OBAMA ANGERS DEFICIT SCOLDS

[DonViejo]

Deficit scolds distraught at Obama entitlement betrayal

The president's decision to withdraw proposed Social Security cuts has professional Beltway centrists seeing red

ALEX PAREENE

You may be pleased that the president has (for now) abandoned his Very Serious proposal to cut Social Security benefits in order to Fix the Debt (and perhaps win nebulous concessions from an uncooperative Republican Party). Do you know who’s not pleased? Professional deficit scolds, a class that includes much of the supposedly objective American political press. They are dismayed. They are practically weeping into their cups of morning joe. Why, they are asking, can’t American politicians simply grow up and cut social insurance programs?

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt excoriates Obama’s decision to abandon a politically untenable Social Security cut, and also compares that decision, somehow, to Syria. “Did the president really once believe that the United States could no longer kick the can down the road on entitlement reform?” Hiatt asks. And “if, as [political scientist Adolph Reed Jr.] recently argued in Harper’s Magazine, Obama is ‘an unexceptional neoliberal Democrat with an exceptional knack for self-presentation,’ why do neoliberal Democrats feel disappointed, too?” Maybe you’re disappointed because every Western government fully adopted your worldview decades ago and the result has been a new Gilded Age that you can’t blame on reckless Big Government New Deal Democrats? Or maybe it’s something else, I dunno.

As Dean Baker points out, Hiatt ignores the fact that Medicare — the primary driver of “entitlement spending,” which is usually yoked to Social Security mainly because people want to use Medicare costs to justify a preexisting desire to cut Social Security — is already projected to cost much less in the future than it was before Obama came into office, and that Hiatt seems disappointed less in Obama’s failure to account for the long-term deficit than he is by Obama’s about-face on the desirability of lowering the long-term deficit by the most regressive means possible.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/25/deficit_scolds_distraught_at_obama_entitlement_betrayal/

[Vincardog]

1. Again the supposed "centrists" Ignore the FACT that SS has NEVER impacted the DEFICIT and can not by

LAW. FK em

[Laelth]

2. I'd like to see the President make them even more angry.

How about we up SNAP benefits and SS? Medicare for all works. How about that? If they're going to scold the President, regardless, then I think he should give them something really big to cry about.

-Laelth

[bvar22]

5. ..and RAISE-the-Cap on FICA dedudtions...

...like Candidate Obama promised in 2008.

Elections have consequences.
We [should be fighting about HOW MUCH we are going to Raise-the-Cap,
not about how much to cut Social Programs.

The Democratic Party Leadership has LOST the Battle of Framing the Issue.

[riqster]

3. "Centrists" my ass. Wingnuts in sheep's clothing.

Actual centrist (aka middle of the road) voters support Social Securityexpansion and enhancement, as noted in the article.

[rhett o rick]

4. "Centrist" are wingnuts trying to be legitimate.

Centrist are not "middle of the road". The middle of the road are now called leftistS. And the left are called the "EXTREME LEFT".

[riqster]

7. Among actual voters, not so much.

Among the Punditocracy, yeah, it's about right.

Very much like Walt Kelly's cartoons about how the "road has shifted".

[Warren DeMontague]

6. Good God, Man!! What, Then, Pray Tell Us, What Can We Cut?

[Jamaal510]

10. Hm...I'm stumped on that question, too!

[freshwest]

8. Obama says:

[Cha]

11. Obama says..

[freshwest]

13. Oooh! Love that pic so much!

[Cha]

14. It's

lovable..

[Gothmog]

9. Who cares what these deficit hawks think

It takes two parties to negotiate and President Obama did his best. It is time to take all cuts to the safety net off the table

[Cha]

12. Obama says..