No wonder CNN uncages Jack Cafferty for only a few carefully monitored minutes every day. The old boy still has more testosterone than Dona Lemon and Anderson Cooper combined. (But then so does Soledad O’Brien.) FROM CNN’s Jack Cafferty:
“The government is selling snake oil – again.
Look closely and this so-called ‘deal’ on the debt ceiling crisis is a triumph of sleight-of-hand over substance.
Sunday night it was, ‘We will cut a trillion dollars in the first 10 years.’ By this morning a trillion had become $917 billion, which means we lost $83 billion in cuts overnight. Makes you afraid to go to bed.
In the first three years of the Obama presidency, the deficits will total about $4.2 trillion. Cutting $917 billion over 10 years, or $91 billion a year, is chump change.
Then there’s the commission, another one. Remember the commission President Obama ordered to come up with answers to this stuff last year?
They did. Their report was full of a lot of good ideas. It was ignored by the president and Congress. But they want us to believe this commission will be different.
Baloney. There has been no attempt to address tax reform or entitlement reform. That will be left for ‘The Commission.’ My guess is they won’t touch it anymore than the current crop of folks tackled it. And without those two things, we are doomed.
Supposedly there will be triggers in the legislation that will require additional cuts totaling $1.4 trillion across the board if the committee and Congress cannot agree. Color me skeptical.
We are facing more than $61 trillion of unfunded liabilities from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other obligations – $61 trillion.
There is no money to meet those obligations and our government knows it. But they have the unmitigated gall to march out Sunday night as though they had found a cure for cancer and expect us to break down in uncontrolled adulation. They make me ill.”
[SNIP]
Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, via RT: “This colossal debt, 14 trillion or more, means that the country has been living on credit, which is really bad for one of the world’s leading economies. They live beyond their means, and put a part of their burden on the entire world’s economy.”