{"id":189734,"date":"2010-02-18T17:41:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-18T22:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/02\/18\/so-obamas-magical-deficit-reduction-commission-is-a-go\/"},"modified":"2010-02-18T17:41:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-18T22:41:00","slug":"so-obamas-magical-deficit-reduction-commission-is-a-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/02\/18\/so-obamas-magical-deficit-reduction-commission-is-a-go\/","title":{"rendered":"So Obama&#8217;s Magical Deficit Reduction Commission is a Go"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>And <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052748704804204575069871801865444.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_us\">former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine <span>Bowles<\/span> and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson will be the co-chairman<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I think that it&#8217;s a bad idea in the first place, and that it&#8217;s a way to create political cover for weakening Social Security and Medicare, and what&#8217;s more, as former Clinton Treasury official Brad <span>Delong<\/span> notes, putting Simpson in charge of deficit reduction is like naming an, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/delong.typepad.com\/sdj\/2010\/02\/you-dont-name-an-arsonist-to-co-run-the-fire-department.html\">Arsonist to Co-Run the Fire Department<\/a>,&#8221; with history of supporting every half-<span>assed<\/span> tax cut for the rich plan out there, supporting Reagan&#8217;s <span>disastrous<\/span> 1981 cuts, and opposing Clinton&#8217;s tax increases, which produced the first surpluses in a generation.<\/p>\n<p>What really worries me is that we have a whole bunch of Beltway <span>Boyz<\/span> who are thinking that the huge problem is Social Security and Medicare, and are looking for a way to gut them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson will be the co-chairman. I think that it&#8217;s a bad idea in the first place, and that it&#8217;s a way to create political cover for weakening Social Security and Medicare, and what&#8217;s more, as former Clinton Treasury official Brad &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,978,1086,1173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-politics","category-social-safety-net","category-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189734"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}