Alan Simpson & Erskine Bowles Spreading Lies on CSPAN infront of Senate Budget Committee

[jtown1123]

I am tearing my hair out here...how are non economists with a corporate agenda telling Senators on the Budget Committee how we should cut the deficit? These assholes came up with a plan, despite their protestations, cuts Social Security and Medicare benefits.

This is not courageous, this is not the right thing to do for our grandchildren, this is not caused by runaway spending.

This debt is "not a cancer" it will not "destroy our country" from within, as Erskine Bowles loves to claim.

We gave away trillions to the banks and Wall St. assholes who caused this mess and now we are coming after programs that assist the poor and middle class. Disgusting. We can't let these voices drown out ours.

http://www.ncpssm.org/news/archive/Analysis_of_Commissions_Proposal/

http://www.ncpssm.org/truth_squad/index.php

[Pisces]

1. I agree that we should not cut medicare or social security,but giveaway to the banks and wallstreet

is not correct. These institutions are paying the loans back. These bailouts were not free money. We still need the auto industry which employs millions, we also need banks. It is a mistake to say they
were given something. It is Fox news reporting.

[jtown1123]

3. Fine. The thing is, we let them get away with these fraudulent activities

that annhilated the housing market and people's 401(k)s. This was obvious, yet the fed did nothing. We can't keep giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas and don't hire. Enough with this Reagan bullshit nonsense.

[JHB]

2. We need to repeatedly remind people that these guys are frauds

I’m not the first person to make this point, but those who are defending the deficit commission on the grounds that there are some potentially good ideas in there are missing what the purpose of the commission was supposed to be.
***
What the commission was supposed to do was something much harder: it was supposed to produce a package that Congress would give an up and down vote. To do this, it would have to produce something much better than a package with some good stuff buried in among the bad stuff; it would have to produce a package good enough to accept as is.

And it didn’t do that. Instead, it produced a package that may have had some good things in it, but also, remarkably, introduced a whole slew of new bad ideas that weren’t even in the debate before. A 21 percent of GDP limit on revenues? Cutting the top marginal rate to 23 percent? Sharp reductions in the government work force without, as far as anyone can tell, a commensurate reduction in the work to be done? Instead of cutting through the fog, the commission brought out an extra smoke machine.

Or put it another way: what on earth are people who say things like, “This proposal can be a starting point for discussion” thinking? We’ve been discussing and discussing, ad nauseam; the commission was supposed to provide a finishing point for discussion. Instead, it produced a PowerPoint that is one part stuff that has long been on the table, one part conservative wish-list, and one part just weirdly ill-considered.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/the-soft-bigotry-of-low-deficit-commission-expectations/

[jtown1123]

4. Brilliant, Thanks for the Krugman piece.

[mmonk]

5. What do you think is? A representative democratic republic or something?

That is so yesterday.

:sarcasm:

[bvar22]

6. And the Kabuki plays on.

I can hear the tearful excuses now.

"We didn't vote to cut Social Security.
We voted to save the economy."

"It was a comprehensive package.
We had to vote for the whole thing or something bad would happen."

"We didn't have the votes."

"It was all Joe Lieberman's fault." :cry:

"This was a step in the right direction."

"This is the most Progressive legislation in decades."

"We'll fix it later."