SEN. DAVID VITTER WRITES

What Sen. Vitter wrote:

Dear Friend,

If you didn't get a chance to watch President Obama's address on fiscal policy yesterday, you might be better off. It was nothing more than a partisan campaign-style speech that doubled down on raising taxes.

What the president has failed to realize is that the problem isn't that our taxes are too low – it's that the current spending habits in Washington have created a recipe for disaster. The answer is not increasing taxes or perpetrating ugly class warfare, but to make bold spending cuts so we don't leave this fiscal mess for our children and grandchildren. Increasing taxes during this economy would seriously hurt America's job creators.

If it weren't such a serious problem, it would almost be comical that the president claims that Obamacare will help reduce the deficit yet fails to acknowledge how much his failed bailouts, stimulus and other reckless spending have contributed to the fiscal mess we're in....

What I wrote:

Dear Sen. Vitter,

I watched the speech, and I thought the president's suggestion that the rich pay their fair share of taxes for the privilege of living in this great country was one of the best parts of the speech.

I also noted that the president placed the blame for blowing the budget squarely where it belonged, on the tax cuts for the rich and two off-budget wars that were never paid for during the presidency of George Bush and his Republican cohorts running wild, including you.

You have a nerve, Sen. Vitter. Do you think I'm stupid?

June Butler

And if asking the richest amongst us to pay their fair share is "perpetrating ugly class warfare", then I quote George Bush and say, "Bring it on!"

UPDATE: My friend Counterlight reminded me in a comment of Warren Buffett's words in a CNN interview with Lou Dobbs:

BUFFETT: Yeah. The rich people are doing so well in this country. I mean, we never had it so good.

DOBBS: What a radical idea.

BUFFETT: It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be.

The interview took place in 2005! The inequities are even greater today.

LET'S NOT FORGET...

...who blew the budget. The best of Obama's speech yesterday, in my humble opinion:

America’s finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus. America was actually on track to becoming completely debt free, and we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.

But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program — but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts — tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our nation’s checkbook, consider this: In the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.

But that’s not what happened. And so, by the time I took office, we once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a Baby Boom retirement that is now starting to take place. When I took office, our projected deficit, annually, was more than $1 trillion. On top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession that, like most recessions, led us to temporarily borrow even more.

Others, such as Kevin Drum at Mother Jones and Duncan Black at Eschaton, agree with my humble opinion.

Let's not forget.