Obama Packs Debt Commission With Social Security Privatization & Benefit Cut Supporters
By Jane Hamsher | FireDogLake
President Obama has packed the Debt Commission (also known as the cat food commission) with members who have an overwhelming history of support for both benefit cuts and privatization of Social Security.
Revolt of the Wonks: Former Obama Advisors Want to Know What’s Happening on His Deficit Commission
By Jane Hamsher | FireDogLake
There’s a very important an article in the Neiman Watchdog this morning (Harvard’s journalism review, Deputy Editor Dan Froomkin). It’s written by Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson, entitled “Has Obama created a Social Security ‘death panel’?
The Deficit Hawks’ Attack on Our Entitlements
By Robert Kuttner | The Washington Post
With the enactment of a large economic stimulus package, fiscal conservatives are using the temporary deficit increase to attack a perennial target — Social Security and Medicare. The private-equity investor Peter G. Peterson, who launched a billion-dollar foundation last year to warn that America faces $56.4 trillion in “unfunded liabilities,” is a case in point. Supposedly, these costs will depress economic growth and crowd out other needed outlays, such as investments in the young. The remedy: big cuts in programs for the elderly.
Special Book Salon Today (preview)- The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation
By Elliott | FireDogLake
Most Americans saw President Bill Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich as staunch foes–”the polar extremes of Pennsylvania Avenue.” But as Steven Gillon reveals in The Pact, these powerful adversaries formed a secret alliance in 1997, a pact that would have rocked the political landscape, had it not foundered in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal.
Whacking the Old Folks
By William Greider | The Nation
In 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.
How Social Security Can Gain Without Much Pain
By Greg Anrig | The Huffington Post
Advocates of cutting Social Security benefits often argue ruefully that they wish that there was some other way to “save” the program. But, they say sadly, the only realistic choices involve shared sacrifice and pain. So they recommend changes like further delays in the age when full retirement benefits can be collected, reducing cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security payments, and other cuts that would reduce how much future retirees are scheduled to receive.