Last spring, Wall Street investment banker Peter Peterson hosted a lavish daylong conference devoted to the budget deficit. One of the highlights was an appearance by President Clinton. Clinton boasted of how he had wanted to cut Social Security back in the mid-90s but congressional leaders from both parties wouldn't let him.
The cut he had wanted would have reduced the annual cost of living adjustment by 1 percentage point annually. This would have left seniors in their 70s, 80s, and 90s with Social Security benefits today that are about 15 percent lower than their current level. How great would that have been?
Peterson is back with Round II this week, another lavish affair devoted to the deficit. President Clinton will be again be playing a starring role, although it is not clear whether he will still be boasting about his wish to cut Social Security benefits.
What is clear is that Peterson is using his vast fortune to push an agenda that has little to do with deficit reduction, and everything to do with cutting Social Security, Medicare and other programs that are vital to ordinary working people.
This fact is apparent from the list of attendees. This is supposed to be a group seriously committed to deficit reduction, yet one of the highlights will be a talk by Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican Chairman of the Budget Committee.
Mr. Ryan is best known for a budget proposal that calls for $3 trillion in individual and corporate tax cuts over the next decade. These cuts are supposed to be offset by the elimination of tax deductions, except Ryan does not identify a single tax deduction that he wants to eliminate.
All he identified is $3 trillion in tax cuts, most of them going to the wealthy. In Peter Peterson's world giving up $3 trillion in revenue is deficit reduction.
The remarkable part of this story is that there are people who are talking about the budget deficit in a serious way. They are proposing solutions that enjoy the support of the American people, and they are right in front of Peterson's nose, but he is doing his best to ignore them.
While Ryan will be touting his plan for adding another $3 trillion to the debt with more tax cuts for the wealthy, and increasing the cost of Medicare to the American people by $34 trillion, at least one of the groups at the conference will be presenting a budget plan that is much more in accordance with the views of the American people.
There are several important principles guiding the EPI plan. First, it focuses on jobs and growth as the immediate problem facing the economy. It is ridiculous to be spending so much time yelling about the deficit at a time when 25 million people are unemployed, underemployed or out of the work force altogether.
It is especially absurd when everyone knows that the economic crisis caused by the collapse of the housing bubble is the main reason that we have large deficits today. The main reason the budget went from deficit to surplus in 90s was the unexpected drop to 4 percent unemployment at the end of the decade, not deficit reduction measures by President Clinton and/or the Republican Congress.
Once the economy is back near full employment, the EPI plan gets most of its revenue from increasing taxes on the wealthy, the big winners in the economy over the last three decades. It also includes a tax on Wall Street financial speculation; taxing the folks whose recklessness brought on this economic disaster.
The cuts focus on the military budget. It protects Social Security and Medicare, which are vital programs to the country's workers and their families, and actually increases spending on infrastructure, education, and other areas that will foster long-term growth.
What is striking is that this program is broadly consistent with extensive public opinion polling on the budget. People don't want to see Social Security and Medicare cut. They think the rich need to pay more and they see the military as the major area of spending most amenable to cuts. The Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus in Congress, put out a budget proposal along these lines last month.
Even Peterson's own America Speaks project came to similar conclusions. This project subjected groups of people at 19 sites across the country to 6 hours of Peterson designed deficit rants. In spite of badly biased presentations, the story was the same. Don't cut Social Security and Medicare. Tax Wall Street and the rich and cut military spending.
The basic problem is that the country is entirely prepared to deal with the deficit in a reasonable and responsible way. However, the people's vision does not include Peterson's goals of gutting Social Security and Medicare. Rather than being "deficit hawks," in denying the obvious path forward on the economy and deficit, Peterson's gang can best be described as "deficit ostriches."
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What we have now are all beholden to the Corporate Masters.
No pay, No PLAY.
let 80 billion dollars a month, at the peak of stupidity to 50 billion a month now be removed from the
economy and expect things to remain the same. That's why we have to print money. Also like it or not
we need to stop all immigration legal and illegal. Most of these people donot support themselves, the
majority are on welfare. The taxpayers that are left can no longer support them. No more guest workers, no more green card visas. We no longer grow enough food to feed ourselves. we import more food than we export.
Anyone that believes in a global economy is living in a dream world.
Strauss kahn was a meddling manipulator,and a conniving schemer and most of his decisions
were based on greed.
WHAT? Where do you live? Here, immigrants are buying and rehabilitating homes and working.
As vor HB-1 visas, I agree. No way we can't fill job openings with the numbers we have here.
But bottom line, where did your ancestors come from, Joe? Did they meet Columbus on the beach?
You, like these deficit ostriches, are pushing a far-right social agenda that doesn't seriously offer any solution to the deficit.
A New, New Deal: This uses well proven financial techniques to boost the economy, generate jobs and broaden the ownership of wealth in an acceptable manner.
A Human Investment Tax Credit program: Designed to create 6 million jobs and help 4 million entrepreneurs. Weak versions of the incentives were tried in 1977 and 2 million jobs resulted.
A Capital Homestead Act: A bold plan to create second incomes for almost everyone that are independent of savings. This meets the challenges posed by automation of employment and sending jobs overseas. If you get the income from the job it is less of a problem. This also widens the ownership of wealth.
Excess wealth concentration is an economic and not merely an ethical problem. It appears to have caused the Great Depression, inflation and recessions, according to the late economist Robert Edmonds.
20 Hours of Toil: Second incomes open a path to reducing the hours spent in work we do not choose. We work long and hard at what we want to do.
4 Hour Workdays: Bertrand Russell suggested this in 1932 to end unemployment. With substantial second incomes such ideas can become realistic.
During WWII unemployment shrank to 2%. This seemingly impossible figure might be obtained as a matter of policy, without inflation, by considering better ideas.
We have often done the difficult. Perhaps the "impossible" can be accomplished, even if it does take a little bit longer.
Huge debt, does not always create jobs, as we now know.
See www.aesopinstitute.org for some of the details and references.
Just like MSM ignored the conclusions from the Meet-Up America bullchip that Dean Baker references above.
Here was an overwhelming response from the PEOPLE to save exactly what Peterson what's to destroy and yet, Peterson thinks he's on the side of the PEOPLE. His self delusion will undo us all if there is no serious, populist pushback agaiinst his Jihad to destroy what's left of the middle class, and as Henry Kissinger said in the 70's, "...rid the planet of "useless eaters.""
Is there not one human being in government who could pull that off?
Or are "the times" just too cynical to allow it to happen?
I would so love that someone within our government could call them out.
I'm hoping that once Obama wins his second term he karate chops these bastardos in the throat and drops them to their knees. Boy do I want to see that.
you really don't give a hoot about cutting our deficit or debt...
its just all about ensuring the entitlements remain untouched no matter what, never mind if there is no money or that they are on the road to insolvency.
even it means we go completely broke like Greece.. no reasonable compromise will be considered
your agenda is cyrstal clear.... just be honest.
Senator Barack Obama
March 16, 2006
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government¬’s reckless fiscal policies.
Numbers that large are sometimes hard to understand¬. Some people may wonder why they matter. Here's why: This year, the Federal Government will spend $220 billion on interest. That is more money to pay interest on our national debt than we’ll spend on Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. That is more money to pay interest on our debt this year than we will spend on education, homeland security, transporta¬tion, and veterans benefits combined. It is more money in one year than we are likely to spend to rebuild the devastated gulf coast in a way that honors the best of America.
And the cost of our debt is one of the fastest growing expenses in the Federal budget. This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and States of critical investment¬s in infrastruc¬ture like bridges, ports, and levees; robbing our families and our children of critical investment¬s in education and health care reform; robbing our seniors of the retirement and health security they have counted on.
my issue is how you Progressives persist in defining families making $250K a year as rich..
such a family with a mortgage, car payments, insurance premiums, property taxes is NOT rich.. comfortable.. yes, upper middle class in some areas of the country maybe
BUT NOT RICH!!
No protection, no safety net, no rights. This is your GOP at work.
rousting the homeless in the middle of times Square. Some sport, eh!!!
we are talking about cutting back on the Nanny State to a SUSTAINABLE LEVEL..
you liberals somehowe believe that entitlements must continue ad infinitum even when those that claim to be "entitled" never paid a dime INTO the system...
.
welfare queens... food stamp president...
the NANNY STATE you describe pertains to Wall Street Bailouts, OIL and AGRA subsidies and many other wasteful and DECEITFUL transfers of taxpayer wealth
gee... teacon, ask yourself how much safer you feel knowing the BILLIONS spent in iraq and afghanistan really were about OIL. and don't you love the airport choices now: xray or intimate pat down...
but maybe that is the gotp vision: wreck this country so that no one will have a reason to attack it: we will have become everything we once opposed
The very idea of ignoring the structural problems with SS and Medicare is your basic problem. SS was meant to provide a safety net and not meant to systematically underwrite the population's ability to stop working progressively earlier in a persons expected lifespan.
While cutting defense is essential, it is a one time impact. Whereas Medicare is expected to continue to grow because of unregulated healthcare costs and growing populations of elderly.
What about simply means testing Medicare?
unfortunately, making it big in this country has nothing to do with empathy
until some influential wealthy people get on a soapbox and claim they do NOT take medicare and it becomes a mark of PATRIOTISM to give back, it won't happen
Social Security was falsely advertised to such a degree that people assumed it was a retirement fund. And the blame for that goes to all parties.
Cutting the defense budget is more than a one time thing... Just as you want to curb entitlements, the yearly defense budget is also kept in check