David Gergen thinks what's left of the middle class in America had better be ready to take their medicine after we bust the budget with these tax cuts for the rich. How could America possibly survive if we asked the wealthy in this country to pay their share?
GERGEN: I just want to come back to one point Anderson. For the last two days we’ve been hearing about protecting the middle class… protecting the middle class. When we get serious about deficit reduction, you know who’s really going to get hit hard? It’s going to be the middle class. A lot of the mortgage deductions are going to get trimmed back. A lot of those things are going to get trimmed back and you know, I think that Washington is not being straight with people.
Yes we’ve got this… we have a need to get these tax cuts extended. It has to be done and so forth and so on, but trouble is coming for the middle class and the sooner the president and the Congress full level with the American people, the better.
Gergen's example of cutting back on the mortgage deductions rings pretty hollow with me since I believe they were only talking about mortgages over $500,000 and even then I'm not sure if they meant loan for that amount or the interest up to that amount, and getting rid of it for second homes. That's not going to affect too many that would be considered "middle class" unless you live in some of the most expensive areas of the country and I'd be shocked if they didn't make some exceptions for that.
What he's really talking about here is going after Social Security. He's been touting going after that surplus so our government doesn't have to reimburse the treasury for those funds for some time now. I'm sick to death of these hacks who are considered the "serious people" in our political circles telling the rest of us how we'd better be ready to tighten our belts while we make sure the crooks on Wall Street and big corporations and the rich are never asked to be patriotic and care that America doesn't end up being a third world country. It's just disgusting and it looks like they're happy to be taking us there fast.
And for all of his "concern" for the middle class, the ones who are really hurting are the poor. Of course we got no mention of how those tax cuts for the upper earners are going to help their situation. What we need to be "leveling" with each other about is what we need to do to get people back to work in jobs that pay well and how to rebuild the middle class. Not how we should just be accepting that we further destroy what's left of it.
