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And Sen. Dick Durbin promises she’ll get it. Dear God, Andrea Mitchell is just as obnoxious as Sally Quinn at her worst. “How are we going to pay for all that?” she chides. And she’s hounding Dick Durbin about why, why, WHY isn’t this stubborn president cutting all that wasteful spending and pushing Simpson-Bowles to make her and her husband’s friends on Wall Street happy.
Notice how Durbin hastens to assure her that Obama didn’t embrace it because it would have hardened the Republican opposition, and that the Simpson-Bowles report (the Catfood Commission report) has been and will continue to be the template the president will follow. Oh, goody:
Like the Republicans, Democrats cherry-pick. Pelosi, for example, says she is all for Simpson-Bowles, except for that pesky Social Security part.
That “part” would be the Simpson-Bowles proposals to increase the retirement age over the next 50 years from 66 to 69 and the age for early retirement from 62 to 64. This would result, under Social Security formulas, in a 7 percent reduction in benefits for every year the full retirement age is increased, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. At the same time, elderly and disabled Medicare beneficiaries would have to pay higher out-of-pocket expenses.
Liberals quail, as well, at the way Simpson-Bowles would cap federal revenue and spending at 21 percent of gross domestic product and limit the rate of growth of federal health care costs for the poor, the elderly, children, veterans and military families, to the growth of GDP plus 1 percent.
So if the rate of for-profit healthcare increases outstrips GDP plus one percent, doesn’t that leave us with… a voucher system?
Various Democratic interest groups shudder at the proposals to freeze pay for federal workers, slice military and civilian pensions, cut the federal workforce by 10 percent, end congressional earmarks, reform the tort system, cut the corporate tax rate, and adopt a “territorial” tax system for multinational firms in which most or all of overseas profits would not be subject to U.S. corporate income tax.
That kind of shared pain, of course, is what gives Simpson-Bowles such potential as a “framework” or “template.” Everyone has some skin in the game.
Simpson-Bowles lets us “know what the options are,” says Boehner. “All we have to do is have real leadership and courage.”
Personally, I’d rather President Obama state that he will veto the real budget buster: the Bush tax cuts. But that’s just me.
I wish she were as traditional as some of the founding trustees of the non-profit I worked for — into the 2000s there were a few of the women who we still used the very tradition Mrs. Husband’s Name for. I’d really like the remind every one, every time that bitch speaks or writes that she’s married to Alan Greenspan (a man who carried on an affair with Ayn Rand for decades, even after Rand died).
I’d like to see some sacrifice from her.
Simpson-Bowles is dead. Which is why Obama never gave it much lip service. Besides the Republican Party as it is currently configured will never agree to raise taxes as part of the so-called “Grand Bargin”. “Veto the real budget buster: the Bush tax cuts.” Do you mean all of the Bush tax cuts? Because that’s a terrible idea. Increasing the tax rates on the wealthy, anyone making more then $250,000 a year, is a swell idea. But the middle class, or what’s left of it, don’t need no damn tax increase. Cut the Pentagon’s budget or the Homeland Security’s budget instead. Let’s have that fight with the Republicans and neo-cons.
Nice to see the truth outed. Simpson/Bowles is a voucher system in drag. But let’s be a little more candid, the ACA is lipstick on the same pig.
So the unemployed (whose ranks continue to grow regardless of how the numbers are finessed) can’t find jobs, the barely employed have gone through most of whatever savings they were able to accumulate, millions have lost their homes and their Wall Street “investments,” and the cost of health care remains (and will continue to remain under the bogus insurance company bailout known as the ACA) prohibitive, yet all these desperate folk will have to wait longer for Social Security AND pay more for Medicare? How are they supposed to LIVE? (Excuse me for screaming.)
These D.C. people are certifiable. You think there are a lot of shootings now? The crime rate will skyrocket. The tax base will shrink to nothing. (And I guess the war with Iran will be off the books, just like the war with Iraq where they pillaged the Social Security trust fund with phony IOUs.)
I, for one, do not care what Michelle Obama had to say. It’s all theater and total BS. Where are the jobs?
I’m baffled. Whose writing is being quoted in this article? Andrea Mitchell’s? Most of it sounds to sympathetic to our objections to the proposal from the two co-chairmen of the Cat-food Commission (dotard Alan Simpson and Morgan Stanley and GE director Erskine Bowles). The right and the extreme conservatives who call themselves “moderates” or “centrists” loved the report and ignored the fact that the most conservative members of the commission as well as the most “liberal” (actually center-right) members voted against it. They also love to ignore the fact that many of the ways the tax cuts are supposed to be paid for are not specified, just like in Mitt Romney’s and Paul Ryan’s proposals. On the other hand the last assertion, that “everyone has some skin in the game” is such an outrageous falsehood that I could well believe it comes from the mendacious Mitchell. I know that Obama is obsessed by his desire to cut Social Security benefits, but even he was able to see that the co-chairmen’s “mark-up” (as they called it at the time) is not helpful.
Click on the red link above the paragraph.