I was on Facebook today. I saw something that a good friend of mine had written and the resulting comments.

Mr Obama: not all folks who have money inherited it from their rich parents like your Harvard classmates did.Some of us worked hard to succeed.To get where I am took lots of weekend nights in the library when I should have been out with friends.It took eight years of post graduate education and 12 years in the military,away from home,to finance that education.Demonizing people who work hard does not bring "Hope"!

The fight over spending cuts is a fight over peanuts when you look at the total national spending. Cuts are being made to the programs with the least ability to resist or the least inside connection to find the funds somewhere else in the maze of projects and programs.

A freshman congressman from the state of Washington has promised her constituents that she will find the funds somewhere else to replace the $10 million cut in funds intended for Port of Vancouver work.

A Representative from Ohio is seeking to restore funding for a project in his State that falls under the House’s budget cut. A $20 million transportation grant for N.H. falls under the axe. Senators and Representatives of N.H. and Maine are working feverishly and promising to get funding elsewhere for that project. There are many more examples of this sort that are peanuts in terms of trillion dollar deficits. Remember the Alaskan bridge to nowhere? I haven’t heard from their, now famous, ex governor suggesting that Alaska reimburse the Federal Treasury to help in deficit reductions.

Are we all in a trance, both liberals and conservatives? We sit and watch the evening news, listen to our favorite talk show hosts: Fox, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, Frog Pond Croakers, or whoever. No one seems to be able to differentiate between their BS and their own BS.

The budget wrangles in congress are not even close to addressing the issues with any sane and sensible plan. Wrangling over the difference of 6 billion or 60 billion is 'stuff and nonsense!'

It appears both sides of the aisle are content with targeting those in society, with cuts, who are least able to absorb those cuts without drastic reductions in their lifestyles. Most of those cuts won't touch the upper middle class, and will actually benefit the ultra rich.

I just read, in my local paper, what our U.S. Rep. Tim Huelskamp had to say about our economy and how we can deal with the deficits and long term indebtedness. His opposition in the next election is going to have to be extremely evil, before I choose Tim as the lessor of the two evils!

I challenged the opponents of the Social Security System to justify their assault on the program. To date, I have seen only one brave soul who chose to respond. That response came with the same old charge of “Crammed down our throats”, “Saddling our Grandchildren with Debt”, “Unconstitutional”, and “Bankrupt” None of which are substantiated or plausible.

If the act was ‘crammed down our throats,' then, every resolution passed by Congress has been crammed, regardless of partisan sponsorship. It was debated, amended, rewritten, and passed by majority vote. It has been challenged in court several times and held to be constitutional. It has been self funded and self sustaining for over seventy years, and it is not bankrupt. There are still ‘surplus’ funds and current contributions are meeting the present demands drawn from the fund. It is true that unless an increase in the contributions is adopted, the demand claims will force the dipping into surplus funds, supposedly, held in Trust by the Treasury department. This will be necessary in the very near future, but someone with infinite wisdom has decided to stimulate the economy by cutting the wage earner’s contribution from 6.2% of eligible wages to 4.1%.

I just read another op-ed column in a leading newspaper wherein the writer referred to Social Security (SS) benefits as being welfare. What is it that I don't understand about SS? SS has been targeted as a major cause in the unholy redistribution of wealth in our social system.

We have readers who consider themselves fundamentally conservative. Please come in and explain the rationale for identifying SS benefits as undeserved welfare. How does SS contribute to the National Debt? Where is the fraud that we hear so much about? Why is it that being entitled to receiving the benefits the program was designed to provide makes me an undeserving burden on society?

Please, please come in and respectfully explain to me what it is that I don't understand.

We can't trust our luck. The attacks that have been waged against the Social Security program, from its conception, have been relentless. We read daily the charges that Social Security: was bad from the beginning; has ruined the economy; has made welfare a way of life for the elderly; is plunging us deeper and deeper into debt. We have been lucky that the system has survived the distortions that have gone unchallenged, for the most part. It is time we challenge those distortions before the lies have been told so many times that people begin to think they are the truth. Don't trust your congressman to protect the Social Security System without hearing from you.

Trust — What does that word mean? If you have a good thesaurus, you might be surprised at all the synonyms and associations or combinations of words that imply trust. For the purpose of this article, I choose to use the following definition; something (as property) held by one party (the trustee) for the benefit of another (the beneficiary).

Insofar as the Tea Party has a coherent talking point, besides their vague, arbitrarily selective hostility towards government in general, it is their concern about our enormous national deficit. That is a concern that progressives have been talking about since long before the Tea Party was a gleam in the eye of its founding libertarian ideologues, corporate sponsors, and veteran Republican organizers.

But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. We agree with the Tea Party about the importance of reducing the deficit and, fortunately, the main facts about the deficit are so clear and well-established that they are neither controversial nor difficult to understand. They are these:

If you want to be taken seriously when you rail against the deficit, you need to support one of the following four policies. Better yet, support more than one.

Ready for the four? One, cuts to Medicare. Two, cuts to Social Security. Three, military cuts. Four, tax increases. Any budget expert will tell you that we simply cannot fix the deficit without doing at least one of those four.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that by the year 2035, the annual deficit will be almost $2 trillion. Let's imagine that we make big cuts to every government program that's not our list of the big four -- bigger cuts than Ronald Reagan made -- to things like education and transportation. How much money might that save? Only about $100 billion. You can even double that figure and assume truly radical cuts. Even then you have saved a measly 10 percent of the projected deficit in the year 2035.

The reason is that these programs make up only a modest share of government. The three biggest programs -- by far -- are Medicare, Social Security and the military. (This is from here)

Former Republican U.S. Senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, is a co-chair of President Obama's recently formed bipartisan commission tasked with producing ideas to reduce the government's long term deficit. The other day he responded to a critic by asserting that the American people overuse Social Security claiming that the program is a milk cow with 310 million tits.

While I disagree with Simpson's "analysis" I believe it would be counterproductive to force him to resign. Surprisingly, some Republican leaders (while not having the courage to actually vote for a congressional commission with the same focus even after having signed on as co-sponsors) have declined to prejudge the outcome of the process.

There is still a long road to be traveled in actually getting deficit cutting legislation before the Congress but those liberals (such as Keith Olbermann, whom I admire) who want him to resign are wrong to suggest that future Social Security obligations don't impact the long-term deficit. Social Security "reform" should be one of the topics that the Commission make a part of its recommendation.

Last summer and through the fall, Peace Center members and other activists rallied, demonstrated, and distributed information on the “Medicare for All” plan that we hoped Congress would adopt as its health care reform. This plan seemed like the most sensible and those knowledgeable about our health care system, people such as Dr. Thomas Kluzak of Physicians for National Health Program, seemed to think that this is the only kind of reform that made sense.

As debate at noisy Town Hall meetings and on the floor of the House and the Senate progressed, or deteriorated, if you will, it soon became apparent that the enemies of government-funded and government run health care were going to see to it that real reform never got out of the gate. When Pres. Obama started substituting “health insurance reform” for “health care reform,” the writing was on the wall.

Found the following report in The Huffington Post. The trend reported here is one we've noticed in Dallas at our Resource Center.

ALBANY, N.Y. — Older Americans who were raised on stories of the Great Depression and acquired lifelong habits of thrift now find themselves crowding soup kitchens and food pantries in greater numbers for the first time after seeing retirement funds, second jobs and nest eggs wiped out by recession.

"What we see in line is lots of gray hair, lots of walkers," said Marti Forman, CEO of The Cooperative Feeding Program in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The help is crucial for many fixed-income seniors, who can't always keep up with rising food prices.