I'm So Glad We Elected a Democrat, Part Wev

And the hits keep coming:

President Obama next week will take the political risk of formally proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare in his annual budget in an effort to demonstrate his willingness to compromise with Republicans and revive prospects for a long-term deficit-reduction deal, administration officials say.

Perfect.

Specifically, the President is proposing to lower cost-of-living adjustments, in order to reduce the growth of Social Security, which will of course hit hardest the people most dependent on Social Security benefits, i.e. elderly people in poverty.

The proposed cuts will also disproportionately affect veterans and people with disabilities.

And, brace yourself, the cuts Obama has proposed on seniors are more severe than the closed loopholes/tax increases on the wealthy...

President Obama's proposal would reduce benefits by 0.3 percent for each year after a worker retires. After ten years benefits would be cut by 3.0 percent, after twenty years 6.0 percent, and after 30 years 9.0 percent. Over a twenty year retirement, the average cut would be 3.0 percent…

By comparison, Social Security is about 70 percent of the income of a typical retiree. Since President Obama's proposal would lead to a 3 percent cut in Social Security benefits, it would reduce the income of the typical retiree by more than 2.0 percent, more than three times the size of the hit from the tax increase to the wealthy.

For even further clarification it should be noted the loopholes for the wealthy will not stay closed. The current tax system is designed for that type of gamesmanship. So what is likely to happen if Obama gets his dream deal? Social Security will be permanently cut and the rich will lose a deduction or two for a year before they get slipped back in. Exchanging temporary increases in taxes for permanent benefit cuts to those in need in an a two-tier economy is beyond cynical. If President Obama is legacy shopping, he might want to return this item.

Meanwhile, Republicans like Jim DeMint, newly anointed president of the Heritage Foundation, are doubling-down on Mitt Romney's "entitled to food" garbage: "Today, more people than ever before—69.5 million Americans, from college students to retirees to welfare beneficiaries—depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions. The United States must reverse the direction of these trends or face economic and social collapse."

So we've got one party screaming at people with no options to get bootstrappin' before they destroy the country, and the other party telling them whooooooops here's even less because that other party is terrible and we need to take the political risk risk your actual fucking lives in order to try to bargain with them over the invented crisis of deficit reduction.

I don't even know what to say anymore. The United States government is failing its people. "If you're not rich, you're fucked!" is not a sustainable economic model, which is to say nothing of its colossal indecency.