QOTD

I found this story (0.00 / 0)

by William Grieder in The Nation pretty frightening.

n setting up his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, Barack Obama is again playing coy in public, but his intentions are widely understood among Washington insiders. The president intends to offer Social Security as a sacrificial lamb to entice conservative deficit hawks into a grand bipartisan compromise in which Democrats agree to cut Social Security benefits for future retirees while Republicans accede to significant tax increases to reduce government red ink.

Obama's commission is the vehicle created to achieve this deal. He ducks questions about his preferences, saying only that "everything has to be on the table." But White House lieutenants are privately talking up a bargain along those lines. They are telling anxious liberals to trust the president to make only moderate cuts. Better to have Democrats cut Social Security, Obama advisers say, than leave the task to bloodthirsty Republicans.

Read the whole thing.

I do not trust the president.  

sanctimonious purist/professional lefty

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by: susanthe @ Mon Jun 21, 2010 at 10:04:34 AM CDT

I don't trust William Greider. (0.00 / 0)

That he's not a conservative economist does not make him a liberal.  He's a journalist and, as such, keen on making predictions.  In part, that's because journalism has fallen into a format that requires a "what will happen next" segment as a hook for future stories.  Instead of "who, what, where and why," the modern format follows this recipe:

what happened previously
what happened today
what will happen next

sprinkled with quotes from "both" sides.

This recipe is actually the same as for the soap opera--an entertainment structured for people who can't watch every day.

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by: hannah @ Mon Jun 21, 2010 at 10:46:45 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

William Grieder (0.00 / 0)

has been writing about economics for decades.

I'd say that gives him plenty of credibility. More than the average "journalist."  

sanctimonious purist/professional lefty

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by: susanthe @ Mon Jun 21, 2010 at 11:01:01 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

Commission Chair Allan Simpson (4.00 / 1)

sanctimonious purist/professional lefty

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by: susanthe @ Mon Jun 21, 2010 at 11:16:40 AM CDT

The Times' Nobelist weighs in: (4.00 / 1)

What does it mean that the co-chair of the commission is resurrecting this zombie lie?

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by: elwood @ Mon Jun 21, 2010 at 19:28:30 PM CDT

I hope the silence (0.00 / 0)

on this thread isn't indicative of what we can expect if/when Social Security goes on the chopping block.  

sanctimonious purist/professional lefty

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by: susanthe @ Mon Jun 21, 2010 at 20:33:58 PM CDT

I'd like to see exactly what the policy (0.00 / 0)

position is before getting into speculative arguments.  There are some adjustments to the program that I would support, including reduced benefits for affluent seniors, increased benefits for the working poor, and abandoning the cap on FICA.  

I oppose raising the retirement age because the people this would hurt are the working class and the poor who would find it extremely difficult to continue working beyond age 65 or 66.  In fact, it probably makes little sense to extend the retirement age because we're likely to see a shift from SS to Disability Insurance as many in the working class are unable to continue to toil physically.

I think the crickets are because there have been so many false alarms about this.  Sheesh, Congress couldn't establish a commission to do this - Obama had to appoint one, dragging day-old corpses like Simpson out of the crypt to co-chair.  It's almost impossible to believe that this goes anywhere.

"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world." A. Einstein

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by: StraffordDem @ Tue Jun 22, 2010 at 19:58:48 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

see the policy (0.00 / 0)

like we saw the health insurance reform policy?

I don't share your trusting nature.

I think it's important for those of us who want to protect Social Security to make it very clear that we have every intention of doing so. We need to say it loudly and often, so that Obama can't avoid hearing it.  

sanctimonious purist/professional lefty

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by: susanthe @ Tue Jun 22, 2010 at 20:54:29 PM CDT

[ Parent ]