There's Method to their Madness

Reading this morning's NYT Op-Ed onWashington's Fiscal Meltdown, I saw the underlying GOP strategy with dealing with the Boomer generation's impact on Social Security. They want the poor to die earlier and not get their full benefits. And it's not just for African-Americans anymore.

And then there is the 11th-hour tax cut slipped into the Senate proposal. It would repeal an income tax on Social Security benefits that applies to the wealthiest 20 percent or so of beneficiaries and whose revenue is dedicated to the Medicare hospital trust fund. The repeal would accelerate the fund's projected insolvency by four years, to 2015 from 2019. Now there's a plan! Give the best-off elderly a tax break and put all of the elderly who may have to go into the hospital at greater financial risk.

When you step back and look at it, the collective tax-cutting psyche of Mr. Bush and his partisans appears to border dangerously on the grandiose. How else to explain their relentless profligacy in the face of the unprecedented Bush-era swing from budget surplus to deficit, the unmistakable long-term trend of a rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer income distribution, the ballooning costs of war, the weaker dollar, rising oil prices and record deficits in trade and investment - which now require the United States to borrow $2.1 billion a day from abroad? It's time for the people, the ultimate referees in a democracy, to call a timeout.

They can kill two birds with one stone. Get rid of medical assistance for those who chose to be poor and helpless in their latter years and give tax cuts to the investor class who had the foresight to be born into the well-to-do segment of society.

I'm just waiting for some bold Republican congress-critter to propose legislation for debtor's prisons to make the trifecta of conservative compassion.