DOWNLOADS: (104)

PLAYS: (277)

Embed

I guess PBS decided that "Fix the Debt" campaign's Steve Rattner wasn't getting quite enough air time, what with his near daily appearances on MSNBC's Morning Joe, because Charlie Rose and his producers gave him some unfettered air time Monday evening.

Rose asks why President Obama should care about the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party" thinks about his policies, and whether he's willing to go after our social safety nets. I'd love to know the last time Rose asked whether a Republican president should just ignore the base of his party and suggested that what they think doesn't matter all that much. To his credit, Rattner did admit that President Obama has good reason to pay attention to those that just reelected him, and that they should not be ignored.

He also briefly alluded to the conversation he had during the panel segment on This Week, where his fellow guest Steve Brill rightfully pointed out that lowering the Medicare age would actually save money, but rather than getting into the weeds on that discussion, Rattner only admitted that maybe raising the age might not be "such a good idea." Heaven forbid anyone might actually discuss the heart of Brill's arguments, because it runs counter to the Villager narrative that we must raise the Medicare eligibility age in order to control our health care costs.

Instead, the conversation turned to whether President Obama is entitled to change his mind on the issue or not and with Rattner again pushing for "significant changes to entitlements" as long as there "was a reasonable response from the Republicans on revenues." The idea that Republicans are ever going to come around on taxes seems pretty ridiculous, and as Karoli noted here on our health care costs, the problem is not with the cost to administer Medicare or with the consumers out there, it's with the providers Congress refuses to reign in.

Rose and Rattner were also extremely dismissive of Paul Krugman, who has written extensively about the fact that the debt and the deficit are not urgent issues now and not what we should be focusing on, with Rose calling him "a Nobel Prize winner, but also a minority opinion."

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (134)

PLAYS: (530)

Embed

Chuck Todd and the rest of the beltway Villagers over at MSNBC just can't stop themselves. Todd treated his viewers to yet another infomercial from the network for the Fix the Debt campaign, this time with former Republican Rep. Mark Kennedy having a seat at the table instead of their regular contributor, Ed Rendell, who is usually the one who we see shilling for that organization on the network.

After showing some footage of Republican Paul Ryan blaming the budget sequester on President Obama, but completely ignoring Ryan's hypocrisy on the matter, Todd opined and asked Kennedy why, if this current threat of sequester didn't force both sides to come together, how in the world are we ever going to believe they'll ever work anything out?

Kennedy responded by blaming the problem on the lack of trust between the two parties (never mind which party we can rightfully blame for the better part of that), and he blamed a good portion of the impasse on what he called “debt deniers."

It looks to me like this is taken straight out of the latest attack on Paul Krugman from Todd's fellow MSNBC contributor, Joe Scarborough. After Krugman came on the air with Scarborough and handed his ass to him, Scarborough continued to rant that he was right about the debt.

Here's more on that from Jonathan Chait: Scarborough and Friends Trying to Make ‘Debt Deniers’ Happen:

The deficit scold cause has suffered significant intellectual erosion over the last year or so. In the short run, the interest rate spike they keep insisting will happen keeps not happening. In the long run, the health-care-cost inflation that is at the root of the long-term fiscal predicament is growing markedly less dire. The case for prudent fiscal adjustment remains strong, but the case for bug-eyed, table-pounding terror is growing increasingly ridiculous.

But bug-eyed, table-pounding terror is the stock-in-trade of the fiscal scold movement. And so they are striking back by labeling anybody with a calmer view of the deficit as a “debt denier.” Joe Scarborough, who may have launched the new catchphrase on Twitter, has a new op-ed in Politico brandishing the epithet. Meanwhile, the anti-deficit lobby “Fix the Debt” — for whom Scarborough has served as one of many media spokespersons — has taken up Scarborough’s favorite label with a new campaign, debtdeiners.com, which, alongside its latest attempt to generate a viral dance video, amounts to a concerted counteroffensive against Paul Krugman and others who have ever so slightly mitigated the tone of apocalyptic hysteria surrounding the fiscal debate. They even have their own debt deniers hashtag. They are trying very hard to make “debt deniers” happen.

Go read the rest of Chait's post on why pushing for deficit reduction now is harmful to our economy and helping it to recover and how ridiculous the position of these deficit scolds has been.

Never mind that though if you watch this interview. In the world of Chuck Todd and his guest Mark Kennedy, the almighty Thomas Friedman must be listened to -- because everyone knows that's what all the Very Serious People out there do. He's never been wrong about anything and "debt denier" is now the new phrase they're going to use for anyone who actually wants us to grow our economy by enacting some progressive policies -- instead of using the deficit as an excuse to slash our social safety nets.

DOWNLOADS: (76)

PLAYS: (183)

Embed

The panel segment from this Sunday's Face the Nation was yet another exercise we've seen far too often these days, with millionaire pundits telling everyone how "balanced" it is to whack away at the social safety nets for the most vulnerable among us in order to balance the budget. And host Bob Schieffer wasn't exactly honest with the way he portrayed one of his guests, Maya MacGuineas, when he introduced her.

Rather than letting the viewers know that this woman has been advocating for privatizing Social Security from way back and that she's a long time influential lobbyist in Washington, Schieffer described her as someone from a new group which calls itself "Fix the Debt" that is "one of the kind of go to people in Washington on this in terms of crunching budget numbers."

Well, who could argue with that when you've got Republicans and pundits like Schieffer and his ilk continually telling us that that debt is just going to destroy this country unless we do something about it right now? An expert at "crunching budget numbers." Now who wouldn't want to hear the advice she has to give?

I wonder how most of the people watching this segment would have felt about her advice and whether they like the politicians listening to it, if they knew these things about her.

She was pushing for Social Security privatization back in 2004 when Bush was in office and said this:

Continue reading »