The article from The New York Times is headlined Obama Plan to Cut Deficit Will Trim Spending by $3 Trillion.

President Obama will unveil a deficit-reduction plan on Monday that uses entitlement cuts, tax increases and war savings to reduce government spending by more than $3 trillion over the next 10 years, administration officials said.

Really?  The New York Times?  Even though my expectations of The New York Times is very low, I did expect better from them.  Do they really think tax increases amounts to trimming spending?  What dictionary do they use?  Actually, the reason this raises my hackles so much is this kind of idiocy is not limited to The New York Times.  Many times you see in the media the conflation of deficit reduction with spending reduction.  They are not the same thing.  Deficit reduction is the decrease of the amount by which spending exceeds revenues.  There are two ways to reduce the deficit, only one of which is cutting spending.  Do I have to remind them that increasing revenue is the other way to cut the deficit?  If you misuse and abuse language this way, you are distorting the news.  Sometimes I think  The New York Times motto ought to be “All the news we can distort”

This article is just one example of the report about the Republican reaction to the proposal which has not even been formally announced yet.

That proposal, which was disclosed on Saturday, was met with derision Sunday by Republican lawmakers, who said it amounted to “class warfare” and a political tactic intended to portray his opponents as indifferent to the hardships facing middle-class Americans.

Where is Ronald Reagan when you need him to turn to these Republicans and pejoratively say, “Well, there they go again.”

President Obama might remind the Republicans that the Democrats did not choose to wage class warfare. The Republicans started the war in earnest in 1980 and they have been waging it ever since.  For far too long the Republicans have been trying to keep us from talking about the war they are waging.  They want us to just sit back and let them wage this war against us and put up no resistance.

Like any criminal, they might have been able to get away with their crime if they had only been satisfied with what they had already taken.  What is getting them into trouble is their constant drive to steal more from the middle-class.  They have been repeating the crime so often that the public detectives have finally started to get enough clues to figure out who the culprits are.  Sooner or later these detectives will have enough evidence to convict them in the court of public opinion and finally in the vote.  (I only wish I could predict whether it will be sooner or it will be later.)

September 19, 2011

The same link as originally posted now has the article headlined Obama to Offer Plan to Cut Deficit by Over $3 Trillion.

The first paragraph now reads:

President Obama will unveil a plan on Monday that uses entitlement cuts, tax increases and war savings to reduce the federal deficit by more than $3 trillion over the next 10 years, administration officials said.

At the end of the article the correction is explained.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 19, 2011

An earlier version of this article, and a headline on the Web, mistakenly referred to a figure of more than $3 trillion as the amount of federal government spending that President Obama’s plan would cut. The $3 trillion figure should have referred to the amount the plan would reduce the deficit over 10 years; $1.5 trillion of that deficit reduction will come from tax increases, not spending cuts. The article also gave an incorrect date for the deadline for the bipartisan Congressional committee to come up with its own cuts. It is Nov. 23, not Dec. 23.

Here are a few paragraphs from the article Save the United States and Israel From Themselves.

A State Department official has confirmed that the United States intends to veto the expected Palestinian demand for U.N. Security Council recognition as a member state. The U.S. Congress, moreover, under pressure from Israel’s American friends, has declared that it will then cut off funding for the Palestinian Authority.

Egypt and the Arab governments will be angry, but the Arabs have been angry before with the invulnerable United States, and nothing has come of it—except for the 9/11 attacks and a war “on terror” that has gone on for a decade.

Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence and former ambassador to the U.S., has rather desperately been trying to warn America. He has published his warning in articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times, and circulated it on the Web. He writes that, if Washington vetoes the Palestinian petition, “American influence will decline further, Israeli security will be undermined and Iran will be empowered, increasing the chances of another war in the region.”

A veto will provoke uproar among Muslims everywhere. Everyone already knows this, but the Obama administration ignores it.

Unfortunately, it is counterproductive to try to tell Americans of the possible dire consequences of their actions.  Such warnings elicit the rugged individualist in the American psyche.  We feel that we cannot give into threats, so we will almost feel forced to take the action being warned about to prove that we are not easily frightened.

You can see the train wreck coming, but there is almost nothing that can be done about it.

Given the resounding defeat of the Democratic candidate for US Representative  in New York’s district 9 supposedly to send a message to Obama about his stance on Israel, it would take an exceptionally brave politician to do the right thing.

The US State Department is not sending out any signals of such bravery.  In fact all the signals are in the opposite direction.

It is already far too late to do the right thing.  If the United States were going to allow the vote to go through with no veto, it would have been wisest to let Israel know about this intention long ago.  That would have given Israel the chance to change their own behavior before the vote.  That opportunity seems to be already lost.