Shared Sacrifice

For the past couple of years, President Obama has chided the GOP for seeking to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and working class. In seeking to reduce the deficit through cuts to social programs alone, while leaving the tax rates of the richest Americans untouched (or even lowered), the GOP has shown a naked allegiance to the wealthiest Americans and a willlingness to inflict untold pain on all the rest.

Well it would appear that the GOP has heard the President’s complaints and has responded by offering compromise legislation that asks both poor and rich alike to sacrifice in the name of balancing the budget. Faced with mounting criticism of their refusal to back an extension of the payroll tax cut that affects mostly working Americans, the GOP has offered up a plan to pay for the cut while not adding further to the nation’s deficit. Federal workers, almost all of them middle income earners, will see their pay frozen through 2015, while 10% of them will lose their jobs altogether. The rich will also share in the pain, with millionaries and billionaires excluded from collecting food stamps and unemployment benefits. Yeah… let me repeat that last part: millionaires and billionaires are being asked to share in the pain by giving up their right to collect food stamps and unemployment benefits…. not, it doesn’t get any better the second time you say it. The New York Times:

Senate Republican leaders introduced a bill that would keep the payroll tax rate at its current level for another year. The cost is roughly $120 billion. Senate Republicans would offset most of the cost by freezing the pay of federal employees through 2015 and gradually reducing the federal work force by 10 percent.

In addition, Senate Republican leaders would go after “millionaires and billionaires,” not by raising their taxes but by making them ineligible for unemployment compensation and food stamps and increasing their Medicare premiums. Democrats said that this part of the Republican proposal was not serious, pointing out that high earners were already ineligible to receive food stamps.

13 Comments

Fucking Demrats. It’s time to tar and feather the GOPers as the COMPLETE Stooges of the 1% not the partial ones that the Demrats are.

Why don’t they just abolish the income cap for SS taxes? Would that just be too easy?

You scoff at millionaires going for unemployment, but the former Philly school superintendent who got a million dollars to go away before her contract ended (after getting almost half a million from SF Unified to go away and a quarter of a million from DC Public Schools to go away) reccently applied for unemployment. I wish I could figure out a way to repeatedly fail at jobs and get paid six figures as I went to fail at my next one. Why Philly (or SF, for that matter), hired this person is beyond me. Apparently they didn’t ask for a reference or Google her name.

@SanFranLefty: become a college head football coach. getting fired for losing pays as well as winning.

@jwmcsame:
The best paid paid state employee in Washington is Mike Leach, Washington State University’s new football coach, who just got a guaranteed $2.25 million contract.

@Jesuswalksinidaho: i enjoyed the hell out of watching leach’s teams at texas tech, now texas wreck. i’ll be watching the cougars on the satellite next fall for the late games. i tried to find a newspaper in pullman to read on line. the only one was the moscow-pullman daily news that wanted me to register and subscribe just to read about leach. if i was a teapublican’t, i would have to call herb tarlek’s look-a-like, sean hannity to complain about a moscow newspaper fucking up my freedom of reading. any other papers out that way for my leach news?

@jwmcsame:
The Spokane Spokesman Review http://www.spokesman.com/cougs/
Hope springs eternal for Cougar fans even if “to coug it” means making the easy impossible while losing by any means possible.

@Jesuswalksinidaho:thanks for the link. can washington states troubles be attributed to ryan leaf? he left a trail of trouble where ever he went and later took to breaking into houses for pills. but that ain’t nothing compared to what some ex UT vols have done. we got some fo real killas.
aren’t you the drive by truckers fan here at stinque? check this documentary out. it has been on the documentary channel a lot lately
http://drivebytruckers.com/film.html

@SanFranLefty: Yeah, it’s funny how the Social Security payroll tax is capped at the first $106,800 of income for 2011, and it barely touches the top income earner$. Eliminate the cap and Social Security is solvent in perpetuity with no changes. That’s never even presented as a choice by KKKongriss or the traditional media to solve the phony Social Security “crisis.”

I think you buried the lede a bit, although the idea that Donald Trump is over at Gristides trying to buy fois gras with food stamps is spectacularly absurd. What sticks out for me is that they want to cover part of this extension by reducing the federal workforce by 10%. In other words, they want to pay my measley $1000 tax cut by taking someone’s entire luvelihood away.

At long last, where are the fucking guillotines?!?!?

@jwmcsame:
WSU has trouble recruiting–something about being way out in the Palouse–so they don’t always get the best. There’ve been some standup athletes there, but it seems like there’s always a football player staying in the Whitman County Jail wing of the jock dorm.
Thanks for the DBT link. “Live at the 40 Watt” is one of my favorite concert dvds. Patterson Hood’s spoken intro to “The Southern Thing” is better than Shelby Foote’s folksy stories in Ken Burns’ “Civil War”

@¡Andrew!: Last time I worked for a living it capped at $66,000. I got a couple months free.

@Tommmcatt Be Fat, And That Be That: You can buy foie gras at Gristedes? Darling, not on this planet. You mean Balducci’s. Home of loathsome bankster foodies. You haven’t been here in Emerald City in a long time have you, sweetheart? Don’t feel left out. Here’s a handy link to a resource for our elder gay men. A space where baldness and erectile dysfunction don’t count.

If you can make it here you can make it in Grundarfjordor.

@Tommmcatt Be Fat, And That Be That: If they take my job (last in, first out), I’ll just have to be a civilian merc in Afpakistan and make four times the coin I’m making now.

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