A post by Pat
While still pressing ahead for yet another massive entitlement program, President Obama created a Deficit Reduction Commission. Alan Simpson is the Republican co-chair. The Honorable Mr. Simpson has a flare for colorful speech which prompted Robert Gibbs to tell the press Simpson will bring levity to the commission.
The funny Mr. Simpson is NOT a tax cutter which is perfect since the commission is fore-ordained to give Congress cover to increase taxes.
As the President explained:
The trajectory is clear and it is disturbing but, the politics of dealing with chronic deficits is fraught with hard choices and, therefore, it’s treacherous to officeholders here in Washington. As a consequence, nobody’s been too eager to deal with it. That’s where these two men come in. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles are taking on the impossible. They are going to try to restore reason to the fiscal debate and come up with answers as co-chairs to the new commission. I’m asking them to produce clear recommendations how to cover the costs of all federal programs by 2015 and to meaningfully improve our long-term fiscal picture.
Yeah, this is going to be so much fun. As much fun as having the chair pulled out from under you except with the government pranksters, it’s your life’s savings for your old age and your children’s future pulled out from under you. Decades of spending, promising, lying and now a commission to “restore reason”. Were we really fooled?
The States will have to find some clown commission for themselves. A new Pew study finds public pension funds are underfunded by at least $1 trillion. Sure the economy is bad and the stock market took a dive, but the study found:
While recent investment losses can account for a portion of the growing funding gap, many states fell behind on their payments to cover the cost of promised benefits even before the Great Recession. Our analysis found that many states shortchanged their pension plans in both good times and bad, and only a handful have set aside any meaningful funding for retiree health care and other non-pension benefits.
Side splitting. Oh wait, that’s my head.
The unfortunate thing I see in this, from the President’s description, is it doesn’t sound like they’re going to recommend spending/benefit cuts. Instead they’re going to look at how to structure taxes to “cover the costs” of the programs as they are. I liked the idea of a Senate commission. Sens. Lieberman and Gregg were behind that, but it was voted down.
The unfunded liabilities will eventually bankrupt us. If we wanted to avoid collapse, we’d have to acknowledge that these commitments can’t be kept and must be reduced to a realistic level. Unfortunately, Washington would rather tank the nation than oppose the powerful special interests that feed at the public trough. Meanwhile Obama is aggressively adding to the burden even as he tells us how important it is to address the problem.
What I notice with Democrats/progressives in my neck of the woods is that they don’t understand how to pay for this stuff. They only understand what they see as needs. Their excuse is that Bush didn’t do what needed to be done domestically, so they will. Any consequences that we suffer will be because we didn’t listen to them for 14 years, after the Democrats lost control of congress in 1995, and so we deserve what we get. They think the pain will be worth it in the long run. The truth is they’re doing what they’ve WANTED to do for 14 years. They’ve seemingly packed the delta in spending they would’ve done over that span of time into what they’ve planned for the next seven years.
I guess I can see where they’re coming from, even though I disagree with them. They see the government as the civilizing force in this country, which enables us to “progress” socially and economically. Anytime it takes a step back, so does the country. They’ve held this view ever since FDR. They don’t remember what caused the economic malaise of the 1970s, blaming it on the OPEC oil embargo and the Vietnam War. They don’t remember what caused the economic success of the 1980s, saying instead that workers lost ground on wages. They think the boom of the 1990s was all their doing. It was partly. They deregulated the internet, though the free market took it from there, despite what the Clinton Admin. did on taxes. They remember the economy of the 1950s and 60s with fondness, and think that we can get that back by returning to what we used then: Keynesian economics. They have learned nothing from history, and unless we mute or blunt their influence, we are all doomed to repeat it. We need to remember that the Great Depression didn’t really get going until 1933, even though the crash happened in 1929. This only happened because we made a bad situation worse.
That’s just like an academic liberal… have more meetings, committees, etc. and maybe you can talk the problem to death.
I prefer committees of one or two. The Tinker Commission recommends for starters—get rid of the IRS and institute a flat tax across the board, no earmarks, push tort reform, end illegal immmigration, get rid of the Dept. of Education, Homeland Security, and the prescription drug plan. Get rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. No bailouts for banks or corporations (put that money back into social security!). And I would shut down the conveyor belt the Left has created that pushes people into college when they have no calling or real reason to go. I would build trade schools all over America and do everything I could to bring industry back.
See? that wasn’t so hard.
I like the idea that created Fannie Mae, helping to make housing more affordable (it was started in the Depression era), but I don’t like what it’s become because of the meddling that’s been done to it, creating a corrupt institution that is toxic to our economy. So I’d have to agree, get rid of it. It’s too far gone.
I agree with you even more about the “conveyor belt” into college. There’s just one problem. I heard a great story a few years ago about a prominent man attending a dinner party in the UK back in the 1990s. A British woman approached him and said, “You Americans have the best high school education in the world.” The man was shocked, because he knew that our high schools were no great shakes, especially compared to the schools in the UK. She added, “Too bad you have to go to college to get it.” And therein lies the rub. College has become the new high school, because our public education system has failed. College became our backup system that has prevented us from totally “going down with the ship”, though many are. I don’t like it this way, but this is where we are. I’d much prefer it if universities could get back to the mission they once had, to be institutions that broadened one’s view of the world, and promoted broad research goals, rather than the narrow ones they promote now. But this is going to require doing something about our country’s system of primary and secondary education, so that the burden of picking up the slack is lifted from universities. I take a dim view of public education, because, as I heard someone put it recently, it’s an employment program for adults that exploits children. There are exceptions to this, but by and large it’s an apt description. I’ve suggested that perhaps the best solution is for parents to use libraries and hire tutors to educate their own children–home school–rather than send them to public school, where they’re not taught to think. Perhaps a system of private community schools would be good as well, where groups can pool their resources and build schools to which they’d like to send their kids. Either of these ideas would likely be better than the system we have. We kind of have community schools now with charter schools. The problem is they’re vulnerable to the same sort of corrupting influences that have been dragging down our public schools. Charter schools can be just as bad as the public schools, or worse. The silver lining is so far they seem to have been having a bit better success rate.
We’ve had this illusion for too long that the public education system means “education for all”. With the exception of basic literacy, it really doesn’t. What I’ve seen and heard about is that most parents use the public school system as a glorified day care center. Education is secondary. It’s only in areas where parents care a lot about the education their kids get that you see the education systems working well.
For this commission, I think they should really listen to Ann Coulter’s idea and tell BHO, “Mr. President, resign immediately!” as the first step to reduce the Federal deficit!! ~ Ruben