Guy's an evil douche, but the fact is such Austerity Über Alles currently governs much of the West. See: David Cameron (UK), Mariano Rajoy (Spain), Angela Merkel (Germany/EU). These world leaders are taken very seriously by media, finance, and political elites, as they inflict fanatical rightwing budgets on millions.
Ryan is a symptom of how far right politics have swung in the absence of a political left, as much as he's scum embodied. After all, Democrats haven't been hesitant about going after SS and "entitlements" (stupid term). During "negotiations" with House Republicans it was
Obama who proposed to slash all three entitlement programs.
NYT wrote:The White House agreed to cut at least $250 billion from Medicare in the next 10 years and another $800 billion in the decade after that, in part by raising the eligibility age. The administration had endorsed another $110 billion or so in cuts to Medicaid and other health care programs, with $250 billion more in the second decade. And in a move certain to provoke rebellion in the Democratic ranks, Obama was willing to apply a new, less generous formula for calculating Social Security benefits, which would start in 2015.
And you can laugh at Ryan, but it was Clinton who not only repealed Glass-Steagall (99) and ended "
welfare as we know it" (96), but first tried to "fix social security" by routing
SS revenue into the stock market.
Clinton's point man for "fixing" social security was investment banker Erskine Bowles (Morgan Stanley, etc). Funny: the exact dude Obama tapped to head his Deficit Commission. And there's
serious talk Bowles will replace Wall St water-carrier Timothy Geithner as Treasury Sec for Obama's 2nd term.
So while it's fun to burn effigies of Ryan, last I checked most here are capital-D Democrats, so I'm not sure what's holding your feet up while you laugh. If you think Obama and Bowles are going to stand between SS and the vampire capitalists, you're up in some real magical thinking.
While the rest of us are wasting our time worrying about whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney are sitting in the White House the next four years, [the Washington Post] tells us (approvingly) that these honchos are scurrying through back rooms in Washington trying to carve out a deficit deal.
The plan is that we will get the rich folks' deal regardless of who wins the election. It is difficult to imagine a more contemptuous attitude toward democracy.
The deal that this gang (led by Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles) is hatching will inevitably include some amount of tax increases and also large budget cuts. At the top of the list, as Pearlstein proudly tells us, are cuts to Social Security and Medicare. At a time when we have seen an unprecedented transfer of income to the top one percent, these deficit warriors are placing a top priority on snatching away a portion of Social Security checks that average $1,200 a month. Yes, the country needs this.
The most likely cut to Social Security is a reduction in the annual cost of living adjustment of 0.3 percentage points. While that might sound trivial, the effect accumulates through time. After ten years, a typical check will be about 3 percent lower, after 20 years it will be 6 percent lower, and after 30 years it will be about 9 percent lower.
Social Security amounts to 90 percent or more of the income for one-third of seniors. For this group, the proposed cut in benefits would be a considerably larger share of their income that the higher taxes faced by someone earning $300,000 a year as a result of the repeal of the Bush tax cuts on high income earners. The latter is supposed to be a big deal, therefore the proposed cuts to Social Security are also a big deal.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/bea ... ng-to-help
Looks like the fix is in.
