Impervious to reason and/or basic math

Remember, America, that it's the Republicans who are supposed to be unbending and incapable of compromise.  Hot Air: "Reid: Social Security really isn't part of the problem, you know."

“Social Security is not part of the problem.” Er, actually, these gigantic and growing entitlement programs are the main drivers of our ever-increasing $16 trillion national debt, and Social Security is not a crisis waiting to happen. It’s a crisis that is happening, right now, everyday — and it’s not like ‘nobody could have seen this coming’ or anything.

In fact the Congressional Budget Office has charted the long-term spending on entitlements and by "long term" I mean we'll be totally broke in fifteen years:

As this graph indicates, in an uncomfortably short period of time federal spending will rise above 20% of GDP and never goes down.  This is the tipping point because Hauser's law tells us that revenues from taxes rarely rise above 20% of GDP.  In other words, if you've enjoyed five years of trillion-dollar deficits, you're going to love the next forty.  Well, that is, until the merry-go-round breaks down.

In his effort (such as it is) to avoid the fiscal cliff, Obama has proposed $1.6 trillion dollars in revenues by taxing the "rich."  Keep in mind that this is spread out over a decade - so $160 billion/year - and in October alone federal overspending added $120 billion to the national debt.  In other words, even if we soaked Uncle Moneybags, we'd still have to borrow from China to pay for the other 10-1/2 months of the year.