‘Everything is on the table. Everything’

“The heads of President Barack Obama’s national debt commission painted a gloomy picture Sunday as the United States struggles to get its spending under control,” The Associated Press reports.

Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles told a meeting of the National Governors Association that everything needs to be considered — closing down the federal Departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Labor, and Health and Human Services (none of which are authorized by the Constitution, anyway); shutting down the Federal Reserve and going back to minting money of gold and silver; pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan; slashing the Pentagon budget in half; privatizing Social Security, and ending tax-funded wealth redistribution by closing down Medicaid and Medicare, instead turning over medical care for the poor to private, voluntary charities.

No, no, of course neither Demopublican Bowles — former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton — nor Republicrat Simpson — who as GOP Senate whip in 1990 helped round up enough votes to “help” President George H.W. Bush break his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge — mentioned any of those things being “on the table.”

You believed that? What you been smoking?

Instead, when the heads of President Obama’s so-called “debt commission” listed the supposed “everything” that’s now “on the table” they revealed why their front group is more widely known as the Obama Tax-Hike Justification Commission.

Sizable spending cuts? Impossible!

Instead, after tacitly acknowledging decades of spending on liberal social welfare programs have brought us close to chaotic bankruptcy, the retired redistributionists warn it may be time for “curtailing popular tax breaks, such as the home mortgage deduction, and instituting a financial trigger mechanism for gaining Medicare coverage.”

In other words, turning these so-called “universal federal insurance programs” into blatantly means-tested welfare boondoggles (bearing out the long-standing predictions and warnings of the so-called “wackos of the radical right”), where retiring Baby Boomers who’ve paid the highest known Medicare taxes for past 30 years will be told, “Oh, sorry, you still own a house and bank account; come back when you’re living in a tent.”

The nation’s total federal debt next year is expected to exceed $14 trillion — about $47,000 for every U.S. resident.

The entirety of the nation’s current “discretionary” spending is consumed by the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security programs, said Sen. Simpson. “The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans, the whole rest of the discretionary budget, is being financed by China and other countries.” China alone currently holds $920 billion in U.S. IOUs.

Yet the gentlemen can’t see “It’s the spending, stupid?” They can’t even ask where the heck in the Constitution anyone finds authority for Washington to be involved in funding “education, art and culture”?

Make no mistake: The purpose of this commission is to erode resistance to tax hikes, though the Democrats will stay carefully mum about which taxes will be raised, and how high, till after November.

(It’s an old tactic. Ask “Would you prefer to pay a national sales tax or to have your hands cut off?” Then announce: “Poll results show large majority favor national sales tax.”)

Come November, even should they lose big, the plan is to hold a lame-duck session in which departing majority Democrats, with nothing to lose but their souls, will ram through the tax hikes necessary to fund the boondoggles they’ve been enacting over the past two years, regardless of the economic death spiral into which that will likely drive the nation.

“Change”? If Barack Obama were the post-partisan agent of “change” he promised on the campaign trail, he would have been here in Las Vegas last week campaigning for the Nevada U.S. Senate candidate who’s at least willing to explore modest reforms designed to shore up the viability of Social Security — Sharron Angle.

Instead, Mr. Obama last week urged a vote for the bankrupt status quo. Make no mistake: A vote for Harry Reid and the Democrats in November is a vote for an end to the home mortgage interest deduction. (And you thought there was a housing and banking crisis NOW?)

A vote for Harry Reid and the Democrats is a vote for a 17 percent national sales tax — the so-called Value Added Tax — imposed ON TOP OF the personal income tax.

A vote for Harry Reid is a reward for a man who ALREADY ramrodded enactment of an Obamacare bill that will suck an extra $7 billion out of small businesses in the next decade by requiring companies to file “1099” tax snitch forms on anyone with whom they do $600 in business annually — creating huge incentives for companies to dump their smallest vendors, entirely.

This is all consistent with the forthright, publicly acknowledged redistributionist agenda of the Obama administration, which doesn’t mind driving the entire nation into poverty if they can accomplish their higher goal of punishing capitalists, businessmen, the middle class, and “the wealthy” in “payback” for their supposed years of privilege and oppression.

It’s the “social justice” revolution, on display for much of the past century in Russia, Africa, and Southeast Asia, absorbed first from the president’s childhood mentor, the Communist Frank Marshall Davis, and then during the 20 years that Mr. Obama sat quietly in the church of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who he has called “his spiritual father.”

The Rev. Wright, who argues Martin Luther King, Jr., was misguided to advocate nonviolence among his people, “born in the oven of America,” said at Howard University in 2006 that America “started the AIDS virus. … We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty.”

This is the America-hating, free-market-despising, wealth-destroying agenda that’s driving us to bankruptcy. Yet today’s Democrats call their freedom-loving opponents “extreme”?

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