The fix looks to be in for propelling the Catfood Commission's recommendations into law over the next month or so. Aside from a few voices coming from a few Democrats, the ever-increasing drumbeat among Villagers calls for Taking Seriously the initial proposals released by the commission's co-chairs last week.
Tools like the interactive NYT one give us fairly narrow ranges of options, as in their Healthcare section:
Enact medical malpractice reform
Increase the Medicare eligibility age to 68
Increase the Medicare eligibility age to 70
Reduce the tax break for employer-provided health insurance
Cap Medicare growth starting in 2013
Seriously? These are the only acceptable conditions for reining in healthcare costs? What about opening up Medicare to younger, healthier populations? Or using the VA formulary to control Part D costs for prescription drugs?
This is just an example of how the framework of the Catfood Commission and its parallel commission led and funded by Pete Peterson are setting the agenda for what the powers-that-be will include in their recs. By telling us that we have to make the "hard decisions" from this narrow range, they're defining a false choice.
Rather than choosing between pushing back Medicare eligibility to age 68 or age 70 (good grief!), we need to choose pre-emptive framing against the commission's power to define the cuts and propel them into law. This wouldn't be our job if we had a strong Democratic Party willing to stand up for its core principles, but to co-opt another frame, we have to work with the party we have, not the party we want.
So I thought it might be useful to brainstorm effective frames against the wholesale acceptance of the Catfood Commission and its recommendations. Here are my suggestions.
It's Congress's job to cut spending and raise taxes, not Alan Simpson's or Pete Peterson's. The purpose of handing over the job to the fiscal conservatives comprising the majority of the panel is so that the commission can take the heat for the results, and Congress doesn't have to bother with pesky on-the-record votes for individual components. Trouble is, Alan Simpson and Pete Peterson aren't accountable to voters the way our employees in Congress are.
Congress doesn't have to accept or reject the recommendations in full. I've seen some diaries and comments around here that point to some "good" among the recs, like increasing the taxes on dividends and capital gains, and intimate that we should maybe pass the bad in order to get the good. If there are recommendations that are truly net positives for working people, then pass them in Congress as separate pieces of legislation. The kitchen-sinking by the commission is disingenuous as a pretense that the only way that the good will become law is to pair them with the bad. There's no reason Reid and Pelosi have to accept this package without amendments, and there's no reason the package has to be rammed through Congress in the near future or shortly after the final recs are released in December.
We need a wider range of views than those coming from the Catfood Commission. As Bernie Sanders has proposed, why not have a group comprised of working people, labor unions, progressive activists and economists come up with alternatives? At least we'd get a wider range of views than those of the fiscal hawks that dominate the Catfood Commission.
Those are three frames I'd like to see used as a pushback by Democrats; what are yours? As some inspiration, here are quotes from the handful of Democrats fighting against the memes of inevitability being propogated by the Village.
Bernie Sanders:
The Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan is extremely disappointing and something that should be vigorously opposed by the American people. The huge increase in the national debt in recent years was caused by two unpaid wars, tax breaks for the wealthy, a Medicare prescription drug bill written by the pharmaceutical industry, and the Wall Street bailout. Unlike Social Security, none of these proposals were paid for. Not only has Social Security not contributed a dime to the deficit, it has a $2.6 trillion surplus.
It is reprehensible to ask working people, including many who do physically-demanding labor, to work until they are 69 years of age. It also is totally impractical. As they compete for jobs with 25-year-olds, many older workers will go unemployed and have virtually no income. Frankly, there will not be too much demand within the construction industry for 69-year-old bricklayers.
Despite all of the right-wing rhetoric, Social Security is not going bankrupt. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security can pay every nickel owed to every eligible American for the next 29 years and after that about 80 percent of benefits.
Nancy Pelosi:
This proposal is simply unacceptable. Any final proposal from the Commission should do what is right for our children and grandchildren’s economic security as well as for our nation’s fiscal security, and it must do what is right for our seniors, who are counting on the bedrock promises of Social Security and Medicare. And it must strengthen America’s middle class families–under siege for the last decade, and unable to withstand further encroachment on their economic security.
Paul Krugman:
If you’re sincerely worried about the US fiscal future — and there’s good reason to be — you don’t propose a plan that involves large cuts in income taxes. Even if those cuts are offset by supposed elimination of tax breaks elsewhere, balancing the budget is hard enough without giving out a lot of goodies — goodies that fairly obviously, even without having the details, would go largely to the very affluent.
I mean, what’s this about? There is no — zero — evidence that income taxes at current rates are an important drag on growth.
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.
Richard Trumka:
The chairmen of the Deficit Commission just told working Americans to ‘Drop Dead.’ Especially in these tough economic times, it is unconscionable to be proposing cuts to the critical economic lifelines for working people, Social Security and Medicare.
Some people are saying this is plan is just a “starting point.” Let me be clear, it is not.
This deficit talk reeks of rank hypocrisy: The very people who want to slash Social Security and Medicare spent this week clamoring for more unpaid Bush tax cuts for millionaires.
What we need to be focusing on now is the jobs deficit. Working families already paid for Wall Street’s party that tanked our economy. If we actually want to address our economic problems, we need to end tax breaks that send American jobs overseas and invest in creating jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and green technologies.
Raul Grijalva:
If the co-chairs of the deficit commission were dead set on gutting Social Security and Medicare from the beginning, they could have saved time and effort by releasing this proposal the day after the commission was formed. Instead, we have waited through nine months of backroom negotiations only to be told that the American people will have to tighten their belts another notch while defense spending continues to grow and corporate bonuses continue to expand.
The path this plan would set is not good for the public. Congress should be having a realistic, productive conversation right now about how to reduce our budget deficit and maintain a secure retirement system for those who have earned it. Instead, we’re debating a proposal from a commission dedicated to cutting crucial social programs and reducing corporate and upper-income taxes at the same time. This is not a recipe for a healthier American economy.
Most importantly, we need to stop buying into the Village meme that these recs, or something close to them, are a done deal. They're only a done deal if we accept the neoliberal premises upon which they're built, as well as the narrow scope of solutions.
Extending tax cuts for the wealthy and then imposing draconian cuts to what's left of our social-safety net to fund those tax cuts are not Democratic Party principles. I reject the assumptions behind the Catfood Commission, and I reject absolving Congress of its responsibility to do its job by foisting responsibility for the recommendations on Alan Simpson and Pete Peterson.