Whether Burrowed Inside Bureaucracy or Appointed to Commissions, Social Security Cutters Circle

[Joanne98]

The devils we know in the battle to protect Social Security are Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairs of President Obama’s deficit commission, lovingly described around these parts as the cat food commission. It lived up to its name yesterday, as Bowles and Simpson described the budget as “a cancer that will destroy the country from within.” It’s one of those curious cancers which would go completely away if Congress simply did nothing. But this cancer must be fought, we’re told, by making sure retirees have no financial security.

The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans — the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries,” Simpson said.

“We can’t grow our way out of this,” Bowles said. “We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can’t tax our way out. . . . The reality is we’ve got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We’ve got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that.”

That last bit makes no sense, the idea that we can’t tax our way out, but we must increase revenues, i.e. taxation. Notice that Bowles didn’t bother to say “we can’t cut our way out,” though if you accept his frames, that’s certainly true. Because the point doesn’t seem to be the balancing of the budget, but the cutting as an end in itself. Bowles praised the British austerity budget, with its 3/4 cuts, 1/4 revenue approach.

Bowles also basically told the state governors at this event to stick it, telling them not to expect federal aid this year, getting involved in current anti-recessionary fiscal policy which is not their mandate at all. Good to know that the unelected Erskine Bowles has made that decision for the Congress and the states
http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/07/12/whether-burrowed-inside-bureaucracy-or-appointed-to-commissions-social-security-cutters-circle/