Oop Ack! This is an Insult to Cat Food!

Yeah, this gives me hairballs too

So, now that the election is over, the two co-chairmen of Barack Obama's catfood^* deficit reduction commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, have released the plan that they came up with together.

On their own.

Without consulting with anyone else on the commission.

Which needs to get affirmative votes from 14 of the 18 members to actually issue a report.

It makes it pretty clear that these folks are idiots.

Remember now, that this commission was given one charge, to reduce the deficit in the long term, so let's see what they came up with:

• Cutting social security benefits, even though they themselves have said that this will not count against the deficit, because it has its own trust fund, and because they would be laughed out of town if they did.
• They cut this by means testing social security, changing the way that the benefits base is figured from average wage to CPI, which will cut benefits by over 50% over the next to years, and by raising the retirement age, which, as Paul Krugman notes, "Oh, and they’re talking about raising the retirement age, because people live longer — except that the people who really depend on Social Security, those in the bottom half of the distribution, aren’t living much longer. So you’re going to tell janitors to work until they’re 70 because lawyers are living longer than ever."
• Limiting government revenues to 21% of GDP.
• Cutting taxes, with the top tax rate dropping to 23%.(!).
• Torte reform.
  

Note that these are clearly not part of the committee's charge, which was to reduce the deficit, but they decided to go wingnut to start off.

Additionally, in areas where they are acting within the scope of their committee they want to:

• Cut military spending.
• Cut many tax deductions, including the home mortgage interest deduction (not gonna happen).
• Charge co-pays for veterans to get services from the VA.
• Magically making healthcard costs increase by no more than 1% more than GDP.

No wonder that (still) Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls it, "simply unacceptable."

Felix Salmon is scathing about the plan, and shows just how silly it is:

Meanwhile, some of the small savings have to be seen to be believed. The deficit commission, charged with coming up with a bold plan to bring the nation’s finances into order, really does propose:

• Increasing the amount of time spent on instant messenger, to reduce travel costs;
• “Reduce copying use by putting the default option on copiers to double-sided”;
• Merging the Commerce Department with the Small Business Administration;
• Charging a fee to Smithsonian visitors.
• Etc.

Really, they are suggesting that we have the Smithsonian charge admission, and changing copiers to copy both sides of a sheet of paper by default.

This was foreseeable. Both Bowles and Simpson have been advocating privatizing Social Security for years, and Bowles almost had a deal cut with Gingrich in the 1990s to do so.

Not surprising, BTW, since Bowles is an investment bankers, and those folks have been salivating for decades about the possibility of getting fees for (mis)managing all that money.

This is not a deficit reduction plan. This is a slash fanfic wet-dream from the denizens of some warped right wing think tank.

I would note that the way is playing in the press will be disastrous for the Democrats, because it's all, "Obama Commission proposes cutting Social Security" (or the mortgage deduction, or veterans' benefits, etc.), and that was clear even before wankers Bowles and Simpson were appointed.

It was intended to be yet another excuse for Obama to preen about how he was post-partisan and reasonable he is, and once again, what emerged from this bit of narcissism is cataclysmic blow back, both in terms of the policy and the politics.

<Facepalm>

^*In the interest of health, I would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food. Cats because they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do. As such, dog food is better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential fatty acids. A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat lives just fine on dog food. The phenomenon is known as rabbit starvation.