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Jewish World Review
June 11, 2012/ 21 Sivan, 5772
Simpson bashes back on reform
By
Jay Ambrose
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Try to save the nation from the approaching crisis of unsustainable spending on Social Security and Medicare, and the demagogues will come at you with the lie of how you would force poor, old Joe to eat dog food. Or, more imaginatively, they may show a video of granny meeting her end as someone shoves her wheelchair off a cliff. Some reformers then may hide, but not Alan Simpson. He fights back.
Simpson is the former Republican senator from Wyoming who co-chaired President Barack Obama's bipartisan deficit and debt commission with Erskine Bowles, a White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. The two made some superb recommendations to cut spending (Democrats booed) and reform taxes (Republicans booed) only to be mostly ignored by politicians putting career before country or failing to grasp that no compromise meant no solution.
Simpson and Bowles were especially able in figuring out a way to avert Social Security's suicidal trajectory through gradually slowing the growth in benefits without reducing current benefits. They would also slowly raise retirement ages as well as have the best-off among us contribute more to payroll taxes, but no, no, many times no to all of this, screeched some firebrands.
The vitriol caught on. When Simpson was recently in Oakland, Calif., a seniors group, California Alliance for Retired Americans, handed out flyers saying, "Bowles! Simpson! Stop using the deficit as a phony excuse to gut our Social Security!" Simpson wrote the group a letter, not just any letter, but an endlessly quotable letter taking special umbrage at the flyers' photos of young people. These are the ones, he said, who would "get gutted while you continue to push your blather and drivel."
"What a wretched group of seniors you must be to use the faces of the very people we are trying to save while the 'greedy geezers' like you use them as a tool and a front for your nefarious bunch of crap."
Simpson made it clear he had little use for those who use "emotion" on the issue while grasping little if anything about ominous predictions by Social Security trustees or what was in the Simpson-Bowles report. As they nastily attacked the 80-year-old ex-senator, leftists responded that he sure was vicious to these old people.
I support him. Sure, he could have been cooler, more civil, but being a pussycat is no longer acceptable when so many agitate so successfully on the side of ruination. Entitlement spending is a tipping point issue, one that could visit catastrophe on us, as was observed in precise arithmetical terms this month in a report from the Congressional Budget Office.
It said deficits over the past few years have been the highest since World War II. By the end of this year, the federal government's publicly held debt will amount to 70 percent of the economy, the highest since 1945, the year after the war. Without significant policy changes, the CBO worried, the debt will keep going up drastically and investors could get so nervous that they would jack up interest rates beyond the government's ability to borrow. That would be run-for-the-exits time.
Because of the aging of the baby boomers, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are chief culprits here, the CBO explained, predicting their cost could grow from some 10 percent of the economy today to 16 percent in another 25 years. For the past 40 years, the CBO notes, total federal spending has been just 18.5 percent of the economy.
As early as 13 years down the road, the CBO has previously stated, health entitlements, Social Security and increasing interest payments on growing debt could consume all tax revenues.
These are the sorts of outcomes those seniors in Oakland would confer on the nation with their ideas, which include expanding Social Security, and they have loads of company.
Let's the rest of us join Simpson in fighting the wretches.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment by clicking here.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.
Previously:
• 06/05/12: Legalize sugary drinks, ban dangerous drugs
• 06/04/12: Keep America from going Greek
• 06/01/12: Don't believe in Obama's fairy tales
• 05/30/12: Writing a book? Beats prison
• 05/23/12: Student loans fail students
• 05/21/12: Europeanizing America into crisis
• 05/16/12: Obama a bully, too
• 05/15/12: Walker recall vote could swing national pension policy
• 05/07/12: Bumbling, fumbling, benighted, old Washington near tipping point where freedom is done for
• 05/02/12: The Communists cannot be happy
• 04/30/12: There's no objective truth, least of all concerning behavior
• 04/25/12: Forgive the extremist?
• 04/23/12: Educational excellence is a game
• 04/18/12: Obama's interventions help a few by the most autocratic, complicated, ineffective means possible, yet hurt many more
• 04/16/12: Overregulation strikes again: The nanny state threatens to turn us into children
• 04/11/12: Obama is not bonkers
• 04/04/12: Will America vote against authoritarianism?
• 04/02/12: 'Tipping point' on federal restraint approaches
• 03/28/12: Obama truth from an open mike
• 03/21/12: The progressive campaign for voter fraud
• 03/19/12: Public pensions will get us if we don't watch out
• 03/14/12: Politics needs reporting, not speculation
• 03/12/12: Home of the free, the brave, the endangered
• 03/07/12: Obama used Limbaugh as scapegoat
• 03/05/12: Campaign substance lost in media melodrama
• 03/01/12: When Big Brother drowns
• 02/24/12: Obama goes gaseous on gas
• 02/22/12: Political tears for trust in personal empowerment --- except in the bedroom
• 02/17/12: Of cut-off ears and silenced mouths
• 02/15/12: Obama is a joke whose antics aren't funny
• 02/10/12: An energy boom looms, despite Obama
• 02/08/12: Obama's assault on faith
• 02/03/12: Can Romney get serious?
• 01/27/12: Obama is like an Italian ship captain
• 01/25/12: Newt Gingrich's first 100 days
• 01/20/12: Obama's Keystone pipeline lies
• 01/18/12: Critics worse than urinating Marines
• 01/13/12: Ron Paul is a cartoonish character
• 01/11/12: Newt Gingrich upset by Mitt Romney's brilliance
• 01/09/12: How about regulating presidents, too?
• 01/04/12: How America smothers itself
• 12/30/11: A tax break that helps break the nation
• 12/28/11: Watch out for the banana peel, Newt
• 12/21/11: A tale of two men
• 12/16/11: Strange happenings in Russia
• 12/14/11: Tim Tebow is a man of character
• 12/09/11: A populist, envy-mongering fraud divisively exacerbating resentment among different groups of Americans
• 12/07/11: Tax games threaten nation
• 12/05/11: Why Wal-Mart serves us better than Barney Frank
• 11/30/11: Not writing off Newt
• 11/28/11: Answers to the Iranian threat
• 11/23/11: Failure of the incumbency investment
• 11/18/11: Occupiers: Chop off their heads!
• 11/16/11: Obama asks jobless to sacrifice
• 11/09/11: Michael Moore's insufferable occupation
• 11/04/11: Political tipping point is coming
• 11/02/11: Idealogues versus 7 billion
• 10/28/11: Obama games on student loans
• 10/26/11: Wit and quick moves v. humanity and thoroughgoing honesty? It's no contest - or at least shouldn't be
• 10/07/11: Baptists, bootleggers and Wall Street protesters
• 10/05/11: Federal law will get you even if you watch out
• 09/28/11: Leftist bugbears on the march
• 09/23/11: Still hope for coal to help us
• 09/21/11: Obama's Madoff ploy
• 09/19/11: U.S. can't afford to wait until it happens
• 09/14/11: Defending -- and strengthening -- gung ho collectivism
• 09/12/11: A pipeline to better times
• 09/08/11: Obama just keeps destroying jobs
• 09/06/11: Ultra-feminists thwarting justice
• 08/31/11: Corporations are people? Yes, Count the ways
• 08/26/11: What an earthquake tells us about debt
• 08/25/11: The tyranny of scientific consensus
• 08/23/11: Fracking hardly a public health threat
• 08/17/11: Why Obamacare won't control births
• 08/15/11: Balanced budget amendment unbalanced idea
• 08/10/11: Kerry's war on citizen speech
• 08/05/11: Upside to the compromise leaving the door open for obnoxious maneuvers
• 08/03/11: The people who may save America
• 07/29/11: On making deals, Obama is no LBJ
• 07/27/11: The threat behind the debt
• 07/23/11: Mean opposition to means-testing
• 07/20/11: Leftist babble makes debt crisis even worse
• 07/18/11: Time to raise demagoguery ceiling
• 07/13/11: Obama treating treaties badly
• 07/08/11: Is decline of U.S. exaggerated?
• 07/05/11: Not math deficiency, but demagoguery
© 2011, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
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