WASHINGTON, D.C. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Senate Democrats on Monday presented a $2.7 trillion deficit reduction plan, crafted by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), which includes deep spending cuts, no tax increases and a host of savings that Republican leaders have already endorsed. The plan immediately raises the debt ceiling to authorize the Treasury to pay the United States’ obligations through the end of 2012. It also establishes a bipartisan committee to direct future deficit reductions -- admittedly a threat to entitlement programs -- and guarantees a Congressional vote on its recommendations. To further sweeten the pot, in a brazen gambit tentatively endorsed by the White House, Reid’s draft also proposed “the removal of child labor protections, legal recognition of English as the national language, the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment, the shuttering of all Planned Parenthood clinics, mandatory gun ownership for every American household, the teaching of Intelligent Design, no government health care regulation, exclusive and perpetual copyrights on the King James Bible, relocation of the nation’s Capitol to Texas and the privatization of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

“I dare Republicans to reject this,” Reid added. They did.

”Too Little, Too Late,” Declares GOP Leadership
Although conceding the bizarre and austere sacrifices pledged by Senate Democrats, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said the plan didn’t go far enough. Reid’s proposal, despite offering nearly all the concessions Republicans had agreed upon in previous discussions, continues to protect Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- “all core elements of the socialism destroying this country, along with publicly funded civil services, education, cigarette taxes and a free Internet,” Boehner said.

Those close to the Speaker described Boehner as “distraught and offended” by the Democrats’ “gimmicky” gesture. They also noted that his skin tone changed from orange to red, signaling a heightened threat level.

Boehner’s chief disagreement was the Democrats’ plan to cut $1 trillion from the war effort.

He said, “If you study the 2011 Quality of Life Index, you’ll see that the United States ranks an abysmal 31 overall. We are listed 39 in health, 22 in education, 20 in wealth and 81 in peace. These are disturbing statistics. Even more distressing, America ranked 15 in Democracy. Fifteenth, for the country that started the democratic experiment 235 years ago. Am I surprised? No. Because this is what happens when you allow socialists to run a free country. Socialized medicine doesn’t work. Public education doesn’t work. And we’ll never be number one in peace if we don’t stop terrorism around the world and replace it with democracy. I can no longer sit back and allow socialist infiltration, socialist indoctrination, socialist subversion and the international socialist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our bodily fluids. Military spending and expanding the war on terror are the last places we need cuts.”

GOP Unveils Its Own Plan: The Same But Different
Instead of entertaining Reid’s offer to consider the new proposal, House Republicans countered by issuing a strikingly similar plan that would occur in phases.

The GOP chided the Democrats’ single solution plan as creating “one point of failure instead of multiple points of failure,” which their phased proposal promotes.

The GOP plan would also preserve all military spending, citing the defense budget as a “pennies-on-the-dollar, drop-in-the-bucket” cost to tax payers, as opposed to the outlandish entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

“What’s a tax payer’s return on investment for those things? Nothing,” Boehner snapped.

The phased provision of Boehner’s plan guarantees that the debt ceiling be reached during each election cycle to ensure enhanced visibility into liberal government pork, which will “help voters make more informed, fiscally conservative decisions at the polls.”

But apart from these differences, analysts say that both plans are remarkably the same: they both raise the debt ceiling over time by roughly the same amount, they both practically guarantee entitlement cuts down the road, and neither offers new revenues.

With the House and Senate stalled at an impasse as the August 2 deadline looms, mediators are working feverishly to find common ground upon which both sides can agree.

Speaking for the Republican Party, John Boehner said he would be willing to release his agreement to the Reid plan under these specific conditions: “First, the Democrats must agree to raise the debt ceiling only high enough to cover the rest of the year. The topic will be revisited again when the 2012 election cycle nears, so we can see what Mr. Obama has done with our money. Second, the Democrats must strike the down the gimmicky $1 trillion in war spending cuts. They must come up with that revenue through deeper slashes to entitlement programs and guaranteed spending caps over the next ten years, as our plan does. Third, they’ll need to put that $1 trillion in a briefcase that we’ve stashed behind the SiN @ Spank Club on Connecticut Avenue. They’ll see it near the dumpster in a hefty bag. The bills should be unmarked and non-sequential. We want the briefcase delivered to an address in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, which we’ll text on the cell phone in the briefcase. The delivery must be made by a 12-year-old Philippine bike courier. A boy. After we notify you that we have received the package, we want a private plane on the runaway at Dulles with instructions to take us directly to Cuba. If anything suspicious happens, if any of our directions are not followed to the letter, if any crazy [expletive deleted] goes down on your end, we execute the debt default and your credit rating dies.”

(c) 2011. All stories are works of satire and parody.