A "holiday" from payroll tax cuts (where Social Security and Medicare benefits come from) isn't the only means by which the poor and middle classes can get relief.
What comes after this is privatizin
About GOP
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
“The staunchest supporters of Social Security are those pushing the hardest to cut the program's chief financing stream—the payroll tax. Severing the link between payroll taxes and benefits means beneficiaries could no longer claim they ‘earned’ their Social Security benefits. This would erode future support for this vital program."
-Jason Fichtner
Former Social Security Administration Deputy Commission er
“Social Security was not establisheRead Social Security Payroll Tax Cut -- A Temporary Stimulus With Permanent Damage by Charles Blahous.d to be a source of ‘temporary ’ stimulus funds. The idea that its payroll tax rate should be moved up and down with economic events is highly dangerous to the program’s financial future.
"If Congress continues to cut the program’s funding source, one of two things must happen: 1) Social Security’s insolvency will be accelerated; or 2) Social Security will have to increasing ly rely on general revenues (i.e., income taxes) to pay beneficiar ies.”
The government also spied on American citizens (even before 9/11 … confirmed here and here), while saying “we don’t spy”.
And the government tortured prisoners in Iraq, but said “we don’t torture”.
In other words, high-level officials in the administration were caught in repeated untruths, and so their statements about believing good faith that Iraq had WMDs is less believable .
What Really Happened?
But if the White House knew that Iraq didn’t have any WMDs, why did we go to war in Iraq?
Well, several very high-profile figures have said it was for the oil. See this, this. and this.
A British official said that “the intelligenKEEP READINGce and facts were being fixed around the policy”.
In January 2004, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report on WMDs in Iraq concluded that the evidence prior to the war indicated that Iraq’s nuclear program had been dismantled and its chemical weapons had lost most of their lethality. In addition, the report concluded that the administra tion “systemati cally misreprese nted the threat from Iraq’s WMD and ballistic missile programs”.
Fool Me Once …
In addition, it is a well-understood principle that if someone has been caught in a lie, we are less likely to believe him. For example, a witness who is caught in a lie during trial is unlikely to be believed by the jury when he makes another statement.
Well, Cheney and other high-level White House officials repeatedly implied that Saddam and Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda and 9/11, when they knew that wasn’t true.
Indeed, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reports that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructio ns and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this.
Indeed, a former high-level CIA analyst (who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligen ce briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents , Secretarie s of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials) says that falsified documents which were meant to show that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein regime had been trying to procure yellowcake uranium from Niger can be traced back to Dick Cheney, and that:
CIA Director George Tenet told his “coterie of malleable managers” at the CIA to create a National Intelligence Estimate “to the terms of reference of Dick Cheney’s speech of August 26, 2002, where Dick Cheney said for the first time Saddam Hussein could have a nuclear weapon in a year, he’s got all kinds of chemical, he’s got all kinds of biological weapons.”
Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind says:
Bush administration had informatio n from a top Iraqi intelligen ce official “that there were no weapons of mass destructio n in Iraq – intelligen ce they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”
The Washington Post reports that a secret, fact-finding team of scientists and engineers sponsored by the Pentagon determined in May 2003 that two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops were not evidence of an Iraqi biological weapons program. The nine-membe r team “transmitt ed their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003.” Despite having authoritat ive evidence that the biological laboratori es claim was false, the administra tion continued to repeat the myth over the next four months.
Everyone Knew that Iraq Didn’t Have WMDs
Everyone knew the WMD claims were fake. For example, Tony Blair – the British Prime Minister – knew that Saddam possessed no WMDs. If America’s closest ally Britain knew, then the White House knew as well.
And the number 2 Democrat in the Senate - who was on the Senate intelligence committee – admitted that the Senate intelligen ce committee knew before the war started that Bush’s public statements about Iraqi WMDs were false. If the committee knew, then the White House knew as well.
But we don’t even have to use logic to be able to conclude that the White House knew.
Specifically, the former highest-ra nking CIA officer in Europe says that Bush, Cheney and Rice were personally informed that Iraq had no WMDs in Fall 2002 (and see this).
Former Treasury Secretary O’Neil – who was a member of the National Security Council – said:
In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destructio n.
The CIA warned the White House that claims about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions (using forged documents) were false, and yet the White House made those claims anyway.
Remember Tuwaitha?
The most outrageous lies of the Bush Administration prior to the war were the nuclear lies. That they had the gall to threaten, to frighten, to terrorize the American people with the spectre of mushroom clouds is beyond belief, but that's exactly what they did.
Now the lies are coming back to bite them in the persons of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. The fact that BushCo chose to personally attack Wilson's family, rather than address Wilson's charge, tells us everything we need to know.
But there's more concrete evidence that the Bush gang did not believe their own nuclear lies for a second, and it's this: When U.S. forces took control of Iraq, did they rush to secure the known nuclear sites - specifically the main site at Tuwaitha? Did they safeguard the known radioactiv e materials, lockdown the site and begin searching for evidence of Iraqi efforts to acquire nuclear weapons?
No, they did not. They did, however, in those first days, secure the Oil Ministry.
Tuwaitha languished unsecured for weeks. The uranium stored there was looted. Some of it most likely wound up on the black market.
The Bush Administration, which claimed they had to invade Iraq to save us from the mushroom cloud, promptly forgot all about mushroom clouds and dirty bombs once they got some American boots onto Iraqi oil fields.
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