Alan Nasser — The Coming Plague of Poverty Among the Elderly: Clinton’s Plan For Gutting Social Security

Bowles-Simpson. That would be Erskine Bowles, Morgan Stanley alumnus and WH chief of staff under Bill Clinton.

Counterpunch
The Coming Plague of Poverty Among the Elderly: Clinton’s Plan For Gutting Social Security

Alan Nasser

Simpson/Bowles and their mindless fear mongering. You have to almost admire them for their tenacity in the face of mountains of evidence that they are bat shit crazy wrong.

Check out this tweet from these guys:

More from CBO: A deficit reduction plan could increase income levels by $2000-$4000 by 2040 and reduce interest rates http://t.co/6wIV8674xJ

— The Moment of Truth (@BowlesSimpson) July 6, 2015

So 25 years from now your income may go up from $2,000 to $4,000 per year.

1) Where is there proof?

and...

2) What fucking difference is that going to be 25 years from now???

But that's not all they promise...

They promise that interest rates might be reduced.

This is, like, insane. Rates are NEAR FUCKING ZERO YOU ASSHOLES!

Furthermore as this chart shows, there is no correlation between debt and rates. No, wait, there is...it's the FUCKING INVERSE!

WHAT. UTTER. MORONS.

Chris Christie is floating his big, "presidential," idea: Screwing seniors out of Social Security

Guess who's sorta running for president, but hasn't come out and said it, yet? New Jersey Governor, Christie Christie. And guess what appears to be the main idea for his platform? How he's gonna "fix" Social Security.

Never mind that it ain't broken and will never go broke because the Federal Government can never run out of dollars to pay. Alan Greenspan schooled Paul Ryan on this, remember? And the government "paid back" nearly $69 trillion to holders of public debt securities LAST YEAR. SIXTY NINE TRILLION.

So it's pretty clear we can't run out of money.

But don't let that phase Christie; he's just another clueless, callous debt fanatic. A guy who's pretty much run his state into the ground. Near last in job growth. Credit ratings cut by rating agencies. Led the last three years out of four in people leaving. Cuts to education, health care, social programs, but of course, tax cuts for the wealthy. He's right up there with guys like Sam Brownback of Kansas and Scott Walker of Wisconsin

Christie's plan to fix Social Security is to screw seniors out of benefits by cutting payments and raising the retirement age. Wonderful. More taxes on the most vulnerable and those who worked all their lives and contributed to the system and helped build the country. That's fair.

By the way, with Christie coming out with this plan, expect the other ignorant debt fanatics/hypocrites to do the same and, oh yeah, that means Hillary Clinton, too. Her husband is all about cutting Social Security. His "guy" was none other than Erskine Bowles of Simpleton/Bowels infamy.

All I have to say are two things: Are we still really having this discussion about what is causing income and wealth  inequality?

And...

Say goodbye to Social Security as we have come to know it. It's going away.

P.S. Guys ike Christie are truly disgusting.

Thom Hartmann — Why Is Obama Taking Orders From A Secretive Billionaire?

Peter Peterson, founder and chairman of Peter G. Peterson Foundation. (Photo: Lingjing Bao / Talk Radio News)

Truth-Out
Why Is Obama Taking Orders From A Secretive Billionaire?
Thom Hartmann, The Thom Hartmann Show | Op-Ed

Michael Stephens — This Time Is Indifferent

Yet, revealingly, there are some deficit hawks who are treating the rapid shrinking of the deficit as bad news — and not for the Keynesian reason that this indicates the government is failing to do its part in supporting the economy, as Bernanke stressed in his remarks yesterday, but because the disappearing deficit is easing congressional pressure to pass “entitlement reform” (which, as we’ll see below, does belong in scare quotes)....

For the fauxsterian, the question of whether austerity can be expansionary, or whether economic growth falls off a cliff when countries’ public debt ratios surpass 90 percent of GDP, is really all beside the point. Deficit and debt hysteria have simply been a useful tool for pushing specific legislative changes that may or may or may not be related to the budget balance — changes that might be difficult to pass outside an atmosphere of imminent crisis.

A recent Washington Post column by Steven Pearlstein, “The Case for Austerity Isn’t Dead Yet,” more or less endorses this line. The problem with fiscal stimulus, the column tells us, is that it works: it boosts short-term economic growth, thus easing the pressure to pass “structural reform.”

Multiplier Effect
This Time Is Indifferent
Michael Stephens

priceman — To Those Celebrating Their Proud Ignorance of the President's Austerity

MMT proponent priceman calls out ignorance and anti-intellectualism on the left.

Daily Kos — Money and Public Purpose
To Those Celebrating Their Proud Ignorance of the President's Austerity
priceman for The Amateur Left

Zach Carter — Executive Pay Of Austerity Advocates Saves Companies More Than $1 Billion Via Tax Loophole

Companies in the Fix the Debt coalition, which advocates for federal austerity policies, qualified for $1 billion or more in tax breaks tied to executive pay packages from 2009 to 2011, according to a new report by the liberal think tanks Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America's Future....

Fix the Debt is one of several austerity advocacy groups tied to Wall Street billionaire Peter Peterson, who started a think tank devoted to deficit reduction in 2008 and has bankrolled multiple public relations campaigns on the issue.

A total of 125 CEOs are officially members of the coalition, including CEOs of 90 public companies. The IPS-CAF report only examined tax perks for public companies in the coalition. The same CEO pay loophole is available to private companies, but private firms do not have to disclose executive pay to the SEC.

The coalition urges a host of spending cuts and tax reforms, including benefit cuts for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as a means to reduce the federal budget deficit. A spokesman for the group told HuffPost that while the group doesn't advocate for specific policies, it does insist that comprehensive tax reform be part of any debt deal.

 The CEO pay loophole being used by Fix the Debt companies is extremely popular in corporate America. According to a report by Citizens for Tax Justice, Fortune 500 companies skipped out on $11.2 billion in taxes in 2011 alone thanks to this loophole.

"The stock option loophole is a major reason why corporations are paying record-low federal income tax rates," said Matthew Gardner, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. "The worst of it is that there is no 'cost' to a corporation that uses stock options to pay its executives, so there's no justification for allowing them to deduct it as an expense. It's not an expense."

The Huffington Post
Executive Pay Of Austerity Advocates Saves Companies More Than $1 Billion Via Tax Loophole
Zach Carter

Bozo Watch — Bowles-Simpson go on the attack in spite of Reinhart-Rogoff debacle

On April 19, just after I had written about how the key academic research used to bolster austerity policies was exposed by a 28-year-old grad student at U Mass, Amherst, I got a surprise in my email box.

In the email, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson giddily announced their new deficit-reduction plan, which includes, among other things, a recommendation to increase the eligibility age for Medicare. Their plan would reduce debt as a share of GDP below 70 percent by 2023 and, as the Washington Postreports, “seeks far less in new taxes than the original, and it seeks far more in savings from federal health programs for the elderly.”

What’s incredible is that over the last week, the study by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff that famously warned of the dangers of government debt has been proven to be riddled with errors and questionable methodology. To recap: R&R’s paper purported to show that countries with public debt in excess of 90 percent of gross domestic product suffered negative economic growth. Austerity hawks everywhere used it to justify cuts that have cost people jobs and vital services. The original spreadsheet used by R&R was obtained by a U Mass grad student, who found that in addition to the mistakes already noted by several economists, there was a coding error in their Excel spreadsheet that significantly changed the results of their study.

As New York Magazine’s Jon Chait has pointed out, that same discredited research has been used by Bowles and Simpson to formulate their deficit-reducing austerity plans.

Let’s take a look at some ugly chronology.....

AlterNet
Unbelievable! Bowles and Simpson Release New Deficit-Reduction Plan Based on Discredited Austerity Research by Rogoff and Reinhart
Lynn Stuart Parramore

Dean Baker — Beating Back the CEO Attack on Social Security and Medicare

Last week I wrote about the conspiracy of corporate chieftains to impose a budget plan involving large cuts to Social Security and Medicare, regardless of who wins the elections in November. According to veteran Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein, who wrote approvingly of these efforts, many of the top executives of the country's biggest companies are meeting behind closed doors to design such a budget plan.

This plan is expected to follow the designs of the plan crafted two years ago by Morgan Stanley Director Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson, the co-directors of President Obama's deficit commission. The Bowles-Simpson plan called for a reduction in the annual cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security that is equivalent to a 3 percent cut in benefits. It also called for gradually raising the normal retirement age to 69 and phasing in lower benefits for workers who earned more than $40,000 a year. The Bowles-Simpson plan would also raise the age of eligibility for Medicare to 67.

Pearlstein indicated that these corporate honchos were prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get their plan put into law. He put the necessary figure at $278 million. This target is made easier by virtue of the fact that the CEOs sit on trillions of dollars of corporate revenue and, thanks to the Supreme Court, all their contributions for this effort will be fully tax deductible. 

That's the state of play, at least according to Pearlstein's assessment, or my interpretation of his assessment. The question is whether this juggernaut can be stopped?

Read it at The Huffington Post
Beating Back the CEO Attack on Social Security and Medicare
Dean Baker | Co-director, CEPR