What is even more cynical about these tax breaks is that here you have a conservative President and a conservative party, which for years have been ranting and raving about how terrible deficits are. But now they are giving us the largest deficit in American history. Why are they driving up a huge national debt that our kids and grandchildren are going to have to pay off? I'll tell you why they are doing that. They are doing that so that they'll come back before the American people and say, "We cannot afford to maintain Social Security; privatize it. We can't afford to protect Medicare and Medicaid; privatize it. We can't afford to protect the Veterans Administration; privatize it." That is their cynical plan: to destroy the basic rights that millions of people have fought for and received, and to bring us back to the nineteenth century, where the American people had no rights, where the elderly were the poorest people in our society, where children slept out on the streets without nutrition programs, where workers were unable to form unions, where there were no health care programs for the elderly. That is what they are trying to do, and we are not going to allow them to get away with it.

More...

Go out on Main Street, stand at the corner, and ask people a simple question. Tell them you're doing an informal poll, and ask them if they want 40 percent of the tax breaks, hundreds of billions of dollars, to go to the top 1 percent, or whether those breaks should be spread around more fairly and be used for education or lowering the deficit. Then tell me who is "fringe." Ask them if we should maintain our disintegrating health care nonsystem or establish a universal health care system that guarantees health care for all. Then tell me who is "fringe." Ask them if we should continue to let polluters destroy our environment, or move to safe, sustainable energy. Then tell me who is "fringe."