There’s too much talk about deficits and not enough about jobs. Oddly, the deficit gabble is coming from divergent political positions: Tea Partiers (whom no one expects to be logical) and the White House (whose current occupant was assumed to be akin to Plato’s Philosopher King).

The Tea Party Crowd is all steamed up about the federal deficit and how it will impact their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on. They seem to lose sight of the fact their children and their progeny need jobs today. They are adamant about cutting back government, but they staunchly defend the entitlements such as Medicare that they enjoy. Some of the political aspirants who have sprung up want to tear up the social contract and the government agencies that address social needs. They just don’t want the limits they set to affect themselves. Go figure.

Meanwhile, back at the White House, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (NCFRR) is studying the financial debacles of recent years. The Commission is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. One of its leaders, former US Senator Alan Simpson has said that everything is on the table. Now that’s a big table.

The White House appears susceptible to wonkish ideas emanating from studies and commissions. It sometimes loses sight of the big picture while pressing for its goals. Sometimes it seems to find its stadium seat late in the game. Let’s hope that it isn’t the case if the NCFRR comes up with game changing policy recommendations that would further undermine the lives of ordinary Americans.

It could happen: recommendations to radically alter Social Security, tax code changes affecting mortgage interest deductions, restrictions on the rights of organized public sector workers. Nothing is off the table.

The current economic crisis should not become cover for subverting the social improvements of the past 80 or more years. We expect the White House to clear the table of harmful proposals and to deny them consideration

The political extremists on the right are vociferous, angry and threatening. They should be opposed and not appeased. We are in a zero-sum game in which bipartisanship has no place.

Our political allies should be identified by their deeds and not by their words and expressions of sentiment. We have litmus-test issues. Hope and change, buzzwords of the recent past, are no longer in current usage. Proof of principles is what the American public and the Labor Movement need now.