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Didn't we just have an election win to raise rates on the two percenters?

We just had an 18-month presidential election and the results have actually come in. Obama won and so did higher tax rates for the wealthy. So why does the president have to keep going over and over this? Now the endless parades of centrist phonies like David Cote who say they just want to fix the debt problems litter my teevee screen. And since he's a former member of the Simpson-Bowles committee, he has instant Beltway Villager cachet. Please, my brain hurts. Make it stop!

These phonies seem to live solely to inflict pain on the elderly working class of America by demanding cuts to our earned benefits programs (or, as Villagers call them--entitlement programs). The programs that make it easier for elderly Americans to get proper health care and live somewhat respectably after they reach 65. I don't get it. I know the super-wealthy have fleeced the average American family for trillions of dollars over the decades, so why the new push to inflict severe pain to their endgame in life? They are even trying to use their base of two percenters as human shields to protect the .0001%ers or as the awesome Billmon says:

Amid the endless (and endlessly confusing) Beltway chatter about the deal that supposedly will keep the U.S. economy from gunning it over the fiscal cliff on New Year’s Day, one thing has already become crystal clear: The Republican strategy for protecting its plutocratic donor base from the party’s inevitable surrender on taxes.

Basically, it consists in offering up the 20% as human shields to protect the 0.0001% from the rapacious revenue demands of the 47%.Who says Republicans don’t do math?

Josh Marshall speaks to this also when he writes "Saving Private Billionaire".

After reading as much as I can about marginal tax rates and whatnot I can only come up with a theory that most of the uber-rich have had parental issues growing up and now they have their chance to pay them back for all their past indiscretions. Unfortunately, they are also taking out these psychological issues and vengeance on every other elderly American in America. It's pathologically vindictive and evil. And why is the Beltway media (aka The Villagers) joining in to help them carry out this Sympathy For Lady Vengeance type hack fest? It will be bloody and brutal with a high body count and for what? Why can't these masters of of the universe see things like sane people? They could check out Jay Rockefeller and Tom Harkin's letter which states this:

On entitlements, the letter calls for the president to guard against “harmful cuts.”

“We urge you to reject changes to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security that would cut benefits, shift costs to states, alter the structure of these critical programs or force vulnerable populations to bear the burden of deficit-reduction efforts,” the letter says. “Each of these programs is a vital lifeline to the middle class.”

Yes, these programs which Americans pay in for are a vital lifeline for the middle class. Jonathan Cohn writes this:

These liberals aren’t ignoring fiscal reality. They’re actually making a smart argument about how to balance two priorities—reducing the deficit and protecting the people on Medicare and Medicaid. Contrary to what conservatives say and even many centrists seem to believe, the high cost of Medicare and Medicaid isn’t a by-product of government inefficiency.

On the contrary, Medicare historically has held down costs as well as, if not better than, private insurance on a per capita basis. That’s thanks in part to the administrative advantages of a centralized government program and Medicare’s enormous power to set prices. Medicaid is cheaper still, to the point where, honestly, it's underfunded.

The programs keep getting more expensive relative to inflation because medical care keeps getting more expensive—and, in the case of Medicare, because of the increased number of people coming on the program. That’s due to a variety of factors: paying too much for services and to the people who provide them; delivering a lot of treatments that are unnecessary, unhelpful, or even harmful; focusing too much on acute treatment when we should be focusing on preventative care and other ways of keeping people healthy.

Exactly! Cohn links links to Jaren Bernstein's blog and he writes:

But neither is cutting benefits now. Jared Bernstein, the former Obama Administration economist now at the CBPP, put it well on his blog: “Now’s the time to watch and evaluate, not to reduce access to what is a highly efficient, effective form of health coverage for the nation’s seniors.” The advocates for deep entitlement reductions don’t seem to realize that the people on Medicare and Medicaid need the protection those programs provide—and that, without those programs, they’d suffer. Given the very significant chance we can reduce health care spending without reducing benefits, we have an obligation to try. It’s the compassionate thing to do. And the smart thing, too.

So I ask again, why do some many of these CEO gasbags want to hurt millions of seniors when there is no problem to fix at the moment?

I can only conclude that they need serious--and I mean serious therapy immediately. We can only hope it's not too late to save them because if we have to depend on the political will of Congress to defend the elderly; then we're all screwed.