When Obama made his announcement, you’ll notice he says he would have preferred a bigger deal with entitlement “reform” (i.e. Social Security and Medicare cuts). It’s a shitty deal – even the NY Times noticed.
By the way, I’m not calling them “entitlement” programs anymore, that’s right-wing phrasing. They’re national retirement programs. We paid for them, they’re ours:
President Obama said tonight that he and congressional leaders have agreed to a debt ceiling deal just two days before a possible government default that would inflict major damage on the economy.
The full Senate and House must still vote on the agreement, Obama said at a surprise appearance Sunday night in the White House.
“We’re not done yet,” Obama said. “I want to urge members of both parties to do the right thing with your votes.”
As word of the agreement filtered out, some Democratic liberals are already protesting that the plan lacks new tax revenues, while some Republican conservatives said it creates the possibility of too many defense cuts down the line.
Obama said there are some parts he doesn’t like, particularly the lack of new tax revenue, but that is the nature of compromise.
“This process has been messy,” Obama added. “It has taken far too long.”
The proposal calls for a two-tiered $2.1 trillion increase in the debt ceiling while cutting federal spending by more than $2 trillion over the next ten years. Most of the reduced spending will be developed by a special congressional “super committee.”
The plan also calls for automatic spending cuts if the committee cannot agree on a plan, or if Congress rejects its recommendations.
“Everything will be on the table to hold us all accountable,” Obama said.
I haven’t read anybody citing FDR’s famous remark about planting his own “trigger” into Social Security: “FDR said, “I guess you’re right on the economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those pay roll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program. Those taxes aren’t a matter of economics, they’re straight politics.” ”
I guess he could not have imagined how far the democratic process would degenerate in 80 years, but it took some doing and a lot of money to corrupt our government to the point where it is. If the capitalists had put all that money and energy that they spent on trying to destroy FDR’s legacy into innovation and development, what a nation we might have had for everybody. As it is, we will only have a couple of hundred feudal estates living in an ocean of misery.
Mr Obama will go down in history as the politician who finally defeated FDR.
BTW, that quote comes straight off the SocialSecurity.gov website.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/Gulick.html
My recollection is that SocSec was called an entitlement because people had paid in to the SocSec fund while working. Thus, it was not welfare, it was not a fly by next Congress’s desire to cut it program; it was something an individual and his famly was entitled to. It was theirs.
Also, SocSec was part of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, things to which people are entitled by dint of being born human.
The Republicans try to make perfectly valid terms into words carrying bad connotations. They spend millions of dollars and hours to make negative connections with words such as Democrat, liberal, progressive, etc., including entitlement.