Has anybody been watching Lawrence O'Donnell?

[LongTomH]

He has a 'bipartisan' group talking about ways to cut the deficit. The group includes Democrats like former Senators Gary Hart and Bill Bradley.

They claim they can keep the Bush, 'save' Social Security and still cut the deficit. Of course, their formula requires raising the retirement age and reducing the COLA's. They're also saying they need to consider cutting Medicare and Medicaid. They gave lip service to reducing the military budget and subsidies for biofuels like ethanol; but, most of their time was devoted to making the case for reducing Social Security; the same lies we've been hearing from the chattering classes for months.:grr:

[madmax]

1. Yes, and I'm furious

Utter bullshit.

[roguevalley]

15. I shut it off. I could hardly control my gag reflex. I wonder what

it would take to make them all come down into the gutter with the rest of us, the rich overpriced inbred bastards.

[me b zola]

16. I did the same, I turned off the show

I have been loving The Last Word--until that segment last night. Ugh. I have found that the life experiences of most tv hosts and pundits are very different than the majority of us. They say that they expect to work well into their seventies or beyond because their work is fulfilling, so they can't possibly see why the majority of us need to stop working at some point in our lives. I like Lawrence a lot, but his world is much different than mine.

[Anthony Noel]

2. O'Donnell is as useless as tits on a bull

He's an Establishment Democratic Party hack who tows the line above all else.

[butterfly77]

3. They are slowly...

trying to convince us to go along with their bullsh**,did anyone hear anything about cutting the military budget?

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Yes...but Hart moved on fast

[whathehell]

8. ..Or a dick on a cow?

[Anthony Noel]

11. Yes...

or one of those :)

[lonestarnot]

4. Tuned that shit out because of a dem phone banker calling for volunteers.

Of course I gave him a date.

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. Empire in decline

That's what you watched

[Bigmack]

7. Bailed... do NOT want to hear Repub-lite..... nt

[nashville_brook]

9. O'Donnell has been on fire to cut SS since before he had the show.

He really has an agenda on this. It's sickening.

[Dragonfli]

10. He's still at it, proudly showing Obama claiming entitlements must be looked at.

Since when was Social security part of the budget?
I don't get how they get to pretend that it is part of the budget, Obama included.

[Yeahyeah]

12. Bill Bradley?

[BeFree]

13. CYA

These guys voted to steal the money from the SS funds.

If the money from SS had been invested in a fund that could only be used for SS there would be trillions available. Instead, the politicians 'borrowed' it and spent it like drunken sailors.

And these two voted to spend the SS funds, so now they have to do a CYA.

[stopbush]

14. Not a one of them mentioned the huge IOU owed to SS.

SS would be solvent in perpetuity IF the Feds paid the IOU already owed to SS. I guess the assumption is that it will never happen, so why go there.

Also, they went on about how SS was a compact between 2 generations, and that it was "internally funded" by payroll contributions. They then said that eliminating the bush tax cuts to the wealthy to fund SS would "step outside of the compact - outside of that internal funding."

Excuse me? Were you concerned when you decided to steal money from SS to fund the military, the wars, the tax cuts to the rich, the bridges to nowhere etc? Seems to me that that spending was NOT a part of the compact. Seems to me that a whole shitload of external funding stepped in uninvited to "borrow" money from that "internal" funding, "borrowing" trillions in the process and making SS insolvent by some date certain, when SS would be solvent had you not borrowed all of the funds you have. Ever heard of the lock box?

I would have loved to have been on that panel to ask that question, and to provide a follow-up: does your plan assume that government borrowing from SS will end, and have you made your projections based on the notion that the Feds will stop their stealing? I'd ask that because I would think that Bradley et al have made their projections without accounting for the continued stealing that will go on from SS by the Feds.

They're promoting a never-ending cycle where the common guy gets screwed again and again, where our contributions to SS are used to fund everything under the sun, rather than being used exclusively to fund that for which they were intended, all the while taking MORE money from our checks while moving our retirement age back further and further. Not to provide a solution to fund SS in perpetuity, but to continue the situation where government can continue to borrow from SS to fund a bunch of other crap, so they can "keep taxes low" while fooling the "all taxes are evil" idiots who live in this country.

[Cleita]

17. Bernie Sanders shot holes in raising the SS age to

70 this morning on Thom Hartmann. He said the fund today is able to pay full benefits up to the year 2039 and 78% thereafter if nothing is done at all. He cites the CBO office for this information.