Irreconcilable Differences

Here is still another fascinating harmonic divergence of the current American political landscape.

If I'm a Democrat, I am crapping my pants in panic at this Obamedia poll:

Almost three in five say privatization of the Medicare program, with assistance for low-income seniors, should be considered when lawmakers discuss how to close the budget gap. A majority, though, oppose raising the age at which people can start receiving Medicare benefits.

Americans are narrowly against lawmakers considering Social Security privatization as a means to reduce the deficit. Forty-eight percent say that should be off the table versus forty-four percent who want the possibility looked at. Almost three in four favor lawmakers studying removal of the Social Security tax cap so wages over $107,000 a year are taxable.

Part of the obligatory Donk fearmongering electoral death throes as the GOP wave rumbles stupendously towards the shore is the standard "Republicans are coming for your Social Security and Medicare" garbage. Yet a majority - A MAJORITY! - of the American people are open to the possibility of privatizing Medicare, and a strong plurality to privatizing Social Security. Evidently because even the layest of laymen can now see that both programs are already insolvent, and the federal government as a whole is right behind them, and SOMETHING needs to be done to avert the looming fiscal apocalypse, and raising taxes will be like trying to put out the Towering Inferno with a bomberload of napalm. We are ready for Karl's "adult conversation," and poised to elect a Congress of grown-ups who can and will act accordingly and responsibily in the interests of all the American people, INCLUDING generations unborn.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are proving conclusively and redundantly that they will never - EVER - be on that same particular page, not even to save their worthless political bags of skin:

Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee heard from hand-picked witnesses advocating the infamous "Guaranteed Retirement Account" (GRA) authored by Theresa Guilarducci.
(You can find the blistering interview with Guilarducci by radio talk show host Mark Levin in 2007 at the link).

In a nutshell, under the GRA system government would seize private 401(k) accounts, setting up an additional 5% mandatory payroll tax to dole out a "fair" pension to everyone using that confiscated money coupled with the mandated contributions. This would, of course, be a sister government ponzi scheme working in tandem with Social Security, the primary purpose being to give big government politicians additional taxpayer funds to raid to pay for their out-of-control spending.

What a deal, huh? It isn't bad enough that I've been gouged my entire adult life to the tune of 6.2% of my W-2 earnings (twice that for the self-employed) to subsidize an actuarially doomed boondoggle out of which I'll never see one thin dime or red cent; now they want to steal all the thousands and thousands of dollars I've managed to save over that adult life AND raise my payroll tax burden ANOTHER 5% in "exchange" for what THEY "deem" to be a "fair" pension - not a Goddamned penny of which I'll ever see either.

Screw you, Tom Harkin. You'll get MY 401(k) over my cold, dead carcass. A condition that is going to describe your Party in another three weeks.