Hundreds of thousands of Americans poured into the street across the country today demanding draconian cuts to the nation’s increasingly frayed social safety net programs in order to reduce federal budget deficits that consumers have almost overnight recognized as the most fierce among all the challenges facing the nation.
Carrying signs urging lawmakers to raise the Social Security retirement age, cut Medicare benefits and defenestrate the Medicaid program aimed at helping the poorest Americans, the demonstrators decried the culture of greed that has seen middle- and lower-income individuals and families sponging up nearly five percent of the nation’s wealth while leaving the nation’s most productive and well-dressed citizens to make do with the leavings.
Among the more popular signs was one that said, “No More Trickle Up Economics!” Another read, “Billions For Defense, Not One Cent For Dubuque!”
Scurrying to respond, their little antennae twitching in alarm, elected officials from both parties immediately began exploring ways to make their constituents more insecure than ever. “The people elected us to fuck them until they scream and force us to usher in a worker’s paradise,” said the peculiarly tinted closet Socialist and House minority leader, John Boehner. Democratic party lawmakers were quick to point out that they, too, were elected to fuck the little people and make them like it.
Social Security, which is in no imminent danger of a funding shortfall and in any event could be easily made whole for all eternity by regularly vacuuming the spare change from under the cushions of Pentagon couches, is closer to being on the chopping block—and the rack, to boot—than it has been in a long while. And of course the people leading the charge are ones who are exceedingly unlikely ever to rely on Social Security or Medicare, and for damn sure not Medicaid, to help them through the hard times.
Members of Congress at present make (can’t say “earn”, in most instances) an annual salary of $174,000. The majority and minority leaders in both chambers make $193,400, and Madame Speaker makes $223,500. All of them participate in the Federal Employees’ Retirement System, which uses a combination of years of service and an average of the three highest salaried years to calculate benefits. A member of Congress with 20 years in office retiring today at the minimum age of 50 would get an annual pension of about $35,000 to start. But of course for most retired lawmakers the pension is just pocket money; the real money derives from favors done and ones to come.
That would be cool, wouldn’t it? Put in your 20 and walk away at age 50 with a full pension and a license to steal? If there’s any reforming to be done, it should be in that direction rather than the “let the little fuckers work until 70 and get down with some Fancy Feast on special occasions” approach.
Anyway. Your tax dollars at work.
Meanwhile, Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel provided a helpful interpretive tip to Politico’s Ben White, noting that in assessing the administration’s objectives and performance, it’s way better to pay attention to what they do rather than what their spokesperson, the president, says. Sure, he may talk tough now and again, but he rained money down on the banks like they were starved saplings in the desert, and he enshrined into law the primacy of private health insurers, and he bailed out General Motors, and in general he’s doing his best to see that when government money is spent and government regulations are made, the benefits go to the people who pay the campaign bills.
Or as Rahm put it, “[r]ather than respond to atmospherics [i.e., what the president says], they should look at policies where we have been supportive.”
To which I would add my own rule, which is that if the president says he’s going to do something you like, assuming you’re to his political left, then he’s not going to do it. If he says he’s going to do something you don’t like, then he’s going to do it. Close Guantanamo? Not gonna do it. Escalate that thing in Afghanistan? Gonna do it. Leave Iraq? Not gonna do it. Assassinate US citizens on a bet? Gonna do it. And so on.
Nixon won. He has become the norm. (Norm!) Now even apparently nice guys do the same evil shit that he did, and they do it in public, and they get props for it. Every zombie movie ever made has become a cinematic paean to the soul of the man from Yorba Linda.
