How the White House likes to negotiate. Start with something that sucks, then allow it to get worse. [View All]

[Better Believe It]

Tweak This
By Rotwang
August 24, 2010

Crazy Al sure is funny. Steny Hoyer, Chris Van Hollen, Erskine Bowles, Brad Woodhouse, and President Barack Obama, not as funny. But they all have expressed an intention to cut Social Security benefits. Woodhouse, communications director for the Democratic National Committee, says the program needs to be "tweaked." (I remember Brad leading the charge against Bush plans to privatize Social Security; that was awesome.) Van Hollen, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, says he cannot reject the possibility of benefit cuts until he knows "what else is in the package." Hoyer seeks to build a bipartisan consensus for reform; consensus, that is, with morons.

Is it fair to anticipate proposals for benefit cuts? There can be no other conclusion from the decision to form a commission to produce recommendations on the long-term U.S. Federal budget deficit. The only factors in that deficit are Social Security and Medicare. Everything else is projected to grow more slowly than Federal revenues. And by the way, whatever its faults, the Obama health care reform radically reduces the long-term deficit. No Social Security fix would come close to having the same impact. If our leaders were serious people they would concentrate on perfecting the health care changes.

The composition of the commission, determined by the White House, dictates some kind of "package" that must include benefit cuts. Surely the Republicans and centrists on the commission would not support a fix based entirely on tax increases. (Whether they would support any sort of tax increase is a good question.)

The default liberal position seems to be that the program is not in crisis, that it needs minor surgery. Once again, political opportunism and rotten principles bode no good for the battle to come. If you begin with the premise that the deficit impact of Social Security ought to be reduced, if not eliminated, you can only do so by, in some way, increasing revenues and reducing benefits. Any compromise would have some of both. And we know how the White House likes to negotiate. Start with something that sucks, then allow it to get worse.

The current gambit of the Democrats is to rail against phantom privatization schemes currently being advanced by the likes of Sharon Angle. Don't forget: we already won this argument. Meanwhile, leading Democrats are non-committal about the likely fruits of the Deficit Commission, which is scheduled to release proposals to a lame-duck Congress after the November elections.

Read the full article at:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/24/tweak_this/