Show me proof of your Occupy theory of the deficit being on the poor and middle class.
Sure. The Tea Party believes that we should close the deficit exclusively by cutting domestic spending, right? So, the biggest domestic spending areas, by far, are social security, medicare and education including student loans. So, if we cut social security, middle class people need to start, immediately, saving more for retirement. Whatever we cut out of social security costs middle class that amount same as if we taxed them that amount. Likewise with medicare. Medicare basically functions to subsidize medical costs for the elderly as a supplement to insurance. As medicare is cut, the cost of insurance goes up in proportion. Again, that is taking money out of the pockets of the middle class who need to pay more for their insurance. Likewise, as we cut subsidized student loans, that means that families need to save a little more each month for their kids' college and graduates need to use a bit more of their pay each month to pay back their student loans. In all those cases, the financial effect of domestic spending cuts are the same as if we left the programs alone and raised taxes on them by the same amount.
To shrink the deficit we need to take the money from someone. Cutting domestic spending is the "make the middle class pay more" option. Tax increases on the rich are the "make the rich pay more" option. Military cuts are the only true "spend less" option. Cutting domestic spending doesn't actually reduce the amount we're spending as a country, it just shifts around who is paying for the stuff. People will still go to college, retirees will still retire, etc, so we aren't really cutting spending, we're just moving the costs for those things from the government to the people. That may be a good thing, but it isn't really the same as say a cut in military spending because if we cut military spending, as a nation as a whole we are actually spending less. Private individuals won't go around buying aircraft carriers to make up the difference, we'll just actually spend less on aircraft carriers.
In my view, we need to spread the pain across all three areas. The middle class definitely does need to accept that they will have to pay for some things they didn't used to have to pay for. But, the rich also need to accept that their historically and internationally ultra-low tax rates are going to have to go back to the rates they paid in the 1990s. And, we all need to accept that we can't go on spending more on our military than the entire rest of the world combined spends on theirs. If we try to take $1.4 trillion a year from any one of those piles, it would be a disaster. That's just too much weight for any one of them to bear up under alone, but together, if we all pitch in, we can do it.
Last time I checked, the military has been cut twice in 6months and is looking at a third cut when the failed super-committee automatic cuts go into effect. The military is taking their lumps, but organizations like the US Commission of Fine Arts are getting theirs. Yep, that makes sense.
You may know more about that than I do, but my understanding is that the cuts enacted so far are basically just starting to draw the military back down to the budget it had before the wars. Which, that is reasonable right? We don't want to keep spending wartime levels of money when there is no war going on. In fact, that's the explicit goal Obama has set. The clawback for the failure of the super committee, if that ever really happens, I agree that would be a meaningful cut, but personally I doubt that will really happen.