Dead on Arrival?

We can only hope.  Or changiness, I forget which.

In my piece yesterday, Democratic Party Death Wish, TheMomCat added a chart by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones that illustrates the “deficit” problem.  It’s kind of small so I’m blowing it up (I apologize for the sacrifice in resolution).

In case you can’t see it so well there are 3 blue colored areas and one thick blue line.

• The light blue area at the bottom is labeled Other Federal Noninterest Spending
• The dark blue area in the middle is labeled Social Security
• The medium blue area at the top is labeled Medicare and Medicaid
• The thick blue line is labeled Revenues

The thick blue line cuts through the big Medicare and Medicaid area and makes it look like there are two of them, but it’s really just the one.

Is the Deficit Commission Serious?

By Kevin Drum, Mother Jones

Wed Nov. 10, 2010 8:46 PM PST

Here’s what the chart means:

• Discretionary spending (the light blue bottom chunk) isn’t a long-term deficit problem. It takes up about 10% of GDP forever. What’s more, pretending that it can be capped is just game playing: anything one Congress can do, another can undo. So if you want to recommend a few discretionary cuts, that’s fine. Beyond that, though, the discretionary budget should be left to Congress since it can be cut or expanded easily via the ordinary political process. That’s why it’s called “discretionary.”
• Social Security (the dark blue middle chunk) isn’t a long-term deficit problem. It goes up very slightly between now and 2030 and then flattens out forever. If Republicans were willing to get serious and knock off their puerile anti-tax jihad, it could be fixed easily with a combination of tiny tax increases and tiny benefit cuts phased in over 20 years that the public would barely notice. It deserves about a week of deliberation.
• Medicare, and healthcare in general, is a huge problem. It is, in fact, our only real long-term spending problem.

…

Bottom line: this document isn’t really aimed at deficit reduction. It’s aimed at keeping government small. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re a conservative think tank and that’s what you’re dedicated to selling. But it should be called by its right name. This document is a paean to cutting the federal government, not cutting the federal deficit.

Now consider Krugman-

The Hijacked Commission

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: November 11, 2010

We’ve known for a long time, then, that nothing good would come from the commission. But on Wednesday, when the co-chairmen released a PowerPoint outlining their proposal, it was even worse than the cynics expected.

Start with the declaration of “Our Guiding Principles and Values.” Among them is, “Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P.” This is a guiding principle? And why is a commission charged with finding every possible route to a balanced budget setting an upper (but not lower) limit on revenue?

Matters become clearer once you reach the section on tax reform. The goals of reform, as Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson see them, are presented in the form of seven bullet points. “Lower Rates” is the first point; “Reduce the Deficit” is the seventh.

…

(W)hat the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases – tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans – the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest – and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.

…

It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old – tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.

My emphasis.

The truth is that the Catfood Commission wasn’t hijacked at all.  It was set up by Barack Hussein Obama and his Administration to produce exactly the results it did-

(T)his document isn’t really aimed at deficit reduction. It’s aimed at keeping government small. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re a conservative think tank and that’s what you’re dedicated to selling. But it should be called by its right name. This document is a paean to cutting the federal government, not cutting the federal deficit.

To her credit here is Nancy Pelosi’s official take–

This proposal is simply unacceptable. Any final proposal from the Commission should do what is right for our children and grandchildren’s economic security as well as for our nation’s fiscal security, and it must do what is right for our seniors, who are counting on the bedrock promises of Social Security and Medicare. And it must strengthen America’s middle class families-under siege for the last decade, and unable to withstand further encroachment on their economic security.