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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOBAMA ANGERS DEFICIT SCOLDS
Deficit scolds distraught at Obama entitlement betrayalThe 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 whos 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, cant American politicians simply grow up and cut social insurance programs?
Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt excoriates Obamas 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 Harpers Magazine, Obama is an unexceptional neoliberal Democrat with an exceptional knack for self-presentation, why do neoliberal Democrats feel disappointed, too? Maybe youre disappointed because every Western government fully adopted your worldview decades ago and the result has been a new Gilded Age that you cant blame on reckless Big Government New Deal Democrats? Or maybe its 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 Obamas failure to account for the long-term deficit than he is by Obamas 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
(20,234 posts)LAW. FK em
Laelth
(32,017 posts)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
(39,909 posts)...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
(13,986 posts)Actual centrist (aka middle of the road) voters support Social Securityexpansion and enhancement, as noted in the article.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)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
(13,986 posts)Among the Punditocracy, yeah, it's about right.
Very much like Walt Kelly's cartoons about how the "road has shifted".
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)Jamaal510
(10,893 posts)freshwest
(53,661 posts)Cha
(297,275 posts)freshwest
(53,661 posts)lovable..
Gothmog
(145,291 posts)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