Friday, May 25, 2007

The entitlement elephant in the room

I was visiting Mom over the past couple days, so let's just roll out another Social Security article for now:

This important matter -- far more important than the promises -- is to fix Social Security. Here's a program absolutely vital in the lives of tens of millions, a program that is explicitly the responsibility of these congressional malingerers and a program that is in such a bad way financially that there won't be enough revenues to finance all the benefits just a decade out.

Do nothing about it, and along with Medicare it will eventually swallow the budget whole. Wait to act until the crisis is at hand, and the options will all be ghastly tricks on a trusting public.
Jay Ambrose writes that the Democratic Congress has done "nothing" which is unfair because they've passed 26 laws since the election dealing with very important matters.

Update - Slight correction: Congress has now passed 27 laws.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's all the fault of those obstructionist Republicans!

Obstructionist! OBSTRUCTIONIIIIIISSSST!!!!

Eric said...

What are you talking about? Most of those laws were extensions from the '04 Congress or GOP-sponsored.

And #27 was icing on the legislative cake.

Congratulations on winning Congress, BTW!

Anonymous said...

I have as much idea what I'm talking about as your GOP did when they were peddling the same nonsense for four or five years.

OBSTRUCTIONIIIIIIIISSSSST!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Congratulations on winning some cake icing.

And congratulations on following a leader who, it now seems, will sacrifice another 900 or 1,200 troops to buy time, so that he can reduce the GOP Iraq commitment as close to Election '08 as possible. And without having the Dems "make him" do it.

But what is different now is the political environment in the United States. While Democrats in Congress relented this week and dropped demands to attach a schedule for withdrawal to a bill to finance military efforts in Iraq, White House officials concede that they have bought a few months, at best.

By the fall, they say, they are likely to lose several Republican senators and many members of the House who voted with Mr. Bush in recent weeks.


WASHINGTON, May 25 — The Bush administration is developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year, according to senior administration officials in the midst of the internal debate.

It is the first indication that growing political pressure is forcing the White House to turn its attention to what happens after the current troop increase runs its course.

The concepts call for a reduction in forces that could lower troop levels by the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000, the latest available figure, which the military reported on May 1. They would also greatly scale back the mission that President Bush set for the American military when he ordered it in January to win back control of Baghdad and Anbar Province.

Anonymous said...

In early 2005 Bush gave it a shot. He reminded me of Bluto at the end of Animal House. He gave his pep-talk and ran out of the room - everyone from both parties just sat there and watched him go it alone.

It was the most cowardly political act I've ever seen.