I don’t know who picked the headline The Deficit Is Not Default of Obama, but I just love it.  In this article posted on Truth Out, Greg Palast starts off with the following:

Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” gave debtors’ prison a bad rap. Too bad. I’d say that locking away GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a penitentiary for deadbeats seems like a darn good idea.

Let’s talk about how we ended up in this pickle, bucking up against the “debt ceiling.” From 2001 to 2008, a Republican president took an annual surplus of $86 billion left for him by Bill Clinton and ran up the budget deficit to over half a trillion in a year ($642 billion in 2008). Altogether, George W. Bush blew up the national debt by over $3 TRILLION – then left the bills to Barack Obama.

And it just goes uphill from there.

The sick assumption of this entire debt ceiling debate, as we hear from talking heads whether on Fox or PBS, is that this is our deficit; as if you and I got a tax break or Amazon delivered that submarine to our door.

And the flapping lips on TV also assume that there must be some kind of “compromise” in which the spending spree by the rich must be paid for by the working class. The Washington elite agree we must pay for tax holidays for hedge funds by closing health clinics.

The NPR show Fresh Air with Terry Gross had two segments on American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The first part of the show was Who’s Really Writing States’ Legislation? The previous link will take you to the audio of this interview along with transcripts and links to other information.

The second part of the show was National Chairman Of ALEC Responds To Report.   This link takes you to the audio for this segment of the show.

Thanks to RichardH for letting me know about this episode of the show.

Here is an email I received from former Representative Alan Grayson. He talks a lot of sense as opposed to the nonsense from the gang of 6 and President Obama.

July 22, 2011.

Alan Grayson sent another email with more suggestions.

•    We could let the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire. (“No! No!” shout the Koch brothers.)
•  We could let Medicare negotiate the price of drugs, the way that the VA and private insurance companies already do.
• We could require the rich to pay the same percentage of their income toward Social Security and Medicare as the poor and the middle class do. Not a higher percentage – my God, that would be progressive taxation! Just the same percentage.
• We could impose the same alternative minimum tax on giant corporations that we mere humans must pay.
• We could reduce U.S. military spending to a paltry 40% of the world’s total, from the current 48%, which would still leave us spending four times as much as any other nation.
• We could make Warren Buffett pay the same tax rate on his income as his secretary pays on hers, by eliminating the long-term capital gains tax break, the great majority of which goes to the hyper-rich.

In the video above, Bernie Sanders does not appear until 8 minutes and 20 seconds into this 14 minute video, but I thought it was worth it to give you the whole thing. You can skip ahead if you like.

It is amazing to me that the President can tout a tax increase that cuts the maximum tax rate for the wealthy. To rebalance the wealth distribution in a way that will lead to a self-sustaining jobs recovery, the top rate needs to go up not down.

Fortunately, the time constraints will not allow us to pass this ridiculous bargain. Once we get the debt ceiling raised, maybe we get get the President off his compromise and start talking serious policy debate.