Those values were reflected in this speech and press conference as they have been in most of his appearances in public. Of course the mainstream press would not want to divide this nation along economic class lines. So they leave those obvious biases uncommented on in their reporting most of the time. The people get it anyway and it has only taken them five years to understand this one simple fact. This President is not a man of the people; he is a man of the privileged few.

There is no shame in that fact for the President. There is just a disconnect from the real world in his view of life. A disconnect that has required the political genius of a Karl Rove to hide it from the people who vote for him.

Most people who do badly in High School do not wind up in Yale in the premier private club of all private clubs in American Colleges, Skull and Bones. Most people did not graduate from College and get an appointment to the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. Most graduates from College do not start their own oil company with money from friends of the family that they never repay. Most men in America in our generation did not go from one business failure to another and then to the governorship of Texas and then to the office of President of the United States.

That, my friends is a life of privilege! In an awesome way it is the ultimate life of privilege lived by anyone of my generation. The only other case of such a life of Privilege that comes to mind is Jane Fonda. She has lived her life in an equivalent bubble of privilege. Our nation shelters such people from the normal vicissitudes of the real world. There is no particular shame in that, we would all like our children to have privileges in one regard or another; that is human nature.

If you or I had gone to give aid and comfort to the North Vietnamese during that sad war we would have been punished. Jane was not. If you or I had left our post in the Texas Guard without bothering to go to the proper meetings we would have wound up in Vietnam. George did not. That is what I mean by a life of privilege, a life where consequences felt by all of the rest of us simply do not apply.

A life like that can leave the most amazing gaps in awareness of the real world. By real world I mean the world that most people deal with every day. The world where the choice between doing your homework or getting to work on time is a real issue. In that world you wind up taking the flack for not finishing those last two algebra problems or maybe losing your job at sixteen. That job is sometimes all that allows you to buy clothes and maintain your place in your peer group.

Or try another version of the real world, one where your single parent has a small income and you live in a poor part of town. That can be a world where you have to try and make it home from school without one of the more dangerous predators in the neighborhood noticing you. It is a life where your life is at risk some of the time and your dignity is never an issue. That is now a world where even holding a job is a remote dream for most kids.

Life is not fair. In our family there is a saying, "If you want fair you go to Pomona." That is where the local fairgrounds still reside. Our family does not believe that anything would be served by reducing the lives of the privileged in our society to a lower level. That would be the basis of real class warfare. Our family does believe that with serious application of talent and diligent effort a person can arrive at a good life regardless of what social strata you came from originally.

My wife and I also have few illusions about the privileged families in our nation. They sometimes produce marvelous human beings. Bill Gates was a privileged kid, he has lived an interesting and valuable life thus far. His foundation is doing some utterly wonderful things. I've met some rich kids that I thought could help change this world for the better. I've also met some poor kids that strive to do the same kind of thing, to make this a better world for everyone in it.

On one hand you have concentrations of private money; that is a necessity for any capitalistic society. That private money can do great things in the hands of people who use it well. On the other hand you have the national public treasury.

Our public budget currently consists of two and one half trillion dollars per year that we spend on various things like Social Security, Medicare and the Military. Most of it is collected from the people of this nation in one way or another. For instance all of the funds currently going out as Payments to Social Security Recipients come from payroll taxes levied against income from a payroll. This is purely income derived from a job. If you have income from dividends or property those taxes are not levied against that income.

The Government has borrowed money from that special fund for several years now; there is a surplus in that fund at the moment. Remember that all of that money is from a tax levied against all payroll income regardless of how little money the person makes. That tax applies until you reach the magic number of 90,000 dollars per year. The government owes that payroll tax fund nearly two trillion dollars by now based on borrowing that money for general fund uses.

General fund uses include subsidies that encourage companies to do certain things that are considered to be in the public interest. They also include the cost of wars and the peacetime costs of maintaining our military. They include our Federal Education Budget and our Farm Subsidy programs. The general funds do not go toward defraying the costs of either Medicare or Social Security. Those are covered by special funds collected from separate payroll taxes only.

Why am I making such a point of saying this so carefully? That would be because most of the people in this nation still do not understand the nature of the scam being promoted by the President and his little helpers. He is saying that the nearly two trillion dollars collected in payroll taxes and used for general fund purposes no longer exist.

The President is implying that the government cannot afford to pay that debt. At the same time he is saying that, he is trying desperately to hold onto the nearly two trillion dollars in tax cuts that Congress passed at his request. That two trillion dollars is lining the pockets of the richest citizens exclusively.

This simply amounts to a huge transfer of wealth from the poorer classes to the wealthier ones. The ones losing in this scheme are the people who are totally dependent on wages for their income. Tax monies from their payroll income are being transferred to the wealthier citizens who derive most of their income from investments. That would be a whole new level of class warfare if the scam succeeds.

The wren is tuning up for her concerto and the cat is pushing hard against my back. She wants the chair that we nominally share all to herself now. That is a transfer of ownership that is strictly nominal, I can get it back. The Social Security scam is not nominal it is grand theft for the benefit of the privileged among us. Not nice Mr. President, not nice at all. God bless and keep you all safe today, privileged and poor alike.