"After years of historic deficits, this 110th Congress will commit itself to a higher standard: Pay as you go, no new deficit spending. Our new America will provide unlimited opportunity for future generations, not burden them with mountains of debt."

Nancy Pelosi in her first speech as Speaker of the House on Jan 4, 2007.

They own the media, which is enabling them to buy elections/candidates.

I used to think it was just cyclical, and soon our Democratic hero, a Teddy Roosevelt type, would come in and bust up the money machines that are sucking us dry and nearly took us to the edge of disaster, but now...

Just trying to figure out the path I need to take professionally that will end with me retiring in a country where my 401k will let me lead the comfortable retirement I was planning here.

And the deficit/debt number is not inherently a problem, the problem is that we've invested that money in all the wrong things.  Or rather we haven't invested it at all, we've blown it bailing out banks, waging wars and making sure the rich and corporations pay as little tax as possible.  If we'd spent it building infrastructure, creating jobs and moving us off of fossil fuels, we'd be building for a future and expanding revenue and making the lives of American citizens better.  

All of those things, btw, are things the public supports.  The bank bailout, the wars, and tax cuts on the rich, the public does not support.  But notice we got them anyway.  That's because, IMO, our elected representatives no longer represent us.  We live in a kleptocracy/oligarchy.  This is what happens in a kleptocracy/oligarchy.  The majority of people are robbed to give money to the very wealthy. This is what The Deal and now this Debt Ceiling Kabuki are all about.  Giving money to the rich and taking it from the poor/working class/middle class/upper middle class. This will continue regardless of the results in 2012 because an election alone cannot change this dynamic.  We've seen that repeatedly.  The Rs do this and the public votes them out of office (e.g., 2006 & 2008).  The Ds do this and the public votes them out of office (e.g., 2010).  And yet there is no change in the underlying policies.

Specifically, according to many reports, the president offered both means-testing of Medicare benefits and a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. The first would be bad policy; the second would be terrible policy. And it would almost surely be terrible politics, too.
....
So why is the president embracing these bad policy ideas? In a forthcoming article in The New York Review of Books, the veteran journalist Elizabeth Drew suggests that members of the White House political team saw the 2010 election as a referendum on government spending and that they believe that cutting spending is the way to win next year.

If so, I would respectfully suggest that they are out of their minds. Remember death panels? The G.O.P.'s most potent political weapon last year -- the weapon that caused a large swing in the votes of older Americans -- was the claim that Mr. Obama was cutting Medicare. Why give Republicans a chance to do it all over again?

Of course, it's possible that the reason the president is offering to undermine Medicare is that he genuinely believes that this would be a good idea. And that possibility, I have to say, is what really scares me. link

What you're saying is what they're saying: we need to cut, we need to spend less.  They get you to buy into that by threatening things you care about.  Once you do, it's more or less over, since while they want your agreement - "okay, we spend too much" - they really aren't interested in your input about what should be cut, and will just proceed to do what they want to do.

Notice that the argument from the get-go has never been about whether we need to cut, but what should be cut, so that's why they are now only arguing over the details.  In my mind, the Democratic argument should have been chapter and verse on why cutting at a time of recession/jobless recovery is not how one keeps the economy moving upward - but we don't have a Democratic president who believes in that argument, rejecting the lessons of history.  And, he also either doesn't understand what it means that we are sovereign in our own currency, and the tremendous flexibility that gives us, or he is choosing to ignore it, preferring to politicize the issue and advance policies he's been behind since before the 2008 campaign.

At this stage of the game - and it has become a game, albeit a dangerous one - in a down economy, with high unemployment, cutting spending is just going to mean the loss of more jobs in the public sector, which will translate to job losses in the private sector - and the downward spiral will continue.  Do I want to keep spending so much money on war?  No.  But I refuse to be co-opted into their we-have-to-get-our-fiscal-house-in-order strategy, because I'm not going to have any control over what gets cut - and neither are you.  And because we essentially have no voice, we are the easiest target to go after, which is exactly what they want to do, exactly what is happening.

The reality is that the SS Trust Fund buys U.S. Treasuries with its surplus (it is still running a surplus and will for some years yet) because it's the safest investment that exists on the planet.

In other words, the US government only "borrows" money from SS in the way that, say, Cisco "borrows" money from you when you buy its stock.

The only way the Treasury bonds will not be redeemed by SS is if the government defaults on those bonds, something that isn't going to happen because, as we know, the consquences of a U.S. bond default would be economically catastrophic worldwide.

Here's the point.  Obama's proposed cuts to SS have NOTHING to do with the current deficit situation.  Nothing.  Zip. Nada.  He's proposing cutting SS benefits as an alternative to raising the current $106K cap on income subject to SS taxes.

there isn't enough space, nor am i inclined to take it up, to disect all that's ill-informed about your post, so i'll just hit a couple of highlights:

1. last i checked, we are the government. it isn't some monolithic beast, untouched by human hands. unless you haven't voted since 1996, you've had a hand in running it, via your elected officials. that whole "representative democracy" thing. as pogo famously uttered: "we have met the enemy, and he is us."

2. the 1.3 billion lose sustained, on the sale of the last shares of chrysler stock, was a cheap price to pay, for the 1,000's of jobs kept that it resulted in. allowing chrysler to go bankrupt would have had a devastating effect on the economy, and cost hundreds of billions. 1.3 billion v hundreds of billions, and additional 1,000's unemployed. hmmmmmmmmmmmm, tough call there.

The Government has already taken too much from us. Stole, really. Maybe a shutdown is what we need. So we can start from scratch, with repaying the $4.6 trillion we borrowed from social security revenues.

18.74% -  Department of Defense

16.13% -  Unemployment/Welfare/OMS

12.79% -  Medicare

8.19%  -  Medicaid and State Children's HIP

4.63%  -  Interest on National Debt

Wiki Pie Chart