I'll say it again: this talk from Obama of not paying SS checks is ridiculous. Because it's funded via payroll taxes and has a trust fund (which is kind of a joke, but at least has a legal meaning), SS should be one of the last things cut. Unless the Treasury is lying, there's plenty of funds for SS regardless of what happens.
Mencken once defined a demagogue as "one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."
This certainly the case with Obama and the U.S. public (including some mental midgets around here.)
This should be an opportunity to cut a huge amount of waste. To take just one example, SS/Medicare has a ton of fraud. And almost anyone with a good lawyer can get SSI or SS Disability. Moreover, the age for reduced or full benefits should be grandfathered but aggresively moved up. Age 65 was close to life expectancy when SS began in the 1930s. It's a completely arbitrary number at this point.
There are other Fed agencies (and plenty of workers) that should be cut out completely. I won't even start on the Pentagon. This should be a great wake-up for the nation and our bloated gov't and entitlement junkies. It should be the equivalent of the alcoholic/credit card abuser/glutton having a major scare and finally doing something about it.
Instead, it will probably be another "kick the can" game as we pretend that a few token spending cuts and "tax the rich!" will be solve the problem. It won't be. Nations that have turned around problems like ours have found at least 85% of their solution coming from spending cuts. But I'm afraid we won't do that until a real crisis (not an arbitrary deadline) forces us to.
