This sort of thing needs a name...

What the Democrats are doing now (and really started doing in 2006, when they won their majority in Congress) needs a name... a label for the process by which they can do one thing, and call it another in the hope that the American people will fail to grasp the scope of what is being done, no matter what it is called.

Here's what I am talking about...

In 2001, President Bush signed into law the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act, arguably his last truly "conservative" act as President of the United States, and almost the only Congressional spending and revenue bill that I feel Reagan would have supported (since Bush claimed to be a "Reagan Conservative"). This Act is set to expire on Dec 31, 2010, and... if that happens... America will see a 2.5% to 6.7% increase in our annual income tax bills, across the board... from the richest of us to the poorest (whom, under the EGTRRA, weren't paying any taxes at all... but now would again).

Current Democratic leadership (including the President) want a portion of the Act to remain in place, while allowing the tax cuts for the highest earners in the nation to expire. Mainstream GOP members want the whole Act to be renewed and remain in place. The ever-present dichotomy of Dem vs GOP.

If the GOP gets its way, then the deficit that the Dems have worked so hard to build up since 2006 will reach unsustainable proportions by the year 2014, at which point Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, FDIC, and even the IRS, will all spend more than the Fed can bring in to support them. If the Dems get their way, these agencies (and others like them) can maintain operation for a decade or more, but the increase in taxes and the inability of Congress to stem the tide of spending will mean the deficit will continue to rise and the economy will continue to fall.

The Democrats are always giving things names and labels... even the EGTRRA (admittedly, a long title) is only ever referred to as the "Bush Tax Cuts" (even though, constitutionally speaking, no President can impose a tax of any kind... only Congress can do that). What do we call the rationale behind the process by which something done by Congress, supported at the time by the very Representative now acting as Speaker of the House, and which has stemmed off the worst of a global economic adjustment that began in 2000 (and is still raging today), is constantly associated with a non-existent link between a former President and the richest, most influential people and corporations in America and the country's fall into double-digit recession?

How about something like a political "disconnect from reality"?