Why is the Republican Party leadership so scared of Newt Gingrich? Putting aside his generally abrasive personality, his loud streak of megalomania, and his tendency to self-destruct – OK, that’s a lot! – it’s hard to think of much in the way of substantive policy matters that sets the former House speaker apart from the rest of the Republican presidential field.

Oh yes, there’s one thing.

Early last month, when it still seemed that Mitt Romney’s anointment as GOP nominee was a matter of course, the editors of the Wall Street Journal took Gingrich for his position on, of all things, Social Security. The Journal has been pushing for Social Security privatization for decades, but strangely, Read the rest of this entry →

Ted Nugent, the “Motor City Madman” of ’70s hard rock, has a plan to fix Social Security: Eliminate it. And make workers under 45 pay to wind it up. With enemies like this, does Social Security even need friends?

At this point in his demented career, The Nuge – Tedly, Uncle Ted, what have you – is an American institution, a living, breathing parody of contemporary rugged individualism that Glenn Beck and the Tea Party would have to invent if he wasn’t already roaming the Upper Midwest.

As occasional readers of our right-wing op-ed pages know, he’s also a political scientist of sorts. This month, he’s challenging the Republican Party to put its money where its mouth is on Social Read the rest of this entry →

People who want to cut Social Security benefits to lower future budget deficits are “reasonable” and “serious.” Moreover, economists have reached a “consensus” that this should be done. People who oppose balancing the budget on the back of Social Security recipients are “denialists” whose views are “maddening,” “crackpot,” “strident.”

The cartoonist R. Crumb once advised a young protege that to be good at the craft, he needed to draw his subject accurately – but then exaggerate it just a little bit. In polemical writing, adjectives are that little bit of exaggeration. Sprinkled sparingly through an otherwise competently argued piece, they create a slightly distorted view of the writer’s opponents without making the writer sound too angry or confrontational. The cumulative effect is stark: those on the same side as the writer are intelligent and reasonable. Those on the other side are not.

The adjectives applied to defenders of Social Security, quoted above, aren’t from Fox News, the Cato Institute, or a Rush Limbaugh broadcast. They are drawn from Read the rest of this entry →

How stands the Social Security discussion in Washington following State-of-the-Union night? More or less where it was before. Which, for defenders of the program is mostly not good.

President Obama honored his pledge to congressional Democrats over the previous weekend not to endorse cuts to the program. In fact, he went a bit farther, rejecting any plan that would include “slashing benefits for future generations.”

There’s more to say about that. But first, what about Paul Ryan and that Michele Bachmann? Neither of them mentioned Social Security. TV’s talking heads, both before and after the SOTU and the two response speeches, couldn’t stop repeating themselves that the Republican leadership had a big problem: the Tea Partiers were out of control and embarrassing the party with their obstreperousness and their fringe views.

Nonsense. Bachmann’s speech was if anything less of a fire-eating act than Ryan’s, mostly confined to self-congratulation at the Tea Party victories in November, statistics about unemployment and the national debt, and an invocation of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima (more than 65 years ago). Her actual policy positions were completely unsurprising: repeal Obamacare, pass a Balanced Budget Amendment, cut spending to create a “leaner” government.

Nothing Bachmann said veered even slightly from the official position of the Republican leadership. If anything, the party benefited from her speech, since it allowed them to use prime TV airtime to appeal directly to Tea Party voters who were perhaps turned off by the leadership’s propensity to make deals with the administration during the recent lame-duck session. She’s not a rebel. She’s a bridge to the new wave for Boehner, McConnell, and company. . . . Read the rest of this entry →

We’ll shortly be hearing the objections of deficit hawks to the deficit reduction package Demos, The Century Foundation, and the Economic Policy Institute. No doubt they’ll echo the criticisms that have already been leveled at the deficit-shrinkage roadmap Rep. Jan Schakowsky put on the table earlier this month. To get a sense of what those criticisms are likely to be, I recently had a close look at a Schakowsky critique by The Atlantic’s resident deficit hawk, Derek Thompson.

The first thing that makes Thompson’s November 16 piece interesting is that it actually acknowledges the existence of Schakowsky’s plan. The second thing, only slightly less extraordinary, is that Thompson makes an effort to analyze and understand the proposal. It took the New York Times nearly two weeks after Schakowsky released it to even note that it was there (and even then, didn’t provide details).

What’s most remarkable about Thompson’s analysis, however, is that he lectures Schakowsky for not squeezing poor and low-income workers hard enough. Read the rest of this entry →

Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s deficit reduction proposal is a game changer: a serious, moderate, balanced blueprint for addressing the nation’s long-range fiscal challenges, by a leading progressive lawmaker. How her colleagues on the president’s deficit commission respond to it will be a test of how serious they really are about solving the deficit puzzle in a fair and equitable way.

Jan Schakowsky is sometimes described as “one of the most liberal members” of the commission. But the deficit reduction plan she released on Tuesday is moderate, sensible, and actually more effective at lowering the deficit over the next few years than the plan co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles tabled last week ($427 billion in savings by 2015, vs. $250 billion).

Schakowsky’s plan offers progressives a golden opportunity to highlight the differences Read the rest of this entry →

The Bowles-Simpson plan isn’t a fair and equitable way to reduce the long-term federal deficit, whatever its co-authors might claim. In fact, it’s the biggest proposed experiment in supply-side economics since early Reagan.

Long story short: The proposal put on the table last week by the co-chairs of the president’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is essentially a wedding of Rubinomics and Reaganomics. As such, it’s what we might get if Bill Clinton and the late Ronald Reagan were locked in a room together and required to cut the long-term budget deficit – without any regard for the impact of their handiwork on low- and middle-income people.

You’ve probably guessed which partner has the upper hand in this deal. Read the rest of this entry →

I’ve been saying for months that the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is probably doomed. The co-chairs, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, appear to agree.

So my first real question is, What have these people been doing with $500,000 of the taxpayers’ money for the past nine months? Lori Montgomery in the Washington Post reports that many of the commission’s 18 members were “startled” by the Bowles-Simpson plan, which Bowles himself called a “starting point.”

Starting point? Are you kidding? This commission was empaneled in February and held its first – official – meeting in May. Read the rest of this entry →

The Website Industry Gamers reports that Erskine Bowles, co-chair of President Obama’s deficit commission, has approached Microsoft about creating a deficit-reduction video game to help “educate” the public about the need for fiscal austerity. Bowles, apparently, sees the commission’s work as not just to suggest ways to cut the deficit but to convert the unconverted.

To anyone who was around and thinking about the deficit during the first Clinton administration, the deja vu is overwhelming. Back then, Bill Clinton, in appreciation of Bob Kerrey’s vote for his first big package of economic legislation, let the Nebraska senator run a Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform: the direct precursor of Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Read the rest of this entry →