From Majority FM: Jonathan Alter On His Calls For Democrats To Embrace Entitlement Cuts:

Blommberg View Jonathan Alter, argued that cutting entitlements will guard investment in discretionary spending, guess how Sam felt about that argument? Sam and Jonathan debated whether or not CPI was a cut and agreed that the wealthy should pay more taxes...

You can read Alter's article here: Why Democrats Must Get Smart on Entitlements.

It's a long and pretty infuriating interview for anyone who has time to listen to all of it. Alter pretty much personifies everything we've seen wrong with our beltway Villagers who want to insist that liberals are being unreasonable and don't want to do anything about the long term sustainability of our social safety nets, which is not true. Seder did a nice job of taking apart his arguments and the constant false equivalency game he played throughout the interview, which was bad enough that at one point he was comparing liberals who want to protect those programs to Grover Norquist.

Alter based most of his arguments during this interview off of the assumption that if Democrats just agree to cut these programs now, that will stop Republicans from trying to make more cuts in discretionary spending in the future and that if President Obama finally agreed to some "grand bargain" that it would keep Republicans from demagoguing the issue in upcoming elections. As Sam rightfully noted, it didn't stop them from doing it in past elections and there is no reason to believe that Republicans still won't be demanding more cuts.

I also thought Alter was going to blow a gasket when heaven forbid Seder suggested lowering the Social Security retirement age and increasing benefits to take care of our unemployment problem in the United States. It would really be nice to see Alter have to face this same type of scrutiny every time he comes on the air and is portrayed as representing the left side of the aisle.

And I'm sure it will come up here again, but I hate the use of the word "entitlements" but that's what Alter called them in his article and in the segment above. They're earned benefits and social insurance programs and they are designed to keep people out of poverty, but it's not ridiculous to take note of the fact that if you turn any of them into a poverty program only, they won't have a political constituency left to fight to keep them in place and they'll wind up being demonized like welfare has been.

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Bill O'Reilly apparently decided that he should just throw out all of the dog whistles and just bring in the racist bullhorns instead during this interview with former general and Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell this Tuesday night. I'm no fan of Powell for his part in helping to mislead the country into believing that our invasion of Iraq was somehow justified, but given the current breed of right wing mouth breathers who are the majority of the Republicans that we're treated to on the air these days, the man looks downright sane.

O'Reilly went after Powell for stating the obvious, which is that John Sununu, who was a Romney surrogate, constantly threw out racist dog whistles to their base just about every time he was allowed in the air. Sadly Powell did not just call Sununu out for what he is and let O'Reilly brow beat him into saying that the man that was not a racist -- something which is not true and that was made completely obvious to anyone who spent more than a few minutes watching his ugly rants during the presidential campaign.

He also went after him for saying anything mean about Sarah Palin, even though O'Reilly's own network has now thrown her under the bus as well by not renewing her contract.

O'Reilly wrapped things up by saying that Powell "put himself in a category of intolerance by backing Obama's entitlement culture." Powell should have told O'Reilly that his language and questions like that one during this interview are exactly the type of thing he was criticizing Sununu for, but we didn't get that from him either.

He didn't take kindly to O'Reilly's attacks on "entitlements" but rather than hitting back hard at his nonsense, he responded the way we'd expect any other "Third Way," DLC corporate-crat, excuse for what we call "centrist" these days would have, and was pushing for things like the really dumb idea of means testing, or in other words turning earned benefits into a welfare program so we can assure Republicans will have an excuse to destroy them later and there's no constituency left with an ounce of political clout to keep them in place.

I didn't expect much better out of him since he is, after all, still a Republican and a member of the 1 percent, even if his own party and the likes of O'Reilly and company are doing their best to disown him. O'Reilly spent the next segment on his show with Crowley and Colmes trying to do just that.

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After first allowing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to use the lie that people are living longer as a reason to raise the retirement ages for Medicare and Social Security and to push means testing for future beneficiaries, Meet the Press host David Gregory then allowed McConnell to play the same dangerous game that's becoming far too common these days -- downplaying the consequences of defaulting on our debt and conflating it with a government shutdown.

I watched CNN State of the Union host Candy Crowley do the same thing during her interview with Lindsey Graham and This Week host George Stephanopoulos pulled the same number on his show as well. And as Brian Beutler at TPM noted a couple of days ago, we had Senators Pat Toomey and John Cornyn using the same language earlier this week: GOP Senators: Not Raising The Debt Limit Might Not Be So Bad:

During the negotiations over the fiscal cliff, and continuing through today, Republicans have attempted to falsely portray President Obama’s insistence that Congress increase the debt limit as a demand for unlimited power to spend money.

Now that the tax issues at stake in the fiscal cliff negotiations have been addressed, the GOP is once again contemplating not raising the debt limit. And just as they misleadingly describe the nature of borrowing authority, they’re now also suggesting that not raising the debt limit might not be such a bad thing.

“We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary partial government shutdown -which is what that could mean,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) on MSNBC Wednesday. “A temporary disruption because we have to furlough the workers at the Department of Education, or close down some national parks, or not cut the grass on the Mall, that’s not optimal, it’s disruptive, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the path that we’re on.”

In a Friday Houston Chronicle op-ed, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), a member of GOP leadership, used the same language.

“It may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal well being of our country,” he wrote.

The goal is to present to both the public, and perhaps rank and file Republicans who don’t fully understand the nature of the debt limit threat, that the consequences would be fairly modest — to foster a climate in which raising the debt limit without legislative concessions from Democrats will be impossible.

But for two years now, experts — from academia to the Treasury Department to the Congressional Budget Office — have warned in plain terms that the actual consequences would be much worse: a recessionary drop in spending at best and a calamitous debt default at worse.

A government shutdown, like the ones Republicans precipitated in 1995, occurs when Congress fails or refuses to appropriate funds for government operations. Because the executive branch lacks the power to raise and spend money on its own, government functions cease until the political pressure builds on Congress to pass appropriations and then those operations resume.

Not raising the debt limit, by contrast, leaves the government far short of the money it needs to execute the spending Congress has told it to undertake. That would be unprecedented, and put the executive branch in legally uncharted territory: unable legally to borrow the money needed to pay all of its bills, but still required by law to pay them. It would impact services in a chaotic and unpredictable fashion, while removing tens of billions of dollars a month from the economy — many times the contractionary effect of the fiscal cliff’s sequestration provisions.

It’s likely that the government would eventually fail to service all of its debt, damaging U.S. credit and touching off a major financial catastrophe.

Toomey, along with Reps. Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, played a similar role in 2011 debt limit fight, arguing that breaching the debt limit for a brief amount of time would be relatively harmless.

History’s repeating itself. Read on ...

With the help of the likes of David Gregory and his ilk in the media. And for more on why means testing and raising the retirement age is a bad idea, go read here and here and here.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Chris Matthews was apparently completely enamored with Mitch Daniels and his response to President Obama's State of the Union Address this Tuesday night and all I can say is thank goodness Rachel Maddow was there to at least beat back at part of Matthews' fawning praise.

She didn't really have much time to respond to Matthews since they were coming up on a hard break for a commercial, but it's too bad she also did not point out that one, there was nothing honest about Daniel's speech. It was full of one lie after another. And means testing "entitlements", and I hate that word by the way, but means testing Social Security and Medicare is nothing but a way to turn them into welfare programs and to later have an excuse to eliminate them. It's a terrible idea.

And this best kind of "honest" "fiscally conservative" Republican was George W. Bush's OMB Director that helped get our economy into this mess, who has no right to be criticizing that Obama didn't fix Bush's mess quickly enough and is in the middle union busting and pushing right to work in his state and is not looking out for the working class. He's just another Republican governor doing their best to make the economy as terrible as humanly possible at the bidding of the Koch brothers and the richest among us in order to keep President Obama from being reelected. Sadly if this was Matthews' immediate response, we'll surely be hearing more of this sort of ridiculous praise of Daniels' speech from the rest of the Villagers in the beltway media.

MATTHEWS: You know, I really liked that speech by Mitch Daniels. I thought it was really a Midwestern conservatism of the best kind, honest, fiscally conservative or course, but recognizing that we have to protect our safety net and we have to recognize that the rich cannot get all the pension money and all the entitlement money. There's not enough to go around. We're going to have to have means testing. We're going to have to close the loopholes.

A very responsible kind of look at fiscal conservatism that recognizes that the rich can't plunder the poor any more, that if you're going to have a true conservatism, in other words a society that will sustain itself, a society that will be at peace with itself, you need to help the people to get a break and that means it's not Libertarianism at all. There's nothing of Ron Paul in what that man said.

It was a responsible social policy of the right, which was really I think cast in old time Midwest, Bob Taft conservatism, except for some of the bromides, the idiomatic crap that he threw in there to make everybody happy. There was a seriousness to this speech. And now I understand why people like Mitch Daniels.

MADDOW: Chris I am very glad that we area all talking about this together because I could not disagree with you more about the speech. This was just my impression of it but I don't have time to go into that...

MATTHEWS: Why?

MADDOW: We're going to go into that in a moment.

MATTHEWS: What's wrong?

MADDOW: I think that Mitch Daniels there to say the world is on fire. Be afraid. Run to Republicans. I mean, he's talking about America as a country that... America adrift, quarreling and paralyzed going over Niagra. I mean this was a “Be afraid, be afraid, be afraid” this guy's trying to murder the country speech.

MATTHEWS: But he also had solutions. He had gutsy solutions. He wasn't afraid to take on the rich and that's so rare today in the Republican side.

MADDOW: I will take you on that Chris, absolutely.

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I'm waiting to see how Mitt Romney walks any of this back once the general election begins if he ends up winning the Republican presidential nomination because I don't see how his statements tonight on Social Security and Medicare are going to help him with seniors later on, no matter how many times he reiterates that the cuts won't affect current recipients or those over fifty five years of age. During this Monday night's Republican debate Romney apparently thinks that seniors don't care what happens to their children or grandchildren.

Romney was asked what he would do in regards to Social Security and Medicare and he started things out with one of the Republican zombie lies out there, that President Obama cut $500 billion from Medicare. Mother Jones has more on why that's just not true here -- Return of the Big GOP Medicare Lie.

He also fully endorsed raising the eligibility ages for both Social Security and Medicare, endorsed Paul Ryan's plan to privatize Medicare, means testing which turns the programs into welfare programs and block-granting Medicaid back to the states. He also seemed to completely contradict himself within the time frame of a few minutes with his follow up a little later in the debate when he said "we simply can't say we're going to go out and borrow more money to let people set up new accounts to take money away from Social Security and Medicare today." Just what does he think those "voluntary" accounts are going to do to future benefit recipients? It's bad enough the man flip flops on every issue, he couldn't even get his talking points straight within a sentence of each other.

Sadly the awful policies he was promoting here rather than raising taxes on the wealthy and raising the income cap on payroll taxes and curbing the cost of health insurance by moving to a single payer program are not anything that either interests or is supported by his fellow Republican primary contenders, or the hapless moderators asking the questions during the debate.

Transcript below the fold.

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Tom Brokaw is apparently very confused on the issue of “shared sacrifice” and who has and has not already been sacrificing in our society. On this Sunday's Meet the Press, while discussing a recent AARP ad where the group basically stated that the politicians had better keep their hands off of Social Security and Medicare, Brokaw called the ad selfish and an example of "I got mine, to heck with the rest of you." Brokaw followed that with a lot of hand wringing about what tough times we're all in for in America and how we need to be ready to “make some hard calls.”

It seems those “hard calls” include means testing Social Security, which is a terrible idea because it turns it into a welfare program that would be much easier to destroy. And nowhere in the conversation did raising taxes on the rich, raising the cap on payroll taxes, our terrible trade laws that encourage a race to the bottom on wages, the destruction of the labor movement or the refusal to regulate the financial industries come up as a solution to making sure we can keep our social safety nets in place and that we don't have senior citizens or anyone else for that matter living in poverty.

Color me not shocked since our Villagers in the corporate media still aren't over their fetish with austerity measures, regardless of where the majority of public opinion is at right now where people are fed up with the income disparity and the poor and middle class being the only ones asked to make some kind of “shared sacrifice.”

Transcript below the fold.

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Harold Ford Jr. (D-Wall Street) and The Washington Post's Ezra Klein had a bit of a back and forth on Morning Joe earlier today and apparently he had a problem with the concept of math when crunching numbers doesn't fit into his preconceived political assumptions. When Ezra Klein said you could take care of the shortfall for Social Security for the next seventy five years by raising the cap on payroll taxes, Ford wanted to argue with him.

Heaven forbid we can't get a little "shared sacrifice" from the likes of Ford to keep some lower income retirees afloat. Can't have that... oh no. But he loves the idea of means testing it, which we know would just turn it into a welfare program. And we all know what conservatives think about welfare.

Ezra responds here -- What’s hard about deficit reduction isn’t the math:

I got into a bit of a back-and-forth with Harold Ford on “Morning Joe” today over entitlements. Ford said he “didn’t like my math,” but the question with math, of course, is not whether you like it, but whether it’s right.

So let’s check it out. Start with Social Security: I said that the size of the shortfall over the next 75 year is 0.7 percent of GDP. You could pretty much wipe that out by allowing the payroll tax to apply to wages over $107,000 (Ford seemed to think the payroll tax applies to earnings up to $116,000 now, but he’s wrong about that). CBO estimates “the 75-year actuarial balance [of Social Security] to be 0.6 percent of gross domestic product.” I’ve seen 0.7 percent of GDP elsewhere, but I’ll take that as a slight strike against me.

As for eliminating the payroll tax cap do, “this option would improve the 75-year actuarial balance by 0.6 percentage points of GDP and extend the trust fund exhaustion date to 2083.” Come 2083, you’d have to do something else to shore up Social Security. But I’d be pretty happy to secure Social Security for the next 75 years. Rep. Ted Deutch, incidentally, has legislation to do exactly that.

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Thank you Harry Reid! It's about time I heard a Democrat start to push back against the rhetoric we've been hearing on Social Security. David Gregory tried to get Reid to say that we need to go after Social Security to solve our "debt problem" (the one they only started caring about after a Democrat got elected as president) and Reid held firm that the program is not in crisis and is going to be solvent for years to come.

Frankly I'd like to see them leave that percentage right where it is now and take the cap off of the terribly regressive tax, but I would imagine it will be a cold day in hell before we see the politicians allow that to happen.

DAVID GREGORY: What about the role of government, however? Under President Obama the federal debt has expanded by 32 percent. Are people rightfully concerned about the role of government under this President, under Democratic leadership?

HARRY REID: People are concerned about the debt, as they should be. But let's just go back a little bit and look at history. It's not as if we Democrats don't know how to run government. Bill Clinton had a program called PAYGO. If you're gonna have a new program, pay for it; either by increasing revenue or cutting other programs. We did that, and as a result of that we were paying down the debt.

And during the eight years of Bush, the first thing they did is get rid of the PAYGO rules. And we have them now reestablished. And we-- this last Congress, 111th Congress and President Obama, found ourselves in a hole so deep, you couldn't see the top of it. And we're working out way out of that hole.

DAVID GREGORY: Social Security-- how does it have to change? What they put on the agenda is raising the retirement age, maybe means testing benefits. Is it time for Social Security to fundamentally change if you're gonna deal with the debt problem?

HARRY REID: One of the things that always troubles me is when we start talking about the debt, the first thing people do is run to Social Security. Social Security is a program that works. And it's going to be-- it's fully funded for the next forty years. Stop picking on Social Security. There're a lotta places--

DAVID GREGORY: Senator are you really saying --

HARRY REID: --where you can go to save money.

DAVID GREGORY:-- the arithmetic on Social Security works?

HARRY REID: I'm saying the arithmetic in Social Security works. I have no doubt it does.

DAVID GREGORY: It's not in crisis?

HARRY REID: The ne-- no, it's not in crisis. This is-- this is-- this is something that's perpetuated by people who don't like government. Social Security is fine. Are there things we can do to improve Social Security? Of course.

DAVID GREGORY: Means testing. Raising the --

DAVID GREGORY:--retirement age--

HARRY REID: --don't--

DAVID GREGORY: --do you--

HARRY REID: --I'm--

DAVID GREGORY: --agree with either of those?

HARRY REID: --I'm not going to go to with any of those backdoor methods- you know, to whack Social Security recipients. I'm not going to do that. We have a lot of things we can do with-- this debt. It's a problem. But one of the places where I'm not going to be part of picking on is Social Security.

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Looks like Lindsey Graham is continuing to pander to the extreme right wing of his base, which isn't too happy with him right now, with this rhetoric. Graham wants to hold raising the debt ceiling hostage even though he admits here that it would not be a good thing to have the United States default on our Treasury obligations. But he wants to use this "opportunity" to raise the retirement age and means test Social Security and Medicare Part D, or in other words, turn them into welfare systems.

And as I've said before, we all know what Republicans think of welfare. This is nothing more than using the debt ceiling as an excuse to destroy Social Security and our social safety nets in America. Although Graham later admitted that Republicans really didn't want to shut down the government, he apparently is more than willing to play political games with our entire economy in order to get their last chunk of flesh from the working class.

GREGORY: Let me break a few of those things down because it's important, the level of detail. Let me start with this. You talk about the budget. You talk about spending. How will you vote on the debt ceiling? Will you vote to raise it which is a vote that will come up in relatively short order?

GRAHAM: Well to not raise the debt ceiling could be a default of the United States on bond and treasury obligations. That would be very bad for the position of the United States in the world at large but this is an opportunity to make sure that government is changing its spending ways.

I will not vote for the debt ceiling increase until I see a plan in place that will deal with our long term debt obligations starting with Social Security, a real bipartisan effort to make sure that Social Security stays solvent, adjusting the age, looking at means tests for benefits. On the spending side I'm not going to vote for a debt ceiling increase unless we go back to 2008 spending levels, cutting discretionary spending...

GREGORY: Let me stop you right there Senator. That's a big condition just on Social Security alone. Do you think Republicans are prepared to follow you in two things you said; raise the retirement age and means test benefits for older Americans?

GRAHAM: I would suggest that if we're serious about taking America in a new direction and you're not putting entitlement reform on the table, you've missed a great opportunity to change the course of America's future. And the last election was about change, change that really will make us something other than Greece. I think Pat Toomey, Rand Paul and the other candidates that are new to the Congress that said during the campaign, everything's on the table when it comes to making America fiscally sound. Let's see if we can find bipartisan reforms in Social Security before we raise the debt limit.

GREGORY: Do you think Sen. McConnell, the leader of the Republicans is going to go along with that?

GRAHAM: I hope so. I know that Speaker Boehner is going to produce spending limitation bills every day, but the question for the Republican Party, for the tea party and the Democratic Party, beyond discretionary spending are we willing to look at the debt commission suggestions on entitlement reform and begin to enact those reforms before it's too late. I hope that this new Congress will do something the other Congresses have never done and that is seriously look at entitlement reform by adjusting the age and means testing benefits, including Medicare Part D.

Obama health care needs to be repealed and replaced but the Republican Party created Medicare Part D, a prescription drug entitlement that's already gotten out of control. I hope we'll put that on the table for reform.

GREGORY: Would you vote to actually scrap that, to take it away?

GRAHAM: I would vote to means test it. I would vote to make sure that people with my income level and your income level don't get their benefit... their prescription drug bill paid by the federal government because we can't afford it. I would vote to make sure that someone in my income level would have their Social Security benefits renegotiated if they're under 55, not in a Draconian way but changes we can make now for people 55 and under to avoid a fiscal collapse that's surely coming if we do nothing.

The president said in his speech he wants to work with us. This is a good opportunity to find common ground; entitlement reforms starting with Social Security.

Of course, Graham and the rest of the pearl-clutching Republican Party had no problem doubling the national debt under President Bush and raising the debt ceiling seven times, as Jon Perr points out.

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Mitch Daniels is being touted as potentially one of the hopeful presidential candidates for the GOP in 2012, but this interview with MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan fill-in Matt Miller didn't impress me much. Daniels just looked like someone stammering through the list of recent GOP talking points which includes everyone feeling some "shared sacrifice" and cuts to Social Security and Medicaid with no talk about the wealthy in American sharing any of that pain as well.

One of the ideas that Daniels promoted during this interview as the rich potentially doing their share is the Trojan House of means testing Social Security which is nothing but an attempt by the right to turn the program into another form of welfare... and we all know what Republicans think of welfare programs. Dean Baker has more on why that's a really bad idea.

Family Friendly Cuts to Social Security: The Myth of Affluence Testing:

Billionaire Wall Street investment banker Peter Peterson has come up with a focus group tested term for his plan to cut Social Security. He calls it "affluence testing." The idea is that we will just cut Social Security benefits for wealthy people like Peterson who don't need their Social Security. We won't touch benefits for ordinary working people.

That's a great story. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the debate over cutting Social Security. The problem with the Peterson story is there are very few wealthy elderly. We can zero out the benefits for Peterson and his wealthy friends and nothing in the Social Security accounts would change. Social Security's maximum benefits are just a bit over $30,000. Taking away $30,000 from a few thousand families makes no measurable difference in a program that spends $700 billion a year. [...]

This is important not just as a moral issue, but also for political reasons. Social Security enjoys enormous bipartisan support because all workers pay into it and expect to benefit from it in retirement. Taking away the benefits that better-off workers earned would undoubtedly undermine their support for the program. This could set up a situation in which the program could be more easily attacked in the future.

Go read the rest but the last bit in his post says it all. Means testing would just be another way to undermine the program and eliminate it. Don't be fooled by any talk that it would help save Social Security. As Karoli noted in her post, I'm as tired of these lies as well, and if they're going to keep the worker's contribution at 4%, I'm all for it as long as they raise the cap or get rid of it completely. It's a terribly regressive tax where the rich don't pay their share.

Sadly our corporate media has gone full bore with promoting this "bipartisan" "centrist" solution to solving our debt problem that none of them gave a hoot about when George Bush was invading two countries and not even bothering to include them in the budget. Now we've got a crisis on our hands. Bulls#%t.

This is nothing but them doing their part to help the politicians destroy what's left of the social safety nets that we've got left and what little of the middle class in left in America. And as someone who monitors the cable news programming for Crooks and Liars and has for years, this kind of talk is nonstop and on every network... and it's getting really old listening to these talking heads really fast.

When the rich want to start paying their fair share in taxes we can start talking about some "shared sacrifice". Until then, we need to be pushing back against this crap and telling our politicians and the talking heads in the media that we're not buying their snake oil.