Obama Plays Poker With Boehner

Dear Mr. President,

You raise the threshold for higher taxes from $250,000 to $400,000 and Boehner immediately counters with $1 million. This is not a poker game, Mr. President, the future of the country is at stake here. The idea is not to keep raising Boehner but to call his bluff. Some say you’re negotiating with yourself, others say you’re showing good faith by compromising. I say you’re either a conservative Republican austerity hawk at heart or just plain stupid. Either way, your pattern is consistent: campaign on one platform, then immediately abandon it and give the Republicans everything they want. Even the New York Times editorial got a bit exasperated this morning and lamented that you were not a “more combative negotiator.” Not only did you agree to keep the tax rate on dividends, a major source of income for the 1%, at 20% instead of raising it to 39.6%, but you agreed to the Republican idea of cutting millions of seniors’ Social Security checks by using a new cost of living index, the Chained CPI. As if that wasn’t bad enough, you proposed slashing more than $400 billion from federal health care, namely Medicare and Medicaid. But Medicare is not a budget problem. Medicare is funded by a separate tax on wages and stored in a separate trust fund. The problem is that Republican legislation prohibits negotiating lower rates with big pharma and their bloated profit margins. And why did you put Social Security on the chopping block anyway? Social Security is not part of the budget problem either; it’s not part of the budget; it’s an entitlement program funded by a separate tax on every wage-earner and employer and kept in a separate trust fund. How did Social Security suddenly merge into the federal budget? Betrayal after betrayal. And your proposed $100 billion cut to Defense? Another sham; it amounts to no more than $10 billion a year, a drop in the bucket that can be more than offset by buying 800 fewer F-35s or maybe not buying engines for some of them. You’ve embraced the Republican fallacy of cutting spending for what? So the rich can get yet another pass? And then the final straw, another article buried on the inside pages of this morning’s Times, “Congressional Negotiators Drop Ban on Indefinite Detention of Citizens, Aides Say.” I couldn’t help but wonder if you were behind that one, too. Your pattern has not changed, you are still the most effective evil, and anyone who voted for you and thought otherwise is delusional or a fool or both.