On Tuesday President Obama proposed that any increases in federal spending on anything useful, such as healthcare or retirement security, must be balanced by cuts and savings to something else useful, such as healthcare or retirement security.



"The pay-as-you-go rule is very simple," Obama said. "Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere." Except that it's not so simple. Obama would make an exception to allow Bush's tax cuts for millionaires to be extended past their 2010 expiration date, as well as to prevent the alternative-minimum tax from impacting the overclass. Still, the White House insists that everything is very simple:



"PAYGO would hold us to a simple but important principle: we should pay for new tax or entitlement legislation. Creating a new non-emergency tax cut or entitlement expansion would require offsetting revenue increases or spending reductions."



But, guess what? War supplementals and bankster bailouts are "emergencies" and the Pentagon and regular budget war funding are not "entitlements." (Someone will have to explain this to the CEOs over at Boeing, BAE, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, but it's true). With roughly half of every dollar of income tax going to the military and wars and debt for military and wars, we again have a public discussion of "government spending" that ignores the military and wars. Contrary to popular myth, by the way, team Obama just increased -- and therefore did not decrease -- what had been the largest military budget in world history. And let's not forget the Bush-Obama bankster bailouts that suddenly made military spending look small.





But note that 15 House Democrats thus far have said they will vote No, and with all the Republicans voting No we only need a couple dozen more representatives of the party we keep electing to end the wars. We CAN win this one.