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On the day when House Republicans once again pass a budget that kills Medicare and Social Security, perhaps it's worth taking a look at what real people are going through.

Yes, Republicans, it's about far more than White House tours. Employees losing the equivalent of a months' pay, losing their jobs, services being cut and more.

Meanwhile, I'll bet no one is reporting on the Progressive Caucus budget, which actually did create jobs while saving Medicare and Social Security.

2014 is coming. Time to retire the tea party.

So the politicians haven't done such a good job of selling their "cut, cut, cut" deficit hysteria to the general public, according to this poll released today:

Public and pundit reaction to the unveiling of the House Budget Committee Proposal and much of the budget debate so far has focused largely on seniors’ issues and the proposed changes to the Medicare system. This aspect of this proposal is immensely unpopular as a number of public opinion surveys this week and last week attest, including this one. But there is another voice in this budget debate, a voice rarely heard by politicians in Washington, but a voice that finds advocates among average voters: the voice of children.

Proposed cuts to programs affecting kids prove every inch as unpopular as cuts affecting seniors. Indeed, 70 percent oppose the $750 billion cut in Medicaid in the House Budget Committee Proposal. In a battery identifying a series of potential cuts that the Congress may consider in the broader budget debate, voters are more likely to hold harmless programs affecting kids than any other program on the chopping block.

In no way does this survey suggest voters are willing to trade cuts affecting seniors for cuts affecting children and vice versa. Voters recognize there is another option, specifically on the revenue side, as outlined by the President’s budget speech. By a 62 to 24 percent margin, voters prefer raising taxes on those earning over a million dollars over cutting important programs. By the end of the survey, after voters are made aware of the scale of the cuts currently being considered, 72 percent prefer increasing taxes over cutting programs.

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[YouTube here.]

Big Mike -- MoveOn.org's "Break It Down" guy -- is kind of a rationalist response to Glenn Beck: He too uses blackboards, etc., to explain seemingly complex issues. But unlike Beck, who actually makes things out to be much more dense, murky, and inexplicable than they really are (not to mention inventing things that never were), Mike has the gift of taking complex subjects and actually helping ordinary people understand them.

So I every much enjoyed his latest "Break It Down" installment -- this time on the ongoing federal-budget battles. It really is about the nation's Top 1 percent income earners against the rest of us -- and it's going to become even more intense:

And all of this fighting is just over this year's budget. Next year's budget is where things get really crazy.

Because even though taxes for the rich are the lowest they have been in generations, the Republicans want to cut them even further, so millionaires and billionaires are paying 25% instead of 35%.

But where are they going to get the trillions of dollars they need to do that?

Their ideas are fairly simple: Slash $350 billion from things like food stamps, education, training, employment, Cut another $400 billion from programs that help low-income families. Oh, and get rid of Medicare.

Yeah, almost forgot about that. They're going to take away Medicare, give seniors vouchers, and throw them on the mercy of Big Insurance. Because when I think compassion, I think Big Insurance.

So if you or your aging parents actually depend on Medicare, they can look forward to a future where they can choose between buying their meds….or eating.

If we want to get serious about shrinking the deficit, it won't happen on the backs of the middle class that’s already being squeezed.

He actually might have made good use of another chart MoveOn recently published:

Remember all those mini-movies that summarized a broad topic in two minutes or less? Whether the subject was the Civil War, the magical things that happen when you multiply by ten, or the complete history of Western Civilization, these mini-films covered everything in one rapid-fire shot after another, giving you a whole lot of information - and a splitting headache - in a very short period of time.

The first minute or two of this Michelle Bachmann Today show interview is like that. She runs through the entire litany of disproven conservative cliches about the economy in 100 seconds or less without even getting short of breath. If someone ever wants to make one of those two-minute movies and call it The Ideas That Crushed the American Dream, Rep. Bachmann's written the script.

Fire it up and watch her go! We'll sound the bell every time she floats a discredited idea. Ready?

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My favorite part of the president's speech on the budget today was when he eviscerated Rep. Paul Ryan's phony "Path to Prosperity":

Now, to their credit, one vision has been presented and championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates. It’s a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years, and one that addresses the challenge of Medicare and Medicaid in the years after that.

These are both worthy goals. They’re worthy goals for us to achieve. But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known certainly in my lifetime. In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history.

A 70 percent cut in clean energy. A 25 percent cut in education. A 30 percent cut in transportation. Cuts in college Pell Grants that will grow to more than $1,000 per year. That’s the proposal. These aren’t the kind of cuts you make when you’re trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings in the budget. These aren’t the kinds of cuts that the Fiscal Commission proposed. These are the kinds of cuts that tell us we can’t afford the America that I believe in and I think you believe in.

I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic. It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them.

Go to China and you’ll see businesses opening research labs and solar facilities. South Korean children are outpacing our kids in math and science. They’re scrambling to figure out how they put more money into education. Brazil is investing billions in new infrastructure and can run half their cars not on high-priced gasoline, but on biofuels. And yet, we are presented with a vision that says the American people, the United States of America -– the greatest nation on Earth -– can’t afford any of this.

It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. It says that 10 years from now, if you’re a 65-year-old who’s eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy the insurance that’s available in the open marketplace, well, tough luck -– you’re on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.

It’s a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. Who are these 50 million Americans? Many are somebody’s grandparents -- may be one of yours -- who wouldn’t be able to afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some of these kids with disabilities are -- the disabilities are so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.

And worst of all, this is a vision that says even though Americans can’t afford to invest in education at current levels, or clean energy, even though we can’t afford to maintain our commitment on Medicare and Medicaid, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about that.

In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That’s who needs to pay less taxes?

They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That’s not right. And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.

This, of course, deeply upset Rep. Ryan:

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RYAN: I'm very disappointed in the president. I was excited when we got invited to attend his speech today. I thought the president's invitation to Mr. Camp, Mr. Hensley and myself was an olive branch. Instead, what we got was a speech that was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate in addressing our country's pressing fiscal challenges. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander in chief. What we heard today was a political broadside from our campaigner-in-chief.

If Ryan is going to accuse the president of being "dramatically inaccurate," he better be ready to back it up. As you can see, Obama's evisceration of the Ryan budget was based on a set of well-established facts.

In the meantime, I'm sure you'll all join me in playing "Cry Me a River" on the world's smallest violin for Ryan. Especially when he calls Obama's budget outline "doubling down on the failed politics of the past." Projection, anyone? There was no greater failure than the economic politics of George W. "I Never Met A Tax Cut For the Wealthy I Didn't Like" Bush -- and Ryan's plan is Bushism on steroids.

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This week, Republicans swept to power by promising to cut, in the words of Indiana's Mike Pence, "runaway federal spending." But when it comes to putting taxpayers' money where their mouths are, Pence, incoming Speaker John Boehner, future Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann and much of the cowardly GOP's top-brass refuse to say what budget cuts they will actually make. And now to add insult to injury, many of the leading lights of the Republican Party are waiting for recommendations from President Obama's deficit commission, a panel whose creation they opposed.

For months, Republicans have refused to "man up" to the draconian budget cuts their tough-talking campaign pledges would necessarily require. Pressed by NBC's David Gregory last month, Mike Pence could not "name the painful choice on a program that you're going to cut." Asked seven times by Chris Wallace of Fox News, failed GOP California Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina responded only, "you're asking a typical political question." Even as he touted the "GOP Pledge to America," Speaker-to-Be Boehner dodged Wallace as well:

Let's not get to the potential solutions. Let's make sure Americans understand how big the problem is. Then we can talk about possible solutions and then work ourselves into those solutions that are doable.

That charade has only continued since the election. Within 24 hours, Cantor, Bachmann and Tennessee's Marsha Blackburn all did the duck-and-cover on spending cuts. With defense, Social Security and Medicare (not to mention interest on the national debt) off the table, the unexplained GOP pledge to cut $100 billion in "discretionary" spending would necessarily gut the departments of Education, Transportation, Interior, Commerce and Energy by more than 20%.

And as was on display on Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN Thursday, the comic cowardice of the ersatz Republican spending hawks has gone from the ridiculous to the sublime. Refusing to reveal what Boehner described as "lot of tricks up our sleeves in terms of how we can dent this," Republicans are now saying they will wait for President Obama's deficit commission to weigh in.

To make that point, Cooper showed a Meet the Press clip of Texas Senator and NRSC head John Cornyn using President Obama as a human shield:

DAVID GREGORY: What painful choices to really deal with the deficit, is Social Security on the table? What will Republicans do?

SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R-TX), CHAIR, NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORS: The president has a debt commission that reports December the 1st and I think we'd all like to see what they come back with. And my hope is they'll come back for the bipartisan solution to the debt and particularly entitlement reform, as you -- as you've mentioned.

But I --

DAVID GREGORY: But wait a minute, conservatives need a -- a Democratic president's debt commission to figure out what it is they'd want to cut?

Former Bush chief of staff Andy Card also argued that discretion is the better part of valor when it comes to Republicans and their budget machismo:

I do think it's appropriate to wait for the -- the wisdom that might come from this debt commission. They're going to have to make some tough recommendations and see how the president reacts. I think it's much too early to be talking about specific program cuts that are only designed to inflame the debate rather than be constructive and really bringing discipline to the government. The president is the one that will have to propose a budget. Congress will have to react to it.

As it turns out, the new Republican majority lack both courage and a sense of irony. After all, the deficit commission was established by President Obama's executive order after a bill to create it was filibustered in the Senate by 53-46. That defeat came only after several Republican Senators voted against the very bill they once supported. As Politics Daily summed it up:

This reversal early this year involved six Republican co-sponsors of such a commission who voted against their own Senate bill. The six were McCain, Brownback, Mike Crapo of Idaho, John Ensign of Nevada, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and James Inhofe of Oklahoma. McConnell had once supported the idea, but he too voted against it. The bill required an up-or-down vote on the commission recommendations. McConnell and others said they feared the panel might suggest raising taxes.

And so it goes. Aside from Paul Ryan (whose plan to privatize Social Security and Medicare made him a GOP pariah during election season), virtually the entire Republican leadership team tried to run out the clock before Election Day without ever detailing the spending cuts they claimed to champion. Now, these same born-again deficit hawks are too afraid to stand on their supposed principles. The first move in the game of budget chess, they insist, is Obama's.

Frames are beginning to take clear shape for the midterms, and yes, Social Security will be under attack. While Republicans won't necessarily push privatization, they'll try to make points with the usual fear tactics about how the "Social Security Crisis" will bankrupt the country. Paul Krugman has some things to say about that.

The math is wrong and so is their attitude

Social Security’s attackers claim that they’re concerned about the program’s financial future. But their math doesn’t add up, and their hostility isn’t really about dollars and cents. Instead, it’s about ideology and posturing. And underneath it all is ignorance of or indifference to the realities of life for many Americans.

What crisis?

So where do claims of crisis come from? To a large extent they rely on bad-faith accounting. In particular, they rely on an exercise in three-card monte in which the surpluses Social Security has been running for a quarter-century don’t count — because hey, the program doesn’t have any independent existence; it’s just part of the general federal budget — while future Social Security deficits are unacceptable — because hey, the program has to stand on its own.

What's really going on here?

What’s really going on here? Conservatives hate Social Security for ideological reasons: its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution. But they receive crucial support from Washington insiders, for whom a declared willingness to cut Social Security has long served as a badge of fiscal seriousness, never mind the arithmetic.

There's much more to Krugman's article, all worthy of attention. Bottom line is easy: Social Security should not be on the table. At all.

As Tea Party favorite Karl Marx once said, historical events occur twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. And so it is with the Tea Party "Contract from America." But rather than following Newt Gingrich's gimmicky 1994 path to retaking control of Congress, the Tea Partiers sound more like Ronald Reagan circa 1980. After all, the Gipper, too, promised to cut taxes, raise defense spending and balance the budget. Of course, what Reagan produced instead during his eight years in office was a tripling of the national debt and red ink as far as the eye can see.

Undeterred, today's Tea Baggers would condemn America to repeating that history of fiscal disaster, only on a far larger scale. Among the other inanities in their self-contradictory 10-point manifesto, three taken together represent the budgetary equivalent of declaring the sun rises in the west and that the law of gravity no longer applies:

(3) Demand a Balanced Budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax hike.

(6) End Runaway Government Spending: Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of the inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth.

(10) Stop the Tax Hikes: Permanently repeal all tax hikes, including those to the income, capital gains and death taxes, currently scheduled to begin in 2011.

Sadly, the Tea Party's fuzzy math doesn't work. Put another way, you can't get there from here.

For starters, the Bush tax cuts the Tea Party wants to make permanent (10) are largely responsible for the expanding deficits in this decade and the next. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) detailed, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 accounted for almost half of the mushrooming deficits during his tenure. And as another recent CBPP analysis revealed, over the next 10 years, the Bush tax cuts will contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession - combined. (Ending the so-called "death tax," which impacts only 1 in 500 estates, will drain billions more per year from the U.S. Treasury.) An AP chart last fall of data from the Congress Budget Office show the explosion of federal debt that will ensue if the Tea Baggers and their Republicans get their way:

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Paul Ryan is trying to actually say he and the GOP have ideas. Soon, the media will pick up on this and also say that the GOP and Ryan have really cool ideas to take care of that nasty federal deficit and curb health care costs by 2080. Yes, I'm not kidding. 2080 I guess it is an idea even if it's batshit crazy.

The Economist lays it out for you.

Barack Obama's visit with the Republicans last week, some members of the opposition were deeply upset. They bristled at the idea that they have not proposed any serious ideas and are simply the "Party of No". In fact, the accusation is not true: Republicans have proposed some serious ideas recently. I'm going to post on two of them. The first, put forward by Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican member of the budget committee, is the "Roadmap for America's Future" budget proposal and it credibly claims to put America's federal budget in surplus by 2080. The CBO agrees. How does it do that?Simple, it slashes Medicare...top_paying_them">read on

He's shilling for Wall Street yet again as he usually does. He wants to privatize medicare and social security although he uses words like "vouchers" to mask what he's saying.

Crying John Boehner is running from it as fast as he can.

House Republicans are at pains to point out that a far-reaching budget roadmap unveiled by their top budget guy, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), isn't their budget, but when asked today at a press conference what about Ryan's budget he disagreed with, Minority Leader John Boehner couldn't name anything.

"Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you," Boehner said.

And as Howie Klein points out, he reminds teabaggers why they aren't going to like him.

And Paul Ryan's is one of Wall Street's most devoted partisans on Capitol Hill, a veritable lobbyist inside Congress for all of their interests. Teabaggers don't like politicians who voted for the irresponsible Bush bank bailouts? Ryan didn't only vote for it-- twice-- as a high ranking member of Ways and Means and Banking Committee, the he persuaded dozens of reluctant GOP colleagues to vote for it and after it failed the first time, is said to have been the key figure in passing it the second time a week later!

Blue America just set up a page called Stop Paul Ryan. While he's a spectacular conservative hack, he's still very dangerous. If you can throw a few bucks our way. We plan to target him. Remember, he is a conservative and Wall Street golden boy.

Oh yes, the deficit hawks are circling. Obama's decided to throw them some fresh meat in his State of the Union address -- and since he's ruled out cuts in defense spending, this money will come from someplace else.

According to Jared Bernstein, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, this won't be as bad as it sounds: "No stupid Hooverism around here." While I can't help but wonder if this will be taken from the programs that serve the neediest (since those are the constituencies without powerful political backers) he says this will be targeted to specific waste.

Well, we'll see. Maybe this is just political theater, where Obama "proves" he can stand up to liberals. (Krugman says it looks like "pure disaster.")

I just have to wonder if he'd do this without getting some concessions in return from the Blue Dogs. We do know it'll make Evan Bayh happy, and that's what's important!

WASHINGTON -- Facing voter anger over mounting budget deficits, President Barack Obama will ask Congress to freeze spending for some domestic programs for three years beginning in 2011, administration officials said Monday. Separately, Obama unveiled plans to help a middle class "under assault" pay its bills, save for retirement and care for kids and aging parents.

The spending freeze would apply to a relatively small portion of the federal budget, affecting a $477 billion pot of money available for domestic agencies whose budgets are approved by Congress each year. Some of those agencies could get increases, others would have to face cuts; such programs got an almost 10 percent increase this year. The federal budget total was $3.5 trillion.

The three-year plan will be part of the budget Obama will submit Feb. 1, senior administration officials said, commenting on condition of anonymity to reveal private details.

The Pentagon, veterans programs, foreign aid and the Homeland Security Department would be exempt from the freeze.

What a difference a year makes!