The country has a very large debt. This debt was caused by:
1) Conservative tax cuts for the rich under Reagan and Bush.
2) Conservative spending increases, mostly on military.
3) Interest that must be paid each year on the debt from 1 and 2.
4) Emergency spending made necessary by the financial crisis that was caused by Conservative deregulation and cronyism.
Conservatives want to address this debt by:
1) Gut Social Security because money that was borrowed from Social Security to pay for the tax cuts for the rich needs to be paid back to Social Security.
2) Gut Medicare because it is a popular government program that helps regular people.
3) Gut other government programs that that help citizens who don’t happen to be rich and are not owners of big corporations.
Currently there is a proposal being floated for a “debt commission” structured in a way to force these solutions without the cumbersome process of democracy getting in the way.
Senators Gregg, Conrad, Bayh and others are threatening to force the United States of America to default on its debt obligations if such a commission is not set up,
Conrad, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and a group of about a dozen other Democratic senators said that the enactment of a special fiscal process was key to their votes on the debt limit increase. The federal debt limit, now at $12.4 trillion, must be raised by mid-February to prevent the government from defaulting.
How are these Senators described by the media? As “centrists.”
The commission’s supporters, mainly centrist lawmakers in both chambers, have said that the special legislative process is necessary to any fiscal reform because lawmakers aren’t willing to consider the politically perilous tax increases and spending cuts necessary to bring down the deficit, which hit a record $1.4 trillion last year.
Again and again these anti-democracy politicians are described as “centrist” and “moderate.” Please click these two links.
There is a decades-old movement, led by Wall Street and the right, to gut Social Security.
