I like that slogan: Resist austerity, Reclaim the economy, Recreate our democracy.
Update: This actually fits quite well with the other events although I’m fairly sure it’s coincidence:
Sen. Sanders to Lead Hundreds of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid Recipients to Say “Hands Off Our Benefits” THURSDAYSeniors, doctors and workers warn Congressional Super Committee to Support Jobs, NOT Cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security! (Washington, DC) — U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and Budget Committees, will lead an event with hundreds of seniors and workers in Dirksen Room 608 onThursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:00 a.m. (EDT) to warn the bipartisan Super Committee against cutting the hard-earned benefits of millions of Americans. The event will be attended by community leaders with personal stories about the devastation that would be caused by cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Community members from across the nation, including from Super Committee states, will bring hundreds of alarm clocks that will be delivered to members of Congress along with the message, “Wake up Congress, Hands Off Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” Dr. Jessica Eng from Boston Medical Center will speak about the crippling effect the proposed cuts would have on the medical infrastructure. The Congressional Super Committee – a 12 member bipartisan group is considering potential cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by a November 23 deadline that would permanently harm today’s seniors and workers. WHAT: Event with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to tell the Congressional Super Committee “Hands Off” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and to stand with the 99% to Support Jobs, Not Cuts. WHO:·U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)·Community Members from Super Committee and other states with personal stories about Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid·Dr. Jessica Eng, Geriatrics Fellow at Boston Medical Center WHEN: Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:00 am (EDT) — 60 minutes WHERE: Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 608, Washington, DC
###The Strengthen Social Security Campaign is comprised of 320 national and state organizations representing more than 50 million Americans from many of the nation’s leading aging, labor, disability, women’s, children, consumer, civil rights and equality organizations.
Members of what has been dubbed the “go-big coalition” said about 150 lawmakers in both houses support a compromise deficit-reduction plan that would include increases in revenue and cuts to entitlement programs. About 40 members of the group attended the news conference.
“We want [the supercommittee] to know that there is a large and significant number of us in both chambers who want such a deal and are ready to give it a fair shot,” said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), the House minority whip. “None of us wants to risk the immediate and long-term effects of sequestration . . . if the committee fails.” He referred to the procedure, codified in this summer’s deal to raise the debt ceiling, that would trigger automatic across-the-board cuts of $1.2 trillion over 10 years. Under the sequestration requirement, annual cuts of $109.3 billion would start in fiscal 2013, with half the amount to come from the Defense Department — reductions that the Pentagon has warned could affect national security.
“We say to the supercommittee, the right thing to do is to go big,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), a member of the bipartisan coalition. He said that could mean deficit reduction of $3 trillion to $6 trillion, instead of the minimum requirement of $1.2 trillion that the panel must agree on by a Nov. 23 deadline.
“We say to the supercommittee, we’ve got your back,” Chambliss said.
Although several members of the coalition repeated that expression of support, they offered no specifics on how to reach a deficit-reduction deal in the range of $4 trillion, providing little more than encouragement from the sidelines as the supercommittee struggles to agree on how to achieve even the $1.2 trillion minimum.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, argued nevertheless that “going bigger is easier politically,” reasoning that reluctant members of Congress would find it more acceptable to support a truly “historic” package.
He urged Democrats and Republicans to view massive debt reduction as “the challenge of our generation,” exhorting them: “This is our moment. Let’s seize that moment.”
So according to one of the Senate’s leading liberals “the challenge of our generation” is massive debt reduction? Wow. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns …
I suppose it’s a good thing nobody’s paying any attention to this. It’s the holiday season after all.
Here’s the write-up of that PPP Poll I mentioned yesterday about the public losing sympathy for he Occupy movement:
The Occupy Wall Street movement is not wearing well with voters across the country. Only 33% now say that they are supportive of its goals, compared to 45% who say they oppose them. That represents an 11 point shift in the wrong direction for the movement’s support compared to a month ago when 35% of voters said they supported it and 36% were opposed. Most notably independents have gone from supporting Occupy Wall Street’s goals 39/34, to opposing them 34/42.
Voters don’t care for the Tea Party either, with 42% saying they support its goals to 45% opposed. But asked whether they have a higher opinion of the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street movement the Tea Party wins out 43-37, representing a flip from last month when Occupy Wall Street won out 40-37 on that question. Again the movement with independents is notable- from preferring Occupy Wall Street 43-34, to siding with the Tea Party 44-40.
I don’t think the bad poll numbers for Occupy Wall Street reflect Americans being unconcerned with wealth inequality. Polling we did in some key swing states earlier this year found overwhelming support for raising taxes on people who make over $150,000 a year. In late September we found that 73% of voters supported the ‘Buffett rule’ with only 16% opposed. And in October we found that Senators resistant to raising taxes on those who make more than a million dollars a year could pay a price at the polls. I don’t think any of that has changed- what the downturn in Occupy Wall Street’s image suggests is that voters are seeing the movement as more about the ‘Occupy’ than the ‘Wall Street.’ The controversy over the protests is starting to drown out the actual message.
As I said yesterday, the “controversy” is a direct result of right wing lizard brain propaganda about Occupiers being sub-human beasts. The drumbeat has been loud and constant, particularly on local news, and it was almost inevitable that the notion would take hold among some people. Add to that the sight of heavily armed Robo Cops swarming all over our cities as if they were staging an assault on Falluja and people get nervous. That’s not an accident either.
This is not a static situation so these numbers could bounce around. And I don’t think the Occupiers are obligated to react to them in any case. They are on their own trajectory. But this thing was bound to run along America’s cultural fault line whether it set out to or not and in the end it will likely fall on one side of it. That’s ok. That’s doesn’t mean it won’t have the impact everyone seeks. It’s just that the idea of the 99% vs the 1% is a great slogan and its certainly valid. But in our culture, we just don’t divide that way.
And so the police operation to clear Zuccotti Park of protesters unfolded after two weeks of planning and training. Officials had prepared by watching how occupations in other cities played out. A major disaster drill was held on Randalls Island, with an eye toward Zuccotti. Officials increased so-called disorder training — counterterrorism measures that involve moving large numbers of police officers quickly — to focus on Lower Manhattan…
One reason for the secrecy was a lesson learned by the city. On Oct. 14, officials wanted to clear the park, but then backed off as hundreds of protesters streamed in ahead of time after hearing of the plans.
The operation on Tuesday involved officers from various police units, including boroughwide task forces — scores of mobile officers who are usually used to flood high-crime neighborhoods.
Mr. Kelly said many people, almost like commuters, had been coming and going from the park during the day, making 1 a.m. a good time to move in. “It was appropriate to do it when the smallest number of people were in the park,” he said.
Emergency Service Unit trucks with klieg lights and loudspeakers gathered at Pike Slip and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, near the Manhattan Bridge, before moving out. The lights and prerecorded messages booming from the loudspeakers seemed to cow many protesters. As the community affairs officers moved into the park in their light-blue windbreakers, many protesters simply gathered their belongings and left.
No tents were touched until 1:45 a.m., the police said, giving the protesters time to gather their belongings. Other teams of officers were seen gathering on the perimeter to move in if arrests were needed in the park.
Reporters in the park were forced to leave. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said it was for their safety. But many journalists said that they had been prevented from seeing the police take action in the park, and that they had been roughly handled by officers. Mr. Browne said television camera trucks on Church Street, along the park’s western border, were able to capture images.
As the police moved west through the dense tangle of protesters’ personal belongings, including luggage and plastic lawn and leaf bags stuffed with clothing, crews from the Sanitation Department followed, scooping up what was left behind…
Note the pervasive use of the passive voice, as well as the minimization of the media crackdown and police violence at the scene. Also, of course, the only rowdiness was on the part of the protesters:
Some of the rowdiest action of the night took place south of the park. Around 5 a.m., south of Pine Street, one protester jumped on the hood of a police car, and others were seen releasing the air from the tires of a police van. At one point, a piece of plywood came flying from the crowd. In the end, one officer and one protester were hospitalized.
This was not a clean, sanitary peaceful operation on rowdy vagrants. This was a violent assault on the civil liberties of Americans peacefully protesting a corrupt system, complete with a coordinated total media blackout.
As Dave Dayen and I have noted, these scenes and tactics are reminiscent of third-world dictatorships, not modern democracies.
Police brutality has been a fixture in high-crime, mostly minority neighborhoods for decades. But this sort of highly coordinated totalitarian brutality combined with media secrecy hasn’t really been seen in the U.S. since the days of the civil rights movement.
One can judge the importance of certain kinds of oppression to the elite social order, by the reaction of the forces that be against resistance to said oppression. In America of the 1960s and 1970s, the resort to this sort of coordinated totalitarian response was limited to use against advocates for racial equality in the South, advocates for open acceptance of gay rights, and occasionally against those who opposed the escalation of war in Vietnam.
Today, it’s clear that the most powerful forces in America aren’t afraid of advocacy against racial or sexual orientation discrimination, or even advocacy against the military-industrial complex. The gigantic wave of protests against the invasion of Iraq were not met with this sort of force.
To touch the nerve of the real powers in modern America, all one need do is target the financial sector and the gross inequality it has produced. That is who really runs the country–not the racists, not the haters, and not the warmongers. The challenge of my generation is to destroy the power of the banking sector as surely as our parents helped destroy the power of the racists, bigots and sexists before them.
It is a challenge that will be repeatedly met with force, proving that it is the most important challenge of the day.
And just as in decades past, it will require a mix of inside and outside tactics, focused on peaceful raising of popular consciousness and pressure toward legislative action, to get the necessary results. This will be a long and painful struggle with many facets, and the Occupy movement is just the beginning.
Ezra Klein was wondering just what the heck those Democrats think they’re doing and did a little trip down memory lane yesterday and visited negotiations past. I’ll pick up the narrative at the debt ceiling Grand Bargain debacle:
By the end of those negotiations, Obama had offered Boehner a deal that would cut the deficit by about $4 trillion, with only $800 billion to $1.2 trillion coming from revenue. That deal would also have raised the Medicare eligibility age to 67, cut Social Security and made the Bush tax cuts permanent. It was far to the right of both Obama’s previous offer and the Bowles-Simpson commission.
Last week, some of the Democrats on the supercommittee offered the Republicans a plan that would include about $1 trillion in revenue. That put it near even with the president’s proposal to Boehner. The expectation this week is that they will offer the Republicans yet a bit more than that, putting them well to the right of the president’s offer to Boehner, which was in turn well to the right of the president’s previous proposal, which was in turn well to the right of Bowles-Simpson.
So far, Republicans have not said yes to any of the deals the Democrats have offered. They continue to assume a better deal is just around the corner, and thus far, they have been right. Currently, they may be assuming that yet a better deal could be struck with, say, President Mitt Romney, and if he wins the election, they may well be right. If Obama wins, a reinvigorated Democratic majority might prove them wrong. But the fact remains: Their strategy of saying no has, thus far, paid great dividends, though not ones Republicans have decided to collect.
Well, I’d say that the fact that none of these things are popular with the people is one think keeping them from taking yes for an answer. But at some point, they very well might just figure it’s time to cash in their chips. And golly won’t that be great?
Even if that doesn’t happen, however, the terms of the debate have permanently changed. Democrats have abandoned their role as the protectors of the safety net and are instead intent upon selling themselves as the “grown-ups” who “restored confidence” in the markets by seeking a “balanced approach.” Their fundamental political rationale has been lost in the quixotic belief that the people will reward them for their “seriousness” about abstractions. It’s going to be hard to get it back.
And Ezra makes that clear with this passing comment:
Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) emerged with a compromise proposal that would cap 2011’s appropriations at about $1.08 trillion, with more cuts coming in the years after that. Democrats defeated it by one vote…
Today, many Democrats would love to go back in time and accept the McCaskill-Sessions bill. And the same thing may well happen in the deficit “supercommittee.”
Ah yes, McCaskill-Sessions. The one that was supported by the entire GOP caucus and a small handful of Blue Dogs. That’s now considered a “good deal.” See how that works?
But hey, maybe nobody will notice:
Update: TPM reports that Jeb Hensarling went on TV today and basically said the Republicans don’t care about this deal and that they are perfectly wiling to bust the triggers. Good. This whole thing is crap anyway.
But you do have to love their political stylings. They’re pretending they’ve made a major concession by “agreeing” to raise a few fees and (temporarily) close some loopholes in exchange for making the Bush tax cuts permanent.
And they are using this term “static revenue” which Brian Beutler explains:
When Hensarling says “static,” he means revenue that will actually, predictably come into the Treasury. Republicans claim in a Laffer-ite way that their preferred tax policy will create enough economic growth to raise revenues even if the math says it won’t. Democrats reject that kind of analysis.
That’s how they get over with the people who aren’t paying any attention and have no clue what these people are going on about. And you can see from that chart that there are a lot of them.
(This supply-side stuff will make you feel reeeal good. Try it, go on try it.)
Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict “Occupy” protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night’s move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.
The official, who spoke on background to me late Monday evening, said that while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.
According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.
Obviously unconfirmed, but in light of what the Oakland mayor said this morning, certainly not entirely unlikely.
I’m not surprised by this, but I am curious as to how they are going to justify the federal government’s interest if this turns out to be true? (It will eventually come out if it’s true.) If there’s coordination of some kind, as seems fairly obvious, what’s the legal foundation for it?
I don’t have the answers. But I do know that the Federal, state and local police agencies have a tremendous amount of capability and I have no doubt they have been clamoring for the chance to use it.
Update: PPPPolls is tweeting:
Going to have some pretty bad numbers for Occupy Wall Street tomorrow…movement not wearing well with voters
I don’t know exactly what these numbers say, but if the headline is accurate nobody should be surprised. All over the country people are hearing that the Occupiers are animals who are masturbating in public and shitting in the streets. The local news is luridly portraying the protests as hotbeds of crime infested with lunatics and drug addicts.
That stuff isn’t disseminated just for kicks. It’s done to poison the minds of the public before they have a chance to identify with the protesters.
I know that liberals don’t want to see this in those culture war terms, but there are a whole lot of others who can’t see these things any other way.
Update: it turns out there is quite a bit of documentation out there about at least some coordination with DHS and the locals. Here are some pictures from Portland on October 31st clearly showing DHS arresting people.
This is a DHS threat assessment for Pittsburgh for an Occupy demonstration:
This product was created in response to a request for information (RFI) concerning impacts to the Pittsburgh area from the planned Occupy Pittsburgh set for October 15, 2011. This product is intended to provide the private sector and first responders information on the event and appropriate prevention and response measures. Information in this report was collected through open source materials only. Open sources used in this product may include bias and misleading information. This product is an update to a previous assessment disseminated on October 6, 2011.
Click the link to read the whole thing. I see no reference to terrorism, so I guess DHS is now in the business of doing threat assessments and advising the local authorities about tactics and strategy about peaceful domestic demonstrations. Good to know.
Update II:This AP report indicates that the “coordination” netween the city authorities is ad hoc sharing of information and advice. Maybe that’s all there is to it.
The attitude conveyed by the police in that article is pretty obtuse however:
From Atlanta to Washington, D.C., officials talked about how authorities could make camps safe for protesters and the community. Officials also learned about the kinds of problems they could expect from cities with larger and more established protest encampments.
In Portland, for example, protests were initially peaceful gatherings. Then the city’s large number of homeless people moved in, transforming the camp into an open-air treatment center for drug addiction and mental illness.
On Oct. 11, just five days after protesters set up camp, police chiefs who had been dealing with the encampments for weeks warned that the homeless will be attracted to the food, shelter and medical care the camps offered.
This is a priceless encapsulation of everything wrong with what America calls a healthcare system:
PHOENIX — An antivenom recently approved for fast treatment of severe reactions to scorpion stings comes with a high price tag.
Metro Phoenix hospitals are billing as much as $12,467 per vial of the antivenom, The Arizona Republic reported. Since the typical dose is three to five vials, bills for patients and their insurance companies can exceed $62,000.
The drug is made in Mexico and was clinically tested through the University of Arizona.
The cost inflates when the serum is sold in the United States. Each link in the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain from the Mexican factory to Arizona patients raises the price.
A Mexican biotechnology company produces more than 250,000 vials for Mexican residents, who are charged about $100 per vial.
Anyway, it’s good to know that America isn’t a third world country like, say, Mexico. In Mexico, if you’re uninsured and you get stung by a deadly scorpion, you have to pay $100 at the hospital to get treatment. In America, you get the privilege of paying $62,000 for the same exact treatment. That helps ensure that hospital and health insurance companies reap huge profits, which in turn distributes out to shareholders, which in turn trickles down throughout the economy, which in turn generates the sort of economic growth that allows you to get a minimum-wage job you should really be grateful for, because it will help you pay off your $61,900 hospital bill that you would have avoided by getting treatment in a third world nation like Mexico.
Makes sense. Also, the OWS protesters are just lazy hippies who should get a job already. This is the greatest country on earth, and I have no idea what they could possibly be complaining about.
Barton: Look at Jesus. I mean, Jesus in the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25 and the Minas in Luke 19, you know he lines the guys all up and says “I gave you an investment, what did you do with it? ‘I did nothing with it.’ ‘I gave you, what you’d do?’ “I turned five-fold.’ ‘I gave you, what you’d do?’ ‘I turned ten-fold.'” He says “Okay, take away from the guy who didn’t do anything with the investment and give it to the guy who had ten.”
Whoa, that’s not fair! Jesus said “to him who has will more be given, to him who has not will be taken away even that which he has.”
Green: I think the message version of that says to the one that’s picketing down on Wall Street and not working, we’re taking from you now and we’re going to give it to the Wall Street guy.
Barton: You’re not productive. We’re ain’t giving [to] you if you’re not productive and that’s the message. The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re productive, it’s going to trickle down to you. But if you think the guy who had ten is going to trickle down to the guy who didn’t do anything with his one, Jesus says it’s not going to happen that way.
It does not trickle down. As as matter of fact, it will trickle up. If you are not productive, I’m going to give it to someone who is and he’s going to get more.
Geez, I thought JC was at least a supply-sider …
RWW clears up the Biblical confusion:
Of course, if you actually read Luke 19:13-26 and Matthew 25:14-29, you find that Jesus is telling a parable about the Kingdom of Heaven, explaining that those who use the skills and talents given to them by God to spread and promote the Gospel will receive an eternal reward while those who fail to use such skills and talents properly will suffer eternal punishment.
But to Barton, it means that we should be taking from the Occupy Wall Street activists and handing it over to Wall Street millionaires.
Right. And he would be totally down with pepper spray and rubber bullets too because he believed that parasites would inherit the earth otherwise. Or something.
Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones has been doing great reporting on OWS — if you don’t follow his twitter feed, you should. His dispatches from the “spokes council” over the past few days have been fascinating.
I don’t know what percentage of cops are New York Post readers, but I’d guess quite a few of them are sympathetic to its coverage. Here’s one its more restrained editorials:
Mayor Bloomberg last night ordered a long-overdue fumigation of the festering mess at Zuccotti Park — and while the zealots likely will be winging about the decision for months, it remains that the two-month-long demonstration had long since devolved from a principled sit-down into a carnival of contempt both for the law and for common decency…
Just who was responsible for them wasn’t clear — but even the possibility of such a challenge to public safety had to be taken seriously, given the irresponsible acting out that has accompanied the Zucotti Park demonstration from the outset.
And, a possible subway shutdown notwithstanding, the demonstrators overweening disregard for their neighbors — residential and commercial alike — simply could no longer be tolerated.
Public urination and defecation was a public-health problem from the beginning. All-night drumming, disruption of local business and sporadic forays out of the park to shut down traffic and such were a 24/7 presence.
Then came the crime.
Reports of rape, sexual abuse and garden-variety assault were fixtures. Drug-dealing, common theft and fistfights between demonstrators were commonplace, too… But the fact is that no right — the First Amendment included — is absolute. The “occupiers” of Zuccotti Park and their counterparts elsewhere have had plenty of opportunity to get their points across.
To argue, as some have, that there can be no time limits on freedom of speech is specious nonsense.
Others have rights, too, and it is not unreasonable that they be respected. Mayor Bloomberg did that last night.
Good for him.
It’s always gratifying to see the press defend the right of the authorities to restrict the First Amendment.
The right wing has been pushing this theme of the occupy people being anti-social sub-humans defecating on the sidewalks from the beginning. If you look at history, it seems to be characteristic of that worldview, which not a few policemen share. The question will be if the larger message of the 99% can penetrate. That dispatch from the eviction makes me doubt it, but the movement is young and governments everywhere are adopting the Shock Doctrine, which may include the salaries, pensions and benefits of the police departments. It will be interesting to see if the Austerians see the foolishness of that — or, if not, if the police can see past their own cultural filters. Either way, this will be something to keep an eye on.
I just saw Supercommittee member Javier Becerra on my TV saying that he’s still hopeful that they’ll get to a “balanced” Big Deal of 4 trillion, but that they all agree that they must avoid the triggers at all costs.
The reason the panel was to succeed where other bipartisan negotiations have failed was the “trigger.” The inability of the two sides to reach a deal would trigger $1 trillion in automatic cuts over the next 10 years. Half of that would come from domestic spending, although Social Security, Medicaid and a few other programs for low-income Americans would be protected. The other half would come from the Pentagon.
But increasingly, no one fears the trigger. If it is activated, Republicans have spoken openly about undoing the defense cuts — and the White House and congressional Democrats would happily sign on. But the White House won’t allow the defense cuts to be lifted if the other side of the trigger — domestic cuts — isn’t also defused. So it’s simple to imagine the coalition that will disarm the trigger.
I suppose it’s always a risk that the Dems would allow the domestic cuts to go through anyway, but the greater likelihood is that the whole deal would fall apart. (Certainly, a few Democratic obstructionists could make that happen if they wanted to.)
In fact, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Paul Van de Water blogs, a new analysis from economists at Goldman Sachs Research says that a debt downgrade “seems unlikely,” and that medium-term deficit out look would change “only modestly, if at all.”
In the final analysis, Goldman says, “the super committee process is important to market participants because it provides a signal as to how successful future fiscal consolidation efforts might be.” But a badbudget deal could augur worse for the future than no deal at all.
For example, as Bob Greenstein and Jim Horney have explained, the most recent Republican offer would make further fiscal consolidation more difficult to achieve by essentially taking revenues off the table for future rounds of deficit reduction. Adopting the new Republican proposal—or any other proposal that is unbalanced or makes it more difficult to raise additional revenues in the future—would be worse than no agreement at all.
That was written before the latest brilliant plan to punt on the revenue side of this until next year was floated. That was about the Republican plan to “raise revenue” by dramatically increasing the burden on low and middle income taxpayers in order to make the Bush tax cuts permanent.
Any thought that Republicans are going to offer up something better than that next year, if this cockamamie put-taxes-off-until-later idea flies, is delusional at best. They will never give up on making the Bush tax cuts permanent and they will never agree to revenue increases that would actually make a trade for the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts they demand worth it, in terms of politics or policy.
I don’t think there’s any trade that’s “worth it” frankly. Whatever budgetary challenges there are to the health care programs must be solved on a deeper systemic basis, which is what the health care reform was supposed to do. The problem is escalating costs and cutting the program isn’t going to solve that. Social security isn’t contributing to the deficit and has no business even being in the mix. If they are determined to build up another trust fund they can raise the cap and fix the projections for an additional quarter century.
No, these problems all have solutions that do not require cutting the programs and they shouldn’t be part of these negotiations.
We do have a big problem with the wealthy in this country being undertaxed. Plus we have a bunch of military operations around the world that aren’t buying us anything but an imperial headache. If people really are concerned about deficits, maybe we should have a real conversation about spending priorities and what we’re all willing to pay for instead of empowering secret panels to run spread sheets and come up with a bunch of abstract cuts. It’s even possible that Americans would be willing to pay more in taxes. Of course, nobody’s even asking them that because it’s now a political taboo. (Not that it’s the greatest idea in a recession, mind you, but if it’s ok for the government to pull money out of the economy by cutting programs it should be ok for the government to pull money out of the economy by raising taxes.)
I keep coming back to this:
If the deficit really is a crisis, it’s not difficult at all to see how to fix it. That this isn’t even on the table proves that the entire exercise is about something else.
