Part of the President's Speech:
It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. It says that ten years from now, if you’re a 65 year old who’s eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy insurance, tough luck – you’re on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.
This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.
Worst of all, this is a vision that says even though America can’t afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can’t afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about it. In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs? That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.
The fact is, their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.
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The difference with the House Republican plan could not be clearer: their plan lowers the government’s health care bills by asking seniors and poor families to pay them instead. Our approach lowers the government’s health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself. ... Let me be absolutely clear: I will preserve these health care programs as a promise we make to each other in this society. I will not allow Medicare to become a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry, with a shrinking benefit to pay for rising costs. I will not tell families with children who have disabilities that they have to fend for themselves. We will reform these programs, but we will not abandon the fundamental commitment this country has kept for generations.
That includes, by the way, our commitment to Social Security.
The Democrats need to take the points made by POTUS and run with them. Come on Congresswoman Wasserman-Shultz!!
Full text of the President's Speech is HERE
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1 comment:
He can say whatever he wants but anyone who has been paying attention knows that he's nothing but a mascot for Wall Street tycoons. THAT is his base and all us regular working people living from paycheck to paycheck don't matter. Where was Obama's concern for social programs when he was signing the G.O.P.'s extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Surely he knew that when you reduce revenue you either 1.increase the deficit or 2.have to cut spending to balance the cuts. This was as predictable as an episode of Three's Company. The same bastards who were crying that the sky would fall if they didn't get the tax breaks for the high rollers extended are now the same pricks saying the world will end if we don't get a handle on the deficit through gutting well-established programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps. Yet if Obama was a real progressive, or anything but just another BushCheneyClintonBushReagan clone, he would have refused to sign onto their tax cut extensions and used the bully pulpit of the presidency to expose for everyone to see just what the Republican priorities are: more money for those who already have way too much and lassez-faire let-them-eat-cake heartlessness for the needy.
But he didn't. Not because he is afraid of them but because he's not there to stand up for the non-wealthy but rather to be just another marionette of the capitalist robber baron class that he answers to. He's just doing what he has been groomed for years to do. To be the front man for the oligarchy, a new, more charismatic face on the same old exploitation. To take the widespread desire for far-reaching change and channel it into dead-end streets that don't challenge the status quo. Don't go for the head fake. He's Cheney with more melanin, that's it, end of story.
We simply aren't ALLOWED to vote for anyone who might change anything in any meaningful way because that would make the billionaires that own this country and its government piss their pants every four years. No, all we can vote for is an obvious conservative and a slightly-less-obvious conservative. The only avenue left open for real change to be effected in America is the route the Egyptians and Tunisians took, peaceful, non-violent civil disobedience. Ours needs to aim not just at removing the current government but in overthrowing the one-sided, heartless capitalistic economic model that daily exploits everyone who isn't a billionaire and replacing it with worker ownership of the means of production and a government of, by and for the average non-wealthy person. We won't truly end our slavery until we smash the system that enslaves us as it obviously cannot be reformed. And we certainly won't get there by voting in meaningless elections for one of the two heads of the two-headed sock puppet of the billionaires that are the Republican and Democratic parties.
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