The let them eat cake party

After looking at the budgets put forth by the republican controlled House and Senate majorities, Paul Krugman dismissed them this morning as profoundly dishonest documents designed to continue the decades long transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1%.  Magic asterisks abound in both budgets, promising unspecified cuts and increased revenue.  Meanwhile, factions of the GOP demand increases in an already bloated defense budget lest ISIS kill us in our sleep.  So the cuts must come from the already frayed safety net which keeps a fairly large percentage of Americans from sleeping in their cars.  Meanwhile, on the same editorial page, Timothy Egan rails against the GOP's Horatio Algers.  Joni Ernst, Scott Walker and their ilk glory in their reminiscences of poor childhoods and minimum wage jobs.  By golly, they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps or bread bags, why can't the rest of us do the same?  As Egan so eloquently puts it, most people with humble beginnings have some empathy for those who haven't had the luck or skill to transform themselves.  These strutting peacocks seem to have lost any connection to the average joe and are simply traitors to their class, in much the same way Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas have forgotten the myriad lucky breaks that came their way as they went from poverty to world class neurosurgeon and supreme court justice respectively.   They and the rest of the republicans certainly subscribe to Marie Antoinette's prescription for the hungry in Paris before the revolution.  Let's hope the same fate does not befall the denizens of this latter day Versailles.