Countdowns, boils, and enemas...YIKES!

Why does it keep being a stinking payroll tax cut? Of all the taxes to cut, don't freaking cut payroll taxes! Them's what pay the Social Security and the Medicare and the Unemployment Insurance and the like. You know, the budgetary ticking time bombs. Every time you do that, it's like when an inept hero attempts to dismantle a bomb, but accidentally accelerates the countdown. 

(Maybe accelerating the countdown is good. The sooner Social Security and Medicare go bust, the sooner they get fixed, and the more likely it happens before I retire. Maybe this is the greatest political gamble of all time! President Obama is bringing the crisis to a head sooner so that the baby boomers have to face it head on, because we know that they don't give a flying deuce about their children. It's the political equivalent of putting a hot coke bottle over a boil so that it draws the core to the surface and then...blam! It breaks the skin and pings at the end of the coke bottle. My grandpa told me that story. He also told me about his mother administering enemas to him. I don't think he was more animated than when he told the enema story. He also taught me never to hire a man who wears overalls or a man who smokes a pipe; the former is lazy and the latter is a dreamer.)

Every time these blasted budget discussions come up and the answer inevitably is to increase spending and reduce taxes (everyone wins!), I get gloomier and start yelling things like "Down with the mortgage interest deduction!" You tea partiers want more than 47 percent of people to pay federal taxes? You Democrats want to increase revenues? Then revoke the mortgage interest deduction. That nails the middle class, deincentivizes reckless home buying, and doesn't really hit the poor too bad. (Poor home owners are typically the elderly who own their homes outright.) It's just as absurd as farm subsidies and whatnot. (I can easily say this because I do not own a house. Get me a house and I'll tell the politicians to grind the face of the poor before eliminating my entitlement to mortgage interest deductions. And I'll make sure to say it in all caps, and then end my comment with "IT'S IN THE CONSTITUTION, SHEEPLE!")