Y'see many people look at Charles Dickens' portrait of London and Paris in the 1700s and 1800s and say "Heavens! What an awful time!" But the way the members of the "Catfood Commission" think when they read Dickens is "*Sigh*, those were the days!" The commmission, founded by billionaire Pete Peterson, wants to return America back to the days before Social Security was initiated, back to the days when old people lived on catfood because they couldn't afford anything better. To the commission, having a society without a middle class, having a society of poor people that's administered by the very wealthy, is the natural order of things, the "way it should be."
The commission is not directly responsible for the watering down of the second stimulus bill (The bill was to contain $50 billion in money to assist economic recovery, but got $25 billion cut out of it and STILL failed a cloture vote), but it most certainly is part of the same movement to defeat any stimulus measure and push America into a "double-dip recession" as this will fulfill Rush Limbaugh's vision of "I want him [President Obama] to fail." Keep in mind that the Bush tax cuts really and truly need to expire in order to combat the deficit, but as Limbaugh put it in the Fox News piece I linked to
There's simply no arguing that Limbaugh is the head of the Republican Party or that, at the very least, his vision and theirs are one. The commission is part and parcel of the Republican movement to make Obama's presidency fail. We must call people's attention to the commission BEFORE it publishes its' conclusions.
Paul Krugman has commented frequently on deficit-hysteria
I've written frequently on that same topic and on the Catfood Commission
I ask the liberals, the leftists and the progressives of Philadelphia and the region to take a stand on this! We need to fight to rescue our economy from the Catfood Commission and the deficit scolds who look back upon the days of Charles Dickens with nostalgia and longing!