I just saw this up over at the WaPo website: Obama will lay out plan this week to cut deficit. Which, I suppose, is a nice way of saying that all of those hard working retirees who spent most of their working lives paying into Social Security and Medicare might now see little return on their investment if these "proposals" become law.
To be fair, the article does point out that Obama "will also include calls for hiking taxes on the rich", but that's a small consolation indeed. The bad news was delivered by David Plouffe.
Appearing on several Sunday shows, Plouffe said the deficit reduction plan envisioned by the president would include cuts to government health insurance and a discussion over reforming Social Security, as well as eliminating Bush-era tax cuts for people making over $250,000. He would not put a figure on the amount of deficit reduction. He made clear that even the most popular, but expensive, programs are on the table. “You’re going to have to look at Medicare and Medicaid and see what kind of savings you can get,” Plouffe said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
This trial balloon is being floated at a time when House Republican leaders are considering attaching the onerous Ryan budget proposal to the bill raising the debt ceiling, which will shortly be debated. The article stresses that there will be some red meat for the Democratic base in Obama's proposal as well:
Democrats, meanwhile, plan to push for savings in two areas ruled off the table in the most recent budget fight: military spending and tax increases. “We’re going to have to have an expanded playing field,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), the No. 3 Senate Democrat. He also suggested that subsidies to oil companies are a ripe target.
I guess the WaPo reporters who wrote the article consider Robert Reich to have sufficient gravitas to comment on this turn of events, and they quote him at the end of the piece as saying:
"The tea partyers held the House Republicans hostage, and the House Republicans held the rest of the government hostage,” said Robert Reich, labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. “We can expect a repeat performance. Once you pay off hostage takers, there’s no end to how many times they’re going to demand more and more ransom.”