Ezra Klein notices a slight lack of symmetry here:
Democrats have called for entitlement reforms. Republicans have rejected tax increases.
"Republicans begin the spending debate by saying any solution in which wealthier people (or entities) pay more taxes is off the table, and Democrats begin it by saying Social Security and Medicare are off the table," writes Dave Weigel. He goes on to qualify that a bit, but this is a false equivalence that you hear a lot, and that isn’t true.
President Obama's 2012 budget included a call for bipartisan negotiations on Social Security and a set of principles the administration says it will pursue in a deal.... The reality is that Democrats have proposed tax increases, spending cuts and entitlement reforms. You can argue that they don’t go far enough, but they’re all there. Republicans, as of yet, have not admitted the need for new taxes, or even the expiration of temporary tax cuts. There are individuals in both parties who have been relatively more or less responsible, but in general, one party has put everything on the table and the other hasn’t. That’s an important difference between their fiscal stances, and it shouldn’t be obscured.
So what should happen next? If tax cuts are off the table, then Weigel's false equivalence should come become true, and Social Security and Medicare come right off that table, where they are indeed hanging out right now by their lonesome. That's an easy one. Because nothing Democrats can entice them with will make the Republicans give on taxes. Offerings won't work, only threats will. Like the threat of government entirely blowing up over their insistence on impoverishing the nation's seniors. When that starts to play out in the press, you'll probably hear a lot more Republicans sounding like Montana's Rep. Denny Rehberg.
It's conceivably possible that digby is on to something, that we're witnessing some serious kabuki with Durbin putting Social Security on the table so that Obama can swoop in in the end and save it. But, as she says, "[t]he only problem is that these negotiations tend to take on a life of their own and you never know exactly how they're going to come out."