who does?
We do not have the wealth of the Top One Percenters, so we are useless — except for getting fooled to give them our votes.
Ah, charts for the poll results are at this FDL diary by Jon Walke.