Dealing with the deficit

Paul Krugman is not impressed with the Commission, in the least.

Count me among those who always believed that President Obama made a big mistake when he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — a supposedly bipartisan panel charged with coming up with solutions to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems. It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right.

And:


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.

Gerald Seib, of the Wall Street Journal (wherein he qualifies as a moderate), called it differently: Deficit-Cutting Chairmen Call Washington's Bluff.

Matt Miller, who writes a column for the Washington Post (I have an email subscription to his column; I think I first read him on the Daily Beast), opines on the Simpson-Bowles Commission, also. Miller fancies himself "a Radical Centrist." I suppose he does not want to be tarred as a Liberal. Or call himself a Progressive.

21 versus 22. As I wrote in The Post a few months ago, the Bowles/Simpson plan to hold spending to 21 percent of GDP as the boomers age is a dangerous fantasy. All you need to know is that Ronald Reagan ran government at 22 percent of GDP when 76 million baby boomers weren't retiring. Today we're on the verge of doubling the number of folks on Social Security and Medicare. The Bowles/Simpson size of government goal is a fantasy -- it will not happen. Unfortunately, this wrongheaded goal undermines much of what they propose, since it's the organizing feature of their proposal.

2037. The co-chairs don't balance the budget until 2037! The outer limits of the ambition of a commission set up to get our fiscal house in order is thus a 27-year plan to balance the budget? Oy. The most you can say is that it's faster than the plan offered by that other falsely-hailed fiscal conservative, Paul Ryan, whose "Roadmap" wouldn't balance the budget until the 2050s!

He also criticizes them on health care, social security and gas taxes.