Obama's Deficit Commission: No Friend of Social Security?

You might think that President Obama and his team would be taking a decisive stance in favor of maintaining a wildly popular, progressive program that was one of his Democratic predecessors’ greatest policy achievement. You might think that a Democratic administration – one that, with the Affordable Care Act, just passed one of the most sweeping social reforms in decades – would be fighting tooth and nail to preserve Social Security against ideologues like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who has proposed a budget [1] that would privatize Social Security and make massive cuts to Medicare. But you’d be wrong.

As the news site AlterNet reports [2], President Obama has stacked his new 18-member committee charged with dealing with the deficit, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, with a number of figures who have staked their careers on undermining Social Security. And what’s more, the ways in which it favors proponents of cuts to the program go well beyond the people serving on it. While 10 of the Commission members will be Democrats, 14 votes total will be needed to support any recommendations, meaning that both parties will have guaranteed veto power. Moreover, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) have already pledged to vote on the panel’s recommendations – but not until after the midterm elections, when lawmakers will be under considerably less pressure to vote against entitlement cuts.

Who’s in this rogue’s gallery?
• Co-chair Erskine Bowles, the White House’s Chief of Staff under President Clinton; during that period, he was described as "Corporate America’s Friend in the White House. [3]”
• Co-chair Alan Simpson, former Republican Senator, who has a history [4] of attempting to justify backdoor cuts to Social Security by making dubious claims that the annual cost of living adjustment (COLA) is exaggerated
• Alice Rivlin, former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve. In 2004, Rivlin coauthored a Brookings Institution study [5] advocating, among other proposals, an "increase in the retirement age under Social Security" and "more accurate inflation adjustments to Social Security benefits." Rivlin is also a former board member of the Public Agenda Foundation, an organization largely devoted to destroying Social Security under the guise of “entitlement reform,” and which has called on lower-income Americans to “sacrifice.”

Two more of Obama’s six appointees, David Cote (Obama’s other Republican pick) and Ann Fudge, also have extensive Wall Street and corporate ties that make it highly unlikely that they’ll vote to preserve social programs. Cote is even a member of the Business Roundtable, an anti-Social Security organization. Only one of Obama’s six appointees, SEIU head Andy Stern, is opposed to benefit cuts. It’s a safe bet that the remaining twelve members of the commission will follow a similar ideological pattern, and considering the supermajority requirement and the existing bipartisan support for cutting Social Security, it’s not likely that Stern will win the argument.

In short, “Fiscal Responsibility” might sound appealing to most Americans. But when it becomes clear that this panel consists mainly of financial elites demanding “sacrifice” from those less well off than themselves, the picture becomes less rosy – and starts looking a lot more like a backdoor means to achieve Rep. Ryan’s goals.