Economic War Declared on the American Middle Class
If you’re a middle or working class American, whether or not you accept it, we’re all in the same boat, and we just had a shot fired across our bow. The co-chairs of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission released their initial proposal late last week and made one thing perfectly clear — they believe our nation’s fiscal problems must be corrected on the backs of working Americans.
The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was created by executive order this past February. The commission’s primary mission was to identify “policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run,” and also to “propose recommendations designed to balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015.”
It’s difficult to fault either the notion to form the commission or the assigned mission. The group was even structured in a bipartisan manner, requiring that no more than 10 of its 18 members be of a single political party. But if the co-chair proposal is any indication of the content of the final report that’s due for commission vote by December 1, then it’s now evident that class warfare has been waged in America, and the two major political parties have allied against the interests of the majority of citizens.
Fortunately, there may still be hope that this isn’t the case, that the co-chair’s full frontal assault on working Americans will not receive the 14 votes needed to move forward. The proposal, as released, is the work of former Republican Senator, Alan Simpson, and Erskine Bowles, who served as advisor to President Clinton.
Simpson’s politics are certainly no mystery, as evidenced by the abusive e-mail he recently sent to the executive director of the National Older Women’s League where he described Social Security as being “like a milk cow with 310 million tits.” And while Mr. Bowles is purported to be a Democrat, his views put him squarely in the DINO (Democrat in name only) camp. He is an investment banker, formally employed by Morgan Stanley, on whose board he still serves, and the co-creator of his own investment firm.
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