Don’t Let Congress Cut Medicare, Social Security For the 99%

The supercommittee is down for the count, and everyone from the Tea Party to more »

The reason members of the Super Committee didn’t reach an agreement is that Republican members insisted on damaging cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicare – AND they wouldn’t budge from their refusal to roll back tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans. more »

What if the Congressional Progressive Caucus invited the supercommittee to an ad hoc hearing on job creation, and the supercommittee didn't show up? Yesterday, I found out.

This holiday season, let's spare a kind thought for the decent people who toil inside Washington's legislative machinery. These good folk must live and work inside the dreamlike bubble that is today's policy and media world. Each day they strain to see reality through the reflected light of the false but colorful narratives projected against the bubble's surface.

Or would it be a better metaphor to say they're prisoners in some cold underground cell? No matter how many polls are conducted, no matter how many economic analyses are performed, no matter how many bitter lessons are taught and re-taught, there are those who hope to deny them even a glimpse of reality.

Instead these good people are forced to stare into the harsh glare of synthetic reality, hour after hour, as if were a naked lightbulb in windowless room. Only a few precious slivers of genuine sunlight penetrate the dank basement of illusion that imprisons them.

Well-intentioned staffers in Washington need good information to do their jobs well. Instead they're being inundated with confusing pseudo-facts and empty fear-mongering. This week's case in point? The Congressional "Super Committee." Did you know that unless they come up with their cuts there will be no Christmas this year? You didn't? Then you haven't been reading the Wall Street Journal.

Unfortunately, that kind of distortion isn't the exception. It's the rule. more »

According to a document produced by Democrats serving on the congressional deficit-reduction supercommittee, the Democrats are proposing to cut $350 billion from Medicare as part of a $2.3 trillion "grand bargain" to reduce the deficit. It's time for the people to say "no" to this deal. more »

Some Democrats have come under a lot of criticism lately, much of it deserved, for abandoning popular and important programs that were historically associated with their party. But some of the other Democrats -- the ones who are trying to act in the country's best interests -- are genuinely concerned about what will happen to the economy if the Super Committee fails to come up with a plan.

This message is for them -- and anyone else who has the same concern. You need to know that the evidence is clear: A Super Committee failure won't hurt the economy at all.

But its "success" almost certainly would.

Economic Y2K

Every month it seems as if there's another "bipartisan" process designed to impose austerity on the American people. And every month we're told there will be terrible consequences in the world's markets if it doesn't succeed. These predictions are the economic equivalent of "Y2K" -- always apocalyptic, never true, and all too frequently believed.

Democratic officials and staffers are being bombarded by these predictions, delivered by think-tank operatives from their own party who have been steeped in the cult of austerity. It doesn't matter how many times they're refuted by impeccably constructed papers, or by the observations of Nobel Prize winners. And it doesn't matter how many times these predictions are proven wrong.

Some of the experts warning of doom if the "Super Committee" fails said the same thing about last year's Deficit Commission, too. What happened when that "bipartisan" body deadlocked, and the private plan put forward by its co-chairs went nowhere?

Nothing. more »

“I have great respect for each of you individually, but collectively I’m worried you’re going to fail — fail the country,” former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, a co-chairman of President Obama’s fiscal commission, sternly told the congressional supercommittee last week. more »

One of the House Progressive Caucus co-chairs, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., is expected to introduce a bill later today that will require the 12-member congressional deficit-reduction "super-committee" to vote on a plan to create 3 million jobs—before acting on spending cuts. more »

Today on "Democracy Now!", Robert Borosage discussed the "dangerously wrongheaded" path the Super Committee appears to be taking. Video is above and transcript is below. more »

An unelected and unrepresentative group they call the 'Super Committee' has been given extraordinary power over our own economic destiny. Think if it as a political Justice League of America, except that its mission is to rescue Treasury bonds, not people.

Problem is, the bonds don't need to be rescued. People do. more »