Durbin wants new fiscal commission. Wants to raise retirement age, cut COLA. [View all]

[madfloridian]

What is wrong with that man? He wants it to be fashioned like the old fiscal commission, aka the Bowles/Simpson Commission, or the Catfood Commission.

Durbin Proposes Social Security Commission

Durbin wants the commission to make recommendations to make Social Security solvent for 75 years. The panel would be expected to consider increases in the payroll tax, a higher retirement age and a lower annual cost-of-living adjustment for beneficiaries.

"You would basically say to a commission, within a very limited time frame, to come up with a proposal for 75-year solvency of Social Security and then — and this is important — it would be referred to both chambers on an expedited procedure," Durbin told reporters at a Washington breakfast sponsored by The Wall Street Journal…

Durbin's proposed 18-member commission would contain an equal number of Republicans and Democrats but require 14 votes to send a plan to Congress.

In a 1997 article at FAIR, John Hess said it very well. They are going to keep trying to "rescue"
Social Security until great harm is done.

Can Social Security Survive Another Rescue?

The rescue of Social Security has been a staple of American journalism for 20 years now—a story all the more remarkable in that Social Security has never been in peril except from its rescuers.

The rescues have all been based on faulty arithmetic. First, in 1977, the rescuers humbly confessed that they had made a mistake in adjusting benefits to inflation, as a result of which Social Security was threatening to go broke. (They never say the Army is threatening to "go broke," only that it needs more money to do the job that it's asked to do.) Not to worry. Amid the Yuletide hosannas of our massed punditry, our leaders found the courage to enact a correction that would, they swore, assure solvency into the 21st Century.

..In the early '80s, when income taxes were slashed and the great military buildup began, it was clear that some luxuries would have to be sacrificed, like housing, welfare, health and education. But Social Security was the promising target, one with a tax attached that bore mainly on the little folk. Because, however, the little people cherished their Social Security, a frontal attack by the Reagan White House was a political disaster, so a campaign of deception was mounted.

A bipartisan commission under Alan Greenspan went to work on the numbers, while the media developed an unprecedented campaign of vilification of the elderly. On magazine covers, in cartoons and columns and on broadcast commentaries innumerable, they were depicted as hogs, vampires, sharks, gorillas and card sharps scooping up the sustenance of the young. While the investment banker Peter G. Peterson led the media legions, Greenspan fabricated a hurricane warning. Multiplying one false assumption by another (for example, he assumed that the C.P.I. would rise nearly three times as fast as it actually did rise, while his private firm was forecasting an even smaller increase), he predicted that Social Security would go bankrupt in 1983.

Disappointed in Democrats like Durbin who are continuing this effort to cut the safety nets.