Austerity blues

Very soon we'll begin to hear Republicans and their Tea Party allies banging, hanging, dangling, mangling, wrangling, entangling their Debt Commission precepts favoring austerities for us, as the means to shrink our national debt.

Austerity: rigorous simplicity, severely simple, living without luxuries.

So, if we let them gut Social Security, Medicare and other hard-earned discretionaries, allow infrastructures to continue crumbling, overpricing of college education, continuing useless wars, deregulating everything, trusting the free market to be fair, poisoning the planet, allowing tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, corporations avoiding their fair share of taxes, then who is the austerity coming from? US!

Here's what the superrich could live without:

1. exotic automobile fleets
2. more than one superyacht
3. low-paid immigrant services
4. offshore tax-avoiding accounts
5. bought-and-paid-for legislatures
6. corporate-friendly judiciaries
7. energy-wasting mansions
8. horses
9. credit default swaps
10. hedge funds
11. deferential police
12. preferential monetary access

and so much more.

Refudiating these unfairly autocratic misadvantages would equitably level the playing field, and promote inspiring patriotic activities by citizens who may have given up on America's historic promises.

--Bill Arnold