The light has finally gone on. I've figured out what the overall GOP plan is to eradicate the poor, the middle class, and leave the rest of the country to the elites.

First they de-fund health care for anyone who can't afford it, which is all of us who are not indentured servants or making a zillion bucks a year already. Eric Cantor promises those de-funding provisions will be in the GOP budget before it passes the House.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Tuesday the bill to fund the government for the rest of the year will have language to withhold funding from the health care law by the time it passes the House next week.

It was a message to the party’s conservative base that, no, Republicans haven’t forgotten about defunding the health care law. But Cantor still didn’t promise that the defunding language would be in the bill from the beginning – as tea partiers and other opponents of the law want.

Instead, Cantor referred to the likelihood that Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana will offer the defunding amendment on the House floor – noting Rehberg’s “insistence” that the bill should not have any money to implement the law.

"I expect to see, one way or the other, the product coming out of the House to speak to that and to preclude any funding to be used for that,” Cantor said.

As our overall health declines, reducing life expectancies from what they are today to what they will be in the future without access to affordable health care, they will raise the Social Security Retirement Age in some sort of arbitrary and capricious fashion every few years.

[Alabama Senator Richard ]Shelby said he considers deficit reduction to be the top issue on the congressional agenda.

"We're on the road to financial destruction," he warned. "Can we get our hand around this problem without bringing everything to the table? No."

And Shelby indicated that entitlements are very much on his budget-cutting agenda. He mocked the recommendation of President Barack Obama's deficit commission, which he said would raise the Social Security retirement age in 2025 (actually, not until 2027).

"America will be burned by then -- and a lot of us will be dead," he said.

His preferred solution is to "up the age every several years," he said -- the net effect of which would be tantamount to one benefit cut after another.

Who needs death panels, anyway? We can just muddle through until the cancer, diabetes or heart disease kills most of us and we die paupers.

Well, now we know. Of course, here's something Shelby and his ilk are forgetting: Disabled, sick people end up on Social Security early, and are also eligible for Medicare early. So in addition to killing and bankrupting us sooner they'll drive up the deficit even more.

Keep those ideas coming, GOP.