Unfortunately, this is just a snapshot taken the last week of 2010, and it plays into the national political soap opera of the president’s up, oh now the president’s down, what will we do, oh he’s recovered and done something near and dear to my heart, and I love him so (music swells), I wonder what tomorrow will bring (fade out and credits).
As you noted, the rich keep their blessed tax cuts, though the percentage is so small that a reasonable person might wonder why they squealed so much and why the mainstream press kept the story drumming without ever quite noting how small the percentage at state was. We can expect all sorts of cuts of good things in the future because we just won’t have the funding. And Obama went along with this instead of framing it the way the people should see it. What a sanitized politcs this is that he’s given us.
Meanwhile, hardly a thing has been said about the Social Security tax being trimmed. A friend far wiser than myself says that while there’s not now and has never been a Social Security “crisis,” this limited cutback may indeed produce enough of a dip in the fund to let the “crisis” shouters prevail.
Also meanwhile, the “net neutrality” fight has been chugging along for more than a year, with so much spin in each article I’ve read on it that I only came to understand this week what’s at stake. Once again, corporate interests are going to have it their way, the consumer of ideas and information products are going to lose — by paying more, getting less, seeing less inovation funded down the road.
Only if we buy into the soap opera of it all do we applaud a president in 2010 putting ink to repeal of a policy that was only an interim policy when Clinton settled for it when he couldn’t get the homophobes to let him lift the longstanding outright ban on gays in the military. Only the impatient young and uninformed blame Clinton for “don’t ask, don’t tell” and DOMA, a similar interim policy that headed off a full-fledged effort to amend the U.S. Consitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman, which would be harder to drop than an act of Congress.
So while I’m happy that a few things have gotten done, as you are, I still find myself swimming in my own sanctimony on the subject of Obama’s efforts on the behalf of the people he’s supposed to be fighting for. We’ll see how he does without a majority in Congress, but I expect we’ll do no better than we’ve done up to now..