The tax cuts, in turn, further bloat the deficit, making entitlement cuts even more likely.

Obama's "Tax Holiday": A Poison Pill For Social Security:

It's no accident that the "payroll tax holiday" was first proposed by sworn enemies of retirement benefits on the deficit commission. We should be asking ourselves: When tax breaks can be designed in so many different ways, why did they choose this way? Why single out the only source of Social Security's funding? Could it be part of a long-term game plan?

Let's play out a likely scenario if this deal is enacted: The 2% tax holiday expires in 2012, an election year. Meanwhile the government debt will have increased by $120 billion, the amount that will be paid into Social Security to cover the cost of this "holiday." Bear in mind: Never before in Social Security's 75-year history has it taken any funds from the overall Treasury. It's forbidden by law from adding to the deficit. That's why it has its own trust fund, which currently holds a surplus of $2.6 trillion. That's money the Federal government has borrowed, and which it's morally (and legally) obligated to pay back so we can receive our retirement benefits.

Flash-forward to 2012: The "holiday" is set to end. Republicans aren't likely to acknowledge that this was a temporary program, any more than they did with the Bush cuts. Any attempt to let the 2% cut expire will be spun as an "Obama tax hike" on the middle class. In order to believe this "holiday" is really temporary, you have to believe that Obama and other Democrats will be willing to take that kind of heat, under enormous pressure in an election year. Any takers?

Extending this 2% cut would gut Social Security's finances forever.

I'd rather him fight for what is right and be a one term President than give in to what is wrong so that elections can be won.

Instead, he will do the thankless job of brokering legislation on behalf of the grifter class and deride the mildest criticism as wildly inappropriate.

And he will lose regardless.

When the children of these unemployed parents ask why they will have little to eat or why they must move out of their homes, what would you tell them? They certainly will not understand that Congress decided that they do not deserve to eat or stay in their homes while Mommy and Daddy try to find jobs that do not exist.

Neither will they understand that The Masters Of The Universe were given a tax break, supposedly so that they could easily create some of these jobs that don't exist, despite the fact that they've had this bonanza in-hand since the early months of the millennium.

Maybe they'd understand that the kids with the most aren't being asked to share and share alike.

Or maybe we demur on the question of explaining this all to our children and say that we have to do some things that we don't like when we're adults. I'm sorry, but the complexity of the world is not theirs to understand at that age, and we don't need to craft our policies so that five-year-olds (or more to the point, adult people acting like five-year-olds) apprehend and appreciate what we're doing.

He had NO IDEA that the GOP would be 'true to their ideals' and refuse to vote YES on anything. He had NO idea that corporate America was willing to pay billions to have him fail.

Then he either (a) hasn't been paying attention, or (b) he's the biggest naif in the history of executive American politics. Me, I don't buy that "babe in the woods" bullshit. Not for a second.

What he has just communicated, by the way, is that you suffer no consequences for being an ideologue so long as you support a very limited worldview.

The DP certainly had a mandate to get something done. The back-door gutting of Social Security, however, isn't quite what some of us had in mind.