Obamaland

Lets take a look at the nation's priorities after two years in Obamaland.

-- Bush's tax cuts for the rich are good and should stay in place. The Democrats didn't make any serious effort to repeal these, not even when they temporarily held a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. No surprise, since most of these Democrats are millionaires themselves.

-- Defense spending rises the first two budgets. Now the Democrats appear to be fighting to keep it as high as possible. It certainly does not seem to be viewed as a place to cut the deficit.

-- Same goes for 'intelligence' spending, and that giant bucket of corporate pork known as the Dept of Homeland Security.

-- Wall Street gets anything they want. When they say they need hundreds of billions of dollars, they get it. When they say they want the Fed to take over all the bad debt that the Wall Street pryamid schemes created, the Fed is glad to do so. No one gets prosecuted for a con that turned non-verified signature loans into AAA rated securities. No serious reform of Wall Street.

-- For everyone else who might want a hand in this worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, everyone gets a cold shoulder. Oh, the defecit is so bad that there's no help available. And now, we get the good news that we have to give away our retirements to corporate America to pay for all the billions that get spent everywhere else.

The rich are spending a lot of money on TV ads and bought columnists and editorials about the 'deficit' right now. And of course, its anything that doesn't benefit the rich, like Social Security and Medicare, that has to be jetisoned to solve this so-called crisis.

But hey, here's an alternate deficit reduction plan.

-- Put taxes back to where they were before Bush Jr took office.
-- End the wars. That's hundreds of billions a year of 'off-budget' money we can save.
-- Cut back on Defense, Intelligence spending, and on Homeland Security.

On Defense, we spend more than the rest of the world combined. And most of the rest of the top ten are our allies like England and France. We spend way, way, way too much on our military.

On Intelligence, these are the people who didn't see 9-11 coming. And who didn't see the fall of the Berlin Wall. From Iraq to Iran, our 'intelligence' community mainly seems paid to produce what the White House wants to see. Surely we can just outsource the writing of these fictional intelligence estimates to some Indian tech writers online and save some money here.

On Homeland Security, that's mostly just pork. Here's an example for your holiday travel ... those big full body scanners that take the naked pictures of you in the airports. Thing is, they don't work. Oh, they cost millions and millions of dollars. So somewhere out there is a company that's happen to have gotten the contract, probably with the help of a well-paid, uh, well-contributed to, congress-critter. But, they don't detect non-metal stuff like explosives all that much better than metal detectors. The tech has been around for 20 years, and no one thought this would work until it became someone's highly intrusive pork barrel project. You are being virtually strip searched to improve some corporation's profits and to keep contributions flowing to some congress-critter. Have a happy holiday in corporate America. Surely there's some deficit trimming to do this tree.

-- End corporate welfare and close corporate tax loopholes.

Now, I'm not the CBO, so I can't score such a plan. But, I'm guessing all of the above provides plenty of cuts to the deficit, and at the same time frees up enough money that we can have some real stimulus to those of us who don't get million-dollar wall street bonus checks.

And of course, its silly to be trying to cut the deficit in the midst of a depression in the first place. That's so Herbert Hoover. But that's today's Democrats. Herbert Hoover would be right at home in this modern Democratic Party.