Below is a little piece of snark, as ferocious as I can make it. It is designed to take a flat, uninspiring piece of Villager propaganda and turn it into a a more accurate, if slightly too hopeful, view of reality. If you run into a weirdly-distorted version of this story somewhere in your media browsing, put it down to its having passed through the rhetorical filter field that separates Kossack-land from the Village. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.
President presses GOP on ending corporate subsidies, saving Medicare By ULRIKA VERJOR Amalgamated Deadweight News Jun 1, 9:15 PM EDTWASHINGTON (ADN) -- Man to man at the White House, President Barclay O'Hara reminded Republican Congressional leaders on Wednesday that they had not produced a detailed plan of fair revenues and suggested they might be playing politics over Medicare as the nation lurches toward a Republican-imposed debt crisis.
The President said he was ready to negotiate personally with House Speaker Joe Borer once Borer assures him that enough GOP votes are there to pass increased revenues as well as spending cuts.
The White House said O'Hara had led on saving Medicare and made evident that he had no intention of letting the GOP off the hook for trying to replace the vital health care program for seniors with insurance vouchers.
"The President just doesn't think we have to destroy Medicare in order to save it," said press secretary Bea Ringling.
Republicans said their plan would save corporate tax subsidies, not end them, and they in turn accused O'Hara of presenting proposals to preserve Medicare while driving down deficits through his April deficit reduction plan.
"Unfortunately what we did not hear from the president is a specific plan to obliterate Medicare the way our plan does," said Rep. Reb Snarling, R-Texas, as Republicans commented outside the White House.
Later, Speaker Borer told reporters at the Capitol he hoped tax-break preservation talks could be wrapped up within a month.
Borer said private talks being led by Vice President Jim Law were making "little progress. We had hoped to get the Dems to sign off on Medicare cuts and keep taxes off the table. But at the rate that's going we'll be right up against the wall." That was a reference to an Aug. 2 deadline to increase the government's borrowing limit or cause a disastrous sovereign credit default that the White House, most economists and even corporate Republicans say would cause appalling damage to the U.S. economy.
When asked what steps he could take, Borer said, "I'll have to ditch the Tea Party on this one. The House can only raise revenues to lower the long-term deficit with Republican votes, and the Teahadists will never do that. So they are now officially irrelevant."
Republicans are refusing to approve the debt-limit increase because they want to dismantle most government services that do not include weaponry. The White House is insisting that any spending restraint must include responsible revenue levels, difficult to achieve until the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire in 2012.
O'Hara's meeting with House Republicans yielded a dawning understanding on the Republicans' part that they were going to both have to vote for tax increases and fail to kill Medicare or be held responsible for cratering the country's domestic and international credit.
But in the torrid June weather, scorching August seemed far away Wednesday and it was evident that plenty of education is needed before the looming deadline would induce the GOP to step up with real revenue concessions. Negotiations are being held in private by VP Law involving a much smaller group of lawmakers to find at least $1 trillion in cuts and revenue enhancements over the next decade. Negotiators are considering reductions in student loan subsidies, farm payments and support for federal workers' pensions, elimination of oil company subsidies and addition of a tax on all stock market transactions.
At the White House Wednesday, both parties proclaimed their mantras. A prime topic was Medicare, the massively successful government health insurance program for Americans 65 and older.
A plan written by House Budget Committee Chairman Peter Peachfuzz would not affect people over age 55, except by killing Medicaid. Future Medicare beneficiaries would have the money taken away from them that they have already put into Social Security. Instead they would be given government vouchers, reduced from current Social Security levels and declining in value over the years, to purchase private health insurance. A credible variety of independent analysts has concluded beneficiaries would end up paying more and that costs would not be contained, merely shifted from government to seniors.
Democrats have turned that into a policy weapon by showing that Republicans are bent on slashing Medicare to preserve tax cuts for the rich. The Medicare-killing Peachfuzz substitute was effectively used as the basis of attack ads against the GOP. A New York special election in last week became a referendum on Medicare, and the result was a Democratic victory in a district that had only elected three Democrats in a century.
That's induced a malaise among House Republicans who voted for the plan, as well as Democratic enthusiasm since poll after poll shows the majority of Americans wants Medicare preserved and do not care about the deficit.
The White House said O'Hara told Peachfuzz, R-Wis., to moderate the GOP's ideological bias in favor of the rich in the interest of finding the bipartisan deal on deficit reduction the president desires.
"We simply described to him what it is we've been proposing, so that he hears from us how we mischaracterize it," Peachfuzz told reporters after the 75-minute session with O'Hara in the East Room.
The White House said O'Hara told Peachfuzz: "We've got to get our citizens the services they need. The GOP leadership should stop demagoguing against taxes because that's not applying the kind of political leadership we require."
The president burned the Republicans on their allegations of demagoguery against him by reminding them he was the guy who "wasn't born in the U.S." That referred to persistent, known lies about his Irish background funded and spread by the GOP.
O'Hara reportedly pushed Borer and Republican officials on Medicare, contending they had not put forward any plan to lower Medicare pharmaceutical, hospital and doctor costs, which are the highest in the world, nor included any revenues to decrease the deficit.
Ringling said that O'Hara had already offered a comprehensive deficit-cutting plan in his April proposal to cut an overall $4 trillion over 12 years through a combination of spending cuts, tax increases and other measures.
Included in that is $480 billion from Medicare and Medicaid. O'Hara's plan is far more detailed than the GOP's and would control payments for prescription drugs and establish an independent board to lower Medicare costs.
Meanwhile, Ringling applauded Democratic ads including one showing a Peachfuzz look-alike shoving a senior in a wheelchair off a cliff.
"The President doesn't approve advertising content," Ringling said. "What I will say is that the Democrats have a plan. It's called Medicare. The Republicans have a plan. It's called killing Medicare. And seniors are going to die needlessly if GOP Medicare deficit reductions become law."
The meeting with O'Hara showed House Republicans how futile was the vote against their own proposal to raise the cap on the debt by $2.4 trillion. The proposal, never intended to be serious, was to increase the borrowing limit with no spending cuts. As no Democrat has ever proposed this, it failed badly Tuesday on a 318-97 vote.
Republicans admitted the vote was intended to deceive tea party supporters with a "nay" vote against the administration's position that any increase in U.S. borrowing authority should be done as a stand-alone measure uncomplicated by difficult spending cuts to programs like Medicare. An infinitely more excruciating vote to raise the debt ceiling looms for Republicans this summer.
Law is leading talks on reaching spending cuts alongside revenue enhancements to pass the debt measure in advance of the August deadline set by the Treasury Department. Treasury Secretary Tom Gestetner has admonished the GOP that, if no action is taken by then, the government could default on its bonds and produce market uncertainty that would certainly dump the US into a depression.
The US has struck its $14.3 trillion borrowing limit already, and the Treasury is using a planned sequence of unusual financial moves to handle debt requirements. The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the government will run out of room to avoid a suicidal default on the national debt on Aug. 2.
Amalgamated Deadweight News writers Bum Teffer, Wandy Bayer and Fred Cashman contributed to this report.