After Ezra Klein's somewhat odd
suggestion that Dems look to the catfood commission for their budget compromise a few days ago, he
clarifies a bit.
Note that Paul Ryan actually served on the Simpson-Bowles commission, though he voted against their final proposal. The big difference between the two plans is that the Simpson-Bowles plan tries to balance the budget deficit without taking sides in various long-running ideological wars over the role of government while the Ryan plan tries to win those wars under the cover of balancing the budget. Though I should also say that now that I better understand the assumptionsthat Ryan is using to achieve his goals, I don’t think it’s plausible to say that his plan really balances the budget.
But it’d be a shame — and evidence of failure on the part of the Democrats — if Simpson-Bowles became the left pole in this debate. Tom Coburn voted for Simpson-Bowles, and he’s no liberal. It really was a very balanced proposal. I found a lot to like in it and a lot to dislike, which is pretty much what you’d expect from a plan that represents a compromise by people of very different philosophies and political incentives. But it’s not by any means a liberal approach to deficit reduction, which is exactly why it made sense as a framework for this conversation.
Good to know he doesn't think it should be the left pole for Dems, though maybe they should move to the left to make this their end goal? That would be assuming the non-report of the catfood commission was actually an in-the-middle, compromise kind of prospect. Lest any Dems be reading Ezra and think that yeah, the catfood commission actually was pretty balanced and reasonable and "represents a compromise by people of very different philosophies and political incentives," it really doesn't, not when you look at the composition of the members of that failed commission. Which Brian Beutler did, finding "nine tax-averse Republicans and nine Democrats, many of whom have expressed support for Social Security changes in the past, the commission will almost certainly be biased toward benefit cuts, and away from raising taxes."
Ezra himself evaluated the group:
The Senate Democrats on the commission equal out to position 35 -- that is to say, there are more than 30 Democrats who are more liberal than the deficit commission team, which means the deficit commission team is a bit more conservative than the average Senate Democrat. Not so for the Republicans. They average out to position 94. That is to say, there are only a handful of Republicans more conservative than this group. So on the Senate side, the Democrats are a bit less liberal than the average Democrat and the Republicans are a lot more conservative than the average Republican.
The story on the House side is a bit more muted: The Democrats end up in position 84. The Republicans end up in position 384. That means there are more than 80 Democrats who are more liberal than the Democrats' deficit commission group, and about 50 Republicans more conservative than the Republican contingent.
So, yeah, it a pretty conservative group on the whole. And very specifically in the case of this guy, and of course, the co-chair, Alan Simpson. It was a group predisposed to coming out with the recommendation to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare, with some recommended defense cuts thrown in to make them look more serious. But they do not represent some magic middle that will provide the perfect compromise for some grand bargain, a la digby, for Obama.
Even though he appointed this commission. Which, by the way, failed. This is a non-report that everyone who has a vested interest in pushing continues to pretend is real.