Saturday, July 9, 2011

Dear Mr. President,

Hope. Change. Trust. Believability. All four missing in action on your watch. Even Paul Krugman, an early supporter, has given up on you. As he said in yesterday’s column, “It’s getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right.” But this is not a new phenomena. Last December, for example, you not only extended the Bush tax cuts, you out-Republicaned the Republicans with an unasked-for bonus of an extra $5 million exemption on estate taxes and a 35% cap on the tax rate for anything above that amount. Also last year you helped create an expanded deduction for corporate jets. But this year, well, this year’s grandstand play to out-Republican the Republicans by proposing reduced benefits for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is in a category by itself. This one really breaks the back of the social contract. And not only is this consistent with your past actions but consistent with your style of secrecy and double-dealing behind closed doors. “We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing” you said Thursday. True. But what we can’t afford is continuous wars and tax cuts for the rich. It’s the Bush tax cuts, the ones you extended, combined with more than $1 trillion in unjustified immoral wars that are the cause of the deficit, not Social Security or other social programs. What seems to be forgotten in all this is that Social Security was, and still is, I believe, a separate trust fund which Congress has raided over the years and now considers part of the general fund. Krugman points out that you’ve adopted all the fallacies of the Republican rightwingnuts’ rhetoric as truth, even though reality clearly points to the failure of those ideas. You cannot de-fund social programs for the poor and the elderly in order to fund wars. You cannot continue to take from the poor and middle class to give to the rich. It is immoral, it is unconscionable. This is not equality or democracy, Mr. President. We are becoming a nation of haves and have-nots with the gulf becoming wider each day. Once again the jobless rate increases (officially 9.2% in June, unofficially, 16.7%) the number of new jobs is near zero, the rich get richer and the poor get more desperate. And in your flip-flopping and broken promises, your actions that put a lie to your rhetoric, you dishonor yourself and your country. And we are all the poorer for it.