Do Budget Cuts Hurt People?

Shorter Freddie DeBoer: They obviously hurt the least fortunate, while the tax cuts benefit the best-off:

Sullivan maintains a belief that perhaps some Republican-- some serious Republican-- will come along and take advantage of Obama's supposed weakness and put forth a budget plan that is serious. Well, hope springs eternal in the human heart. You would think that a man who has spent the last decade meticulously following America partisan politics would be immune to getting inspired by a Republican politician, but apparently not. What any actual Republican deficit strategy will amount to is yet more signaling of who is "good" and who is "bad" in the conservative mind. Why go after funding for the arts, when that's such a tiny sliver of federal spending that it's almost entirely symbolic? Because fags and weirdos make art. That's why.You can bet, though, that any proposal that is deemed sufficiently serious by Sullivan and any host of other conservative bloggers will be one that hurts the least well off. That's the shorthand that's being used here, after all. What's serious is what trims poor old people from the Social Security rolls and poor sick people from the Medicare rolls.

Here's what you won't find at the Daily Dish, or at the Corner, or in any of the other places showily demanding seriousness: the actual, human, negative consequences of harsh entitlement cutbacks. I mean, from reading online today, you'd be hard pressed to know why we have Social Security and Medicare at all. I'll tell you why: because our winner-take-all economic system leaves defenseless, impoverished people in its wake. We have Social Security because the sight of so many elderly people left literally homeless and starving , too old and weak to work, was unseemly to an earlier generation that was willing to take less for themselves to provide for others. We have Medicare because it is an obscenity for a country responsible for the atom bomb and the moon landing and the Hoover Dam to allow suffer and die from lack of health care access due to the vagaries of birth and chance. That's why those programs exist.

The class war is coming from above, and the warriors are winning.  The majority is losing, and most seem to blame the government, who can be their only defense against it.