Dancing Grannies for Medicare

[eridani]

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/08/obamas-cat-food-committee-alan-greenspan-and-dancing-grannies-medicare

As one Capital Hill player recently wrote me: "Unfortunately, everyone in a position of power up here knows full-well the connection between Peterson, the commission and Simpson. They either don’t care or are too afraid to say anything because they’ll appear 'soft on deficits.' It’s no different than their Iraq war votes... they believe they’ll appear 'weak' if they don’t jump on the bandwagon. The Democrats, (with the exception of Nancy Pelosi and only a handful of others—including commission member Jan Schakowsky), have no intention of taking on Peterson’s crew. Congress may be a lost cause on this issue, if the voters don’t get pissed off about the Commission fast."

Will enough voters get pissed off enough, soon enough to slow down the anti-entitlement juggernaut? It’s a long shot, at this point. There are signs of something like a small movement growing around the Cat Food Commission idea, and scattered protests—among them a recent demonstration in New York dubbed the “Dancing Grannies for Medicare <7>.”

But it’s going to take a lot to waylay the likely course of future events: The Cat Food Commission will undoubtedly recommend, and a lame duck Congress will pass, legislation that looks fairly innocuous: trimming Social Security a bit, maybe by upping the age by a few years, and cutting a little from Medicare—none of it affecting anyone who is over 65 right now. That will enable the politicians now in office to look like they are protecting seniors and fending off any drastic cuts, while at the same time appearing "tough" on the deficit. But the legislation, in the usual Washington mode, will gradually widen as the years go by, so that by the time this bunch of pols are retired (on their fat pensions) and out of the fray, the new rules will be eating into entitlements in a big way.

The other side of this Faustian bargain would appear to be Congress passing some tax increases. "In setting up his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform," William Greider recently wrote <8>in The Nation, "Barack Obama is again playing coy in public, but his intentions are widely understood among Washington insiders." As Greider puts it, "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."

[eridani]

1. Kick for nite owls n/t