The Republican Media- No. 32


Saith Politico:

Alan Simpson, co-chairman of the White House fiscal commission, isn’t a fan of President Barack Obama’s deficit-reduction plan or his new feisty tone.

The decision to shield Social Security from changes “is an abrogation of leadership, a vacancy of leadership,” Simpson told POLITICO on Wednesday.

The harsh appraisal is notable even from the outspoken Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming whom Obama tapped last year to lead his bipartisan fiscal commission. Simpson is often blunt, but he has generally avoided direct criticism of the president, even when Obama declined to embrace the commission report and waited months to push a comprehensive plan.

Simpson said he is “saddened” and “tired of watching” the president talk up bipartisanship in public while bashing Republicans at private fundraisers. And by treading lightly on entitlements, Obama’s proposal fails to live up to the principle of shared sacrifice, he said.

“You can’t get this done without hits across the board,” Simpson said, “and if you are leaving people out all along the way because of political pressure, you can’t get it done.”

It isn't necessary, perhaps, for Politico reporter Carrie Budoff Brown to remind her readers that Simpson last year, in an e-mail to the director of Social Security Works, commented "Yes, I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits!"

If she did provide that context, it might give an objective reader the idea that the ex-senator dislikes elderly people except, presumably, himself, his relatives, and close personal friends.

It's not only the statement- from the reporter- that Simpson and his co-chairman, Erskine Bowles, want "to shore up a system that is expected to go bankrupt by 2037." Social Security is expected to have merely a slight shortfall in 2037 and is not projected to go bankrupt by the Social Security Trustees, or anyone who has studied the system, at any time. It is expected (without any changes) to pay out 78% of scheduled benefits for several decades after the date the Politico reporter apparently thinks it will be bankrupt.

In addition, though, to forecasting demise of the Social Security system, Brown accepts the meme of Republicans and neo-liberals that Social Security contributes to the deficit. She quotes the former GOP Senator declaring "You can't get this done without hits across the board and if you are leaving people out all along the way because of political pressure, you can't get it done." Although Simpson (as far as we know) never specified what "this" is, the clear impression left in the Politico piece is that "this" is deficit-reduction.

It is unlikely that Carrie Budoff Brown set out to repeat GOP talking points. But Social Security is a very successful and popular government program. If even this program is going "bankrupt" or, as often fantasized, "broke," confidence in the federal government to do anything right takes a hit. And voters aren't going to blame the Republican presidents (chart, above, from the Office of the Democratic Leader via Digby's Hullabaloo) who jacked up the national debt, nor the tax cuts which did the work for them, but the one party which doesn't want to destroy government.





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