so who is resonsible?

Remember Durbin also excluded any raise in the retirement age.

First we are going broke due to over spending, yes reduced revenue collection is also an issue, but unless we want the WHOLE GDP going to entitlement spending and debt, we are over spending.

This just in...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell remained at odds on such key issues as the income threshold for higher tax rates and how to deal with inheritance taxes, among other issues. McConnell complained that Reid had yet to respond to a GOP offer made Saturday evening and reached out to Vice President Joe Biden, a longtime friend, in hopes of breaking the impasse.
One sign of progress came as Republicans withdrew a long-discussed proposal to slow future cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients as part of a compromise to avoid the cliff. Democrats said earlier Sunday that proposal had put a damper on the talks, and Republican senators emerging from a closed-door GOP meeting said it is no longer part of the equation.
“I was really gratified to hear that Republicans have taken their demand for Social Security benefit cuts off the table. The truth is they should never have been on the table to begin with,” Reid said late Sunday afternoon. “There is still significant distance between the two sides, but negotiations continue.”

And here lies the reason for our impending bankruptcy:  “I was really gratified to hear that Republicans have taken their demand for Social Security benefit cuts off the table."

Reducing the amount of increase of COLA is a cut...off to Greece we are.

What I don't REALLY get is how Obama continues to avoid responsibility.

And this idiot is a doctor.

The following is from the New England Journal of Medicine.  Doctors, unlike "global warming" scientists are usually adamant about the scientific accuracy of that which presented for review.  We can smell out BS in a second.  I am aghast this was published.

This obvious politically partisan physician writes a lead article which is published in Medicines lead journal about gun violence.  He blames, extols, and proposes limitations of liberty for something (which I placed in bold) that he admits is rare and not increasing.

As the left always does, he intertwines good ideas, background checks with whole sale limitations of gun purchasers rights.  Why does the writer think Californians go to Nevada to buy guns?  Because they want them.

I personally don't give a rat's behind about guns, I care about liberty.

********************

We are learning how to watch the news through tears. All those children, and the adults protecting them. With an assault rifle. Up close. The survivors, eyes averted, are led to safety in daisy chains. Ambulances rush to the scene, but nearly all return empty. Loved ones go home empty, too.

We pore over the details, searching for the clues that will bring order to chaos and help us predict and prevent the next one. But these catastrophes are all different. We have found to our dismay that prediction is somewhere between difficult and impossible. Tailored interventions, designed for specific circumstances, will have little effect. We need to take a broader approach.

Sandy Hook, Oak Creek, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine: “it can't happen here” places where terrible things did happen and 95 people died. Contrary to widespread perception, however, such events are uncommon. Their frequency is not increasing, and they account for only a small fraction of firearm-related deaths and injuries. On average, 88 Americans died every day from firearm violence in 2011, and another 202 were seriously injured. In 2012, for the first time, there will probably be more firearm-related homicides and suicides than motor vehicle traffic fatalities.

The United States has become an extreme example of what could well be termed “global gunning.” With less than 5% of the world's population, we own more than 40% of all the firearms that are in civilians' hands: 250 million to 300 million weapons, nearly as many as we have people, and they are not going away anytime soon. We have made social and policy decisions that, with some important exceptions, provide the widest possible array of firearms to the widest possible array of people, for use under the widest possible array of conditions.

The most egregious policies have been enacted at the state level — “Stand Your Ground” laws, for instance, which have been used to legitimize what many people still call murder. Justice Louis Brandeis rightly praised the states as the laboratories of our democracy, but in some of them, experimentation with firearm policy has taken a frightening turn.

We are paying the price of those decisions. Too often, our children and grandchildren are paying it for us. Payments will continue. Can we do anything to reduce them? I believe the answer is yes.


An argument could be made for a complete rethinking of the role that firearms play in the United States. That is the work of generations, however, and we can accomplish much without it. In the near term, harm reduction is the best approach. We can make specific changes to our firearms laws, on the basis of existing evidence, that will produce measurable benefits.

We should start by requiring background checks for all firearm purchases. When a licensed retailer — gun dealer or pawnbroker — sells a firearm, a background check is performed and a permanent record is kept. But perhaps 40% of all firearms transactions involve private-party sellers, who need not keep records and cannot obtain a background check. I have observed hundreds of these anonymous, undocumented sales; they can be completed in less than a minute.

Not surprisingly, private-party sales are the most important source of firearms for criminal buyers and specifically for persons prohibited by law from purchasing firearms. Such buyers do not volunteer their stories, and savvy sellers know not to ask. Private-party sales are also probably the main reason that the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which requires background checks for sales by licensed retailers, did not reduce firearm-related homicides.1

Second, on at least two fronts, we should broaden our criteria for denying someone the purchase or possession of firearms. Among persons who purchase firearms legally, those with a previous conviction for a misdemeanor violent crime (e.g., assault and battery) are roughly nine times as likely as those with no criminal history to be subsequently arrested for a violent crime.2 With two or more such prior convictions, the risk increases by a factor of 10 to 15. Alcohol abuse is a leading risk factor for both interpersonal and self-directed violence, and firearm owners who abuse alcohol are more likely than other owners to engage in violence-related behaviors with firearms.3

What about purchases by the mentally ill? The current lifelong federal prohibition applies to anyone “adjudicated as a mental defective” — language that is offensive and ambiguous. For many reasons, including the ambiguity, the databases on which background checks rely are incomplete. More than one mentally ill mass shooter, including Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech, 2007) and Russell Weston (U.S. Capitol, 1998), passed a background check and purchased firearms from a licensed retailer because their eligibility was uncertain or records were unavailable. We need better data and criteria that take account of the evidence that mental illness is treatable and that risk for violence is not increased substantially unless there is a history or threat of violence or a history of substance abuse.

We know that comprehensive background checks and expanded denial criteria are feasible and effective, because they are in place in many states and have been evaluated. California, for example, requires a background check on all firearm purchases and denies purchases by persons who have committed violent misdemeanors. Yet some 600,000 firearms were sold there in 2011, and the firearms industry continues to consider California a “lucrative” market. The denial policy reduced the risk of violent and firearm-related crime by 23% among those whose purchases were denied.4

We also know that state-level regulation is insufficient by itself, because firearms simply flow from states where laws are lax to states where laws are stricter. Some pathways even have names, such as the Iron Pipeline from the Southeast to New England. At gun shows in California, where direct private-party sales are illegal, such sales are almost nonexistent. At shows just across the border in Reno, Nevada, where private-party sales are legal, dozens occur, and a third of the cars in the parking lot are from California.

These proposals enjoy broad support. In fact, public-opinion polls have shown that 75 to 85% of firearm owners, including specifically members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in some cases, endorse comprehensive background checks and denial for misdemeanor violence; 60 to 70% support denial for alcohol abuse. (It is deeply ironic that our current firearm policies omit regulations that are endorsed by firearm owners, let alone by the general public.)

And the icy hands of the firearm lobby may be losing their grip on the political process. The NRA is simply not able to drive election results as it has been thought to do.5 The Sunlight Foundation reports that less than 5% of the NRA's campaign spending in 2012 went to races that ended with the result it was seeking. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York has repeatedly declared his intention to establish a well-funded electoral counterweight to the NRA to advance a “mainstream agenda” on firearm policy. President Barack Obama has appointed Vice President Joe Biden to chair a new task force that will develop “specific proposals” for policy reform legislation no later than January.

This time, the circumstances are different. The outcome will be different only if we make it so. The interventions proposed here will not end firearm violence in the United States, but they will reduce it, and that's a goal worth fighting for. If Sandy Hook, Aurora, and the others are what it takes for us finally to confront this challenge, they will still be terrible beyond description. We will still share responsibility for them. But it will be of some comfort to know that all those students, educators, moviegoers, and temple-goers did not die in vain.

Let's be clear

Sure, we can talk about revenue, both growth and rates, however make no mistake, just increasing rates without spending (entitlement) reform is throwing good money after bad.

Our PRESIDENT bears responsibility for the lack of leadership on the defining issue of our time.  There is no Senate budget, there is no willingness to tackle entitlement reform, there is just "tax increases on the rich".


He could have:


     Raised the retirement age.
     Pressured tort reform.
     Reformed the tax system.
          Split the difference with the Republicans regarding the upper rates.
          Reduced deductions.
          Broadened the base.

But he did not, he just demagogue.
The coming re recession is his.

*****************

Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia is a lonely voice: He’s a House Republican conservative who argues that the government simply has to raise more revenue.


U.S. Rep. Scott Rigell, center In a week when Washington makes one, final effort to get to some kind of deficit-cutting deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, Mr. Rigell’s message stands out amid all the noise because of its startlingly unexpected nature.
Mr. Rigell, a businessman first elected to the House in 2010, says he has arrived at his position not by ideological calculation but by mathematical calculation; it represents what he calls in an interview a “data-driven conclusion.” And the data, he says, are simple:

The tax regime put in place by the George W. Bush tax cuts a dozen years ago has produced government revenue at an average of 16.9% of gross domestic product, through good times and bad, across the years since it was enacted. Only twice in those 12 years—in the relatively strong economic years of 2006 and 2007–has it produced revenues amounting to 18% or more of GDP.

Meanwhile, Mr. Rigell argues, even Republicans in Congress are unwilling to pass a budget that actually holds spending down to 17% or less of GDP. In sum, he says, Republicans have a position that locks in a permanent deficit by sticking with tax rates that will always produce less revenue than required for the government programs they are voting to support.

Their grandstanding about taxing rich people has allowed Democrats to avoid any real discussion about reform of the entitlements that are sinking the country. Neither the White House nor the Senate has put forward a coherent plan or a proposal worth voting on that addresses this issue, without which any talk of a long-term solution to the problem is impossible.
Republicans may have hit bottom last week when they sandbagged Boehner and effectively undermined any chance that he could force a more favorable compromise out of Obama. But Democrats are foolish to believe that no blame will ever attach to them just because the GOP has failed. Public cynicism about Congress and the political system is, at its heart, a bipartisan consensus about the governing class, not just anger about Tea Party intransigence. Unless Reid and the Senate Democrats do something this week to put the ball back into the House’s court, they, too, will shoulder plenty of the responsibility for what follows.

The problem with the Republican Party is the quality of the people who vote in their primaries and caucuses.

Republican politicians today have a choice: either change your base by educating and leading G.O.P. voters back to the center-right from the far right, or start a new party that is more inclusive, focused on smaller but smarter government and market-based, fact-based solutions to our biggest problems.

But if Republicans continue to be led around by, and live in fear of, a base that denies global warming after Hurricane Sandy and refuses to ban assault weapons after Sandy Hook — a base that would rather see every American’s taxes rise rather than increase taxes on millionaires — the party has no future. It can’t win with a base that is at war with math, physics, human biology, economics and common-sense gun laws all at the same time.

       

Because they control the House, this radical Republican base is now holding us all back. President Obama was moving to the center in these budget negotiations. He reduced his demand for higher tax revenues to $1.2 trillion from $1.6 trillion; he upped the level at which Americans who would be hit with higher taxes to those earning $400,000 a year from $250,000; and he made his own base holler by offering to cut long-term spending by lowering the inflation adjustment index for Social Security. It seemed that with a little more Republican compromise, Obama would have met them in the middle, and we could have had a grand bargain that would put the country on a sounder fiscal trajectory and signal to the markets, the world and ourselves that we can still do big hard things together. That will have to wait. Now the best hope is some mini-, crisis-averting, Band-Aid.

 

But...

 

Was 2012 the year when the democratic world lost its grip on reality? Must we assume now that no party that speaks the truth about the economic future has a chance of winning power in a national election? With the results of presidential contests in the United States and France as evidence, this would seem to be the only possible conclusion. Any political leader prepared to deceive the electorate into believing that government spending, and the vast system of services that it provides, can go on as before – or that they will be able to resume as soon as this momentary emergency is over – was propelled into office virtually by acclamation.

So universal has this rule turned out to be that parties and leaders who know better – whose economic literacy is beyond question – are now afraid even to hint at the fact which must eventually be faced. The promises that governments are making to their electorates are not just misleading: they are unforgivably dishonest. It will not be possible to go on as we are, or to return to the expectations that we once had. The immediate emergency created by the crash of 2008 was not some temporary blip in the infinitely expanding growth of the beneficent state. It was, in fact, almost irrelevant to the larger truth which it happened, by coincidence, to bring into view. Government on the scale established in most modern western countries is simply unaffordable. In Britain, the disagreement between Labour and the Conservatives over how to reduce the deficit (cut spending or increase borrowing?) is ridiculously insignificant and out of touch with the actual proportions of the problem. In the UK, the US, and (above all) the countries of the EU, democratic politics is being conducted on false premises.

Of course, once in power all governments must deal with reality – even if they have been elected on a systematic lie. As one ex-minister famously put it when he was released from the burden of office: “There’s no money left.” So that challenge must be met. How do you propose to go on providing the entitlements that you have sworn never to end, without any money? The victorious political parties of the Left have a ready answer to that one. They will raise taxes on the “rich”. In France and the United States, this is the formula that is being presented not only as an economic solution but also as a just social settlement, since the “rich” are inherently wicked and must have acquired their wealth by confiscating it from the poor.

Of course, the moral logic of this principle is absurd. The amount of wealth in an economy is not fixed so that one person having more means that somebody else must have less. But, for the purposes of our problem, it is the fault in the economic logic that is more important. The amount of money that is required to fund government entitlement programmes is now so enormous that it could not be procured by even very large increases in taxation on the “rich”. Assuming that you could get all of the rich members of your population to stand still and be fleeced (rather than leaving the country, as Gérard Depardieu and a vast army of his French brethren are doing), there are simply not enough of them to provide the revenue that a universal, comprehensive benefits system requires. And if all the French rich did stay put, and submit to President Hollande’s quixotic 75 per cent income tax, they would soon be too impoverished to invest in the supply side of the economy, which would undermine any possibility of growth.

Barack Obama knows that a tax rise of those proportions in the US would be politically suicidal, so he proposes a much more modest increase – an income tax rate of around 40 per cent on the highest earners sounds very modest indeed to British ears. But that is precisely the problem. If a tax rise is modest enough to be politically acceptable to much of the electorate, it will not produce anything like enough to finance the universal American entitlement programmes, social security and Medicare, into a future with an ageing population. There is no way that “taxing the rich” – that irresistibly glib Left-wing solution to everything – can make present and projected levels of government spending affordable. That is why Britain and almost all the countries of the EU have redefined the word “rich” to mean those who are earning scarcely twice the average wage, and pulled more and more middle-income people into high tax bands. Not only are there vastly more of them but they are far more likely to stand still and be fleeced, because they do not have the mobility of the truly rich.

NRA and small government ??????

It should now be basically obvious to everyone that the NRA, for all of its pious genuflecting in the direction of the Second Amendment, is not a civil liberties organization. Civil liberties organizations support neither preemptive surveillance on the sick nor perpetual pseudo-paramilitary lockdown in elementary schools. While the NRA and its allies may oppose gun control on the grounds that it inhibits liberty, their “solution” requires far greater government intrusion and coercion.
Such is the case with much “small government” anti-regulationism. The minimal state which the right so often fetishizes is, in fact, anything but. Any government which sees its essential function as security will inevitably have to continually escalate security in order to enforce its anti-regulatory position. To put it another way: the only way the so-called night-watchman state can function is with ever-increasing numbers of night-watchmen, armed with ever-larger guns.

"I think one of the most threatening places to be in politics is a black conservative," Mr. Scott says, "because there are so many liberals who want to continue to reinforce a stereotype that doesn't exist about America." What stereotype is that? "That somehow, some way, if you're a Republican you're a racist and if you're black, there's no chance for you in society.
"We have serious challenges in this nation. Some are racial. But in my life, the vast majority of people that have really afforded me the opportunity to succeed were white folks. Is there a better way to say that?"

I'M SICK OF THE NRA

I'm sick of the NRA and their sophomoric rant "guns don't kill people, people kill people". Who can't see the fallacy in that is an idiot.
 YES guns do kill that's what they do.
That's what they are made to do kill!
 I'm mad I have to put up with children being killed, parents having to identify their dead kids. Imagine for just a minute! close your eyes and think if that was your 5 year old daughter or 7 year old son, really close your eyes imagine, keep them closed for a full minute and put yourself right there, right now, and then open your eyes and say well there is nothing we can do?
 BS_____ There is something we can do. There must be something we can do. If we can have 50 "guards" at our airports to search grandma's and grandpa's reassign them to schools in this country. This crazy over reaction to plane safety, simply guard the cock pit door, stop the nonsense looking at us the passengers. That horse is out of that barn.
 Guard our children from us, this cannot happen again.  There is 40 grandparents, 40 parents who will live this pain for the next 40 years, holidays will never be the same, birthdays painful events, those people and their friends are living in hell for the rest of their lives.
 NRA  I am sick of your no compromise attitude, put marshals at gun shows, put people thru rigorous exams to own guns. You must do something the pain is just too great.
 I called each of my six grandchildren today and told them I love them and how precious they are. I wish their was more I could do.
Let's end this nightmare of guns.

Health Care

Everyone knows health care costs are simply rising to fast. Whether it's Obama care, medicare, or whatever it must be controlled. Most people see a doctor for simple things like colds or flue, or checkups, why not let nurses write prescriptions and see patients, open up small business's for nurses to run keep costs low for run of the mill problems most people have.
Do we need to see a doctor for everything. I know the good doctor is not for monopolies, but it seems to me the AMA could looosen the strings on prescriptions.
 Let's put all our thoughts together to see what we could do to lighten the load for the doctors who will be overworked under Obama care.

When the Edward Gibbon of the 22nd century comes to write his History of the Decline and Fall of the West, who will feature in his monumental study of the collapse of the most successful economic experiment in human history? In this saga of the mass suicide of the richest nations on earth, there may be particular reference to those national leaders who chose to deny the reality that was, from the vantage point of our future chronicler, so obviously looming. \
 

But for us, right here, right now, it matters that Barack Obama and George Osborne are playing small-time strategic games with their toy-town enemies while the unutterable economic truth stares them in the face.  Mr Obama is locked in an eye-balling contest with a Republican Congress to see who can end up with more ignominy when the United States goes over the fiscal cliff. It is clear now that the president will be quite happy to bring about this apocalypse – which would pull most of the developed world into interminable recession – if he could be sure that it would result in long-term electoral damage to his opponents.

 Supposedly from opposite sides of the political divide, the US president and the British Chancellor come to a surprisingly similar conclusion: it is not feasible to speak the truth, let alone act on it. The truth being that present levels of public spending and government intervention in the US, Britain and Europe are unsustainable. The proportion of GDP which is now being spent by the governments of what used to be called the “free world” vastly exceeds what it is possible to raise through taxation without destroying any possibility of creating wealth, and therefore requires either an intolerable degree of national debt or the endless printing of progressively more meaningless money – or both.

How on earth did we get here? As every sane political leader knows by now, this is not just a temporary emergency created by a bizarre fit of reckless lending: the crash of 2008 simply blew the lid off the real scandal of western economic governance. Having won the Cold War and succeeded in settling the great ideological argument of the 20th century in favor of free-market economics, the nations of the West managed to bankrupt themselves by insisting that they could fund a lukewarm form of socialism with the proceeds of capitalism.

What the West took from its defeat of the East was that it must accept the model of the state as social engineer in order to avert any future threat to freedom. Capitalism would only be tolerated if government distributed its wealth evenly across society. The original concept of social security and welfare provision – that no one should be allowed to sink into destitution or real want – had to be revisited. The new ideal was that there should not be inequalities of wealth. The roaring success of the free market created such unprecedented levels of mass prosperity that absolute poverty became virtually extinct in western democracies, so it had to be replaced as a social evil by “relative poverty”. It was not enough that no one should be genuinely poor (hungry and without basic necessities): what was demanded now was that no one should be much worse (or better) off than anyone else. The job of government was to create a society in which there were no significant disparities in earnings or standards of living. So it was not just the unemployed who were given assistance: the low paid had their wages supplemented by working tax credits and in-work benefits so that their earnings could be brought up to the arbitrary level which the state had decided constituted not-poverty.

The paradoxical effect of this is that the only politically acceptable condition is to be earning just enough to maintain independent life – and not a penny more. Everybody is steered by the penalties of the tax system or the gradual withdrawal of benefits into that small space in the middle between being “rich” and being (relatively) poor.

Capitalism is, by its nature, dynamic: it creates transitory disparities of wealth constantly as it reinvents itself. Fortunes are made and lost and, as old industries are replaced by new, the earnings that they create rise and fall. Punishing those who exceed some momentary average income and artificially subsidising those who fall below it – as well as providing for a universal standard of living which bears no relation to merit or even to need – has now reached the unavoidable, unaffordable end of the line.
So who will tell the truth – and then act on it? Who will say not just that welfare must be cut, but that in future MEDICARE will need to rely on a system of co-payments? That people will have to provide for their own retirement because Social Security will be frozen? That without a radical reduction in government intervention, the free and prosperous West will have been a brief historical aberration?

Mr. Obama says he merely wants tax rates to return to the "Clinton rates," but rates are already scheduled to go higher than that thanks to ObamaCare. There's the 0.9% Medicare surcharge on all income above $250,000, plus the 3.8% surcharge on investment income. The U.S. economy in 1993 also had far more growth momentum than it does today.

Bill Clinton agreed to cut the capital gains rate to 20% in 1997 but Mr. Obama wants it to be 23.8% at least. State tax rates are also higher than they were in the 1990s, especially in California, where the capital gains rate now is 13.3% on top of the federal rate. Combined that would be 37.1%. In Singapore, the capital gains tax is . . . zero