In a must-read editorial entitled Deficit Debate Driven by the Wealthy, Michael Hiltzik exposes the hypocrisy on the part of the Washington elite when it comes to reining in the national deficit. The sub-heading of the article says it all:
The Simpson/Bowles plan bills itself as a road map to deficit reduction, but it's really a guide to cutting services and benefits for the working and middle class while protecting the interests of the wealthy.
http://www.latimes.com/...
He makes the case that it is infuriating to be lectured to by the very same people who helped bring us to this state of ruin in the first place:
...we are now being treated to finger-wagging about the need to get our fiscal house in order by corporate CEOs like JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon (trading loss $5.8 billion and counting, potential cost to ratepayers from alleged manipulation of the California electricity market $200 million and counting).
He takes on the "adult supervision" myth that the wealthy and connected use to make the rest of us feel that we are all in this together and that our "sacrifice" will be equal to that of the well-to-do and the powerful:
...the debate seems increasingly to be driven by the wealthy, who can be trusted to protect their own prerogatives while declaring everyone else's to be wasteful. Just two weeks ago, a squadron of CEOs and bankers, including Dimon and hedge fund billionaire Pete Peterson, lined up behind a campaign to impose adult supervision on our squabbling Congress.
He then goes after the Simpson-Bowles Plan and those who support it in no uncertain terms:
The Simpson-Bowles plan has inexplicably become the starting point for deficit cutters in both parties. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who in 2010 pronounced a draft version "simply unacceptable," more recently has signaled that she'd support it.
In any environment of serious debate, Simpson-Bowles would be dismissed out of hand. Praised for its sober bipartisan spirit, it's a compendium of flatulent platitudes ("We all have a patriotic duty to make America better off tomorrow than it is today"), vague prescriptions ("cut all excess spending" and "avoid excessive taxation" — as if reaching broad agreement on the meaning of "excessive" is a snap), and the occasional nostrum that earns a "not" on the gonna-happen scale (strip down the mortgage-interest deduction). According to some estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the plan's sample cuts in the tax deductions wouldn't replace the revenue lost to its proposed reductions in marginal tax rates.
Then the author does the almost unheard-of in centrist D.C. circles: he states the truth about Social Security:
The single program getting the bulk [of] the Simpson-Bowles plan's attention is Social Security, which in fact contributes not a dime to the federal deficit, and can't by law. Something else is at work here other than deficit reduction: It's a plan to cut benefits to seniors by ratcheting back on inflation protection and sharply cutting the benefit formula for everyone, starting with those whose average lifetime earnings are $9,000 a year.
He ends his argument with this attack on corporate America:
There's a lot not to like about fiscal-cliff panic. Allowing deficit-cutting concerns to influence how we address today's meager economic growth rate of 1.5% is hopelessly backward. So is talking about cutting government programs when they're needed to maintain employment and assist the poor and unemployed. So as much as corporate CEOs and other privileged incumbents claim they're concerned about the future, it's their future they mean.
I don't know who said it first, but this puts me in mind of my favorite analogy concerning the concept of "shared sacrifice."
It goes something like this:
A pig and a chicken are discussing what each will have to give up in the making of a ham-and-egg sandwich.
It turns out the chicken has to sacrifice an egg; the pig has to sacrifice his lfe.