NEWZ: The US: Increasingly Divided

Here's the latest info on the President's inauguration:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/01/11/MNGN9AO7JG1.DTL

Californians have donated at least $3.2 million of the $18 million that has been raised so far to pay for President Bush's inauguration for a second term on Jan. 20, an affair that will feature nine black-tie balls and thousands of Republican revelers.

The committee staging the inaugural festivities plans to raise $40 million to pay for most of the events, which also will include the traditional parade on Pennsylvania Avenue, a patriotic pageant at the MCI Center, pre- inaugural dinners and a national prayer service.

Meanwhile, our fine Californian governor explains that there isn't nearly enough money to go around:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/01/11/MNG5NAODFP1.DTL

In a plan that does not raise taxes, Schwarzenegger said he had no choice but to make difficult decisions such as eliminating cost-of-living increases for the disabled, slashing welfare for families and not giving schools $1.1 billion that they are owed this year.

...

More than 550,000 recipients of Medi-Cal, the state's version of health insurance for the poor, would pay monthly premiums for the first time under a Schwarzenegger proposal. The state would lower the salaries of health care workers who visit poor blind and disabled people at home, proposing to pay the minimum wage in a move advocates say could dramatically lower the workforce and reduce quality of care.

The annual increases in cost-of-living payments to welfare recipients and 1.2 million elderly, blind and disabled would not be granted and would no longer be automatic. And a federally funded cost-of-living increase to the same group would go into state coffers instead of to recipients. The freeze would lock in payments to one elderly or disabled individual at $812 a month.

Meanwhile, back at the national level, Bush is trying to make sure that the average American is just as screwed in retirement as he is now in the tottering economy:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/01/11/MNG5NAODFH1.DTL

Bush's plan to add private accounts to Social Security, as a leaked White House memo to congressional Republicans put it last week, "will be one of the most important conservative undertakings of modern times. ... The scope and scale of this endeavor are hard to overestimate."

..

The Democrats' chief line of attack so far is that Social Security does not face a crisis, and the question is debatable enough to sow plenty of public confusion. Much depends on the definition of crisis.

Even ardent advocates of private accounts concede that Medicare would be a better place to find a crisis. A new prescription drug benefit alone piled on nearly as much unfunded future liability as the entire Social Security shortfall of $10.4 trillion.

Someday, when they make the movie about the Bush administration, this will be the moment of dramatic contrast, cutting back and forth between rich old men cavorting naked in piles of money at the inauguration and blind & disabled seniors stumbling listlessly through the streets of California, while The Beatles' "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" plays over it all.