Yesterday, I heard Speaker Boehner suggest that even if we confiscate all the income fr0m the richest 1%, we’d still hardly make a dent in the deficit/national debt.

Nice try: it’s a straw man argument to say that is what the opposition wants. It is not. No one I know or read has advocated that. Rather, we’re advocating “shared sacrifice” as a strategy for paying down the debt.

Along the same lines, you hear people say that there is $49 trillion in unfunded mandates from the Federal government. This usually has the desired effect of scaring people into agreeing with the following statement: “We’re broke.”

We’re not broke. The table below lays it out for you.

What this means: The debt argument is a political/ideological argument not a financial one. Boehner and Friends are using their majority to try to dismantle the social safety net once and for all.