Time to attack some sacred cows

It looked for a brief moment as if the defeated Democrats were getting down to business just days after the election when the co-chairmen of President Obama’s bipartisan commission on reducing the debt issued a preliminary call for serious spending cuts and tax increases, measures that could save the country from an economic disaster.

Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles asked us to consider, to think about deep cuts in domestic and defense spending, an increase in the gasoline tax, limiting or eliminating popular tax breaks like mortgage interest deductions and cutting benefits and increasing the retirement age for Social Security.

But instead of thinking about the proposals, the same Democrats who lost the House and nearly the Senate, followed their leader, Nancy Pelosi, who dismissed the entire plan as “simply unacceptable.â€

She and others were especially exercised about what they perceived as an attack on that most sacred of cows, the Social Security status quo, even though Social Security will begin paying out more than it receives in just seven years and the fund will be exhausted by 2037.

The commission co-chairmen enraged Pelosi and other Democratic pols by proposing that the age for full Social Security benefits be raised just one year, from 67 to 68 before going all the way to 69.

But not right away.

The age for receiving full benefits would be increased from 67 to 68 by 2050 and to 69 by 2075. Of course, the American life span by 2075 — 65 years from now, if you’re counting — will probably be around 100, but Pelosi and her gang would have had to take a moment to figure that out before reacting.

The Democratic Party’s favorite special interest, organized labor, also offered a similarly thoughtless, sound-bite ready response from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who called the Social Security proposal “a drop dead message to working Americans,†without noting the message is designed for working Americans planning to retire in 40 to 65 years.

Then, at the other end of the extremist spectrum, we had the reactionary Sen. James DeMint of South Carolina asserting we could make up hundreds of billions by cutting government waste without messing with Social Security and without mentioning any specifics.

Connecticut politicians echoed the party line. Remember Senate candidate Linda McMahon’s silly copout when she refused to discuss Social Security, saying debating such a hot-button issue in a campaign is inappropriate? Senator-elect Blumenthal’s knee-jerky response that he would “oppose any cuts in Social Security,†wasn’t any better. John Larson added his view that the proposal was dead on arrival.

The proposal also calls for the amount of income subject to the tax to go up gradually from $106,800 now to $190,000 in 20 years, but it has been going up steadily all our lives.

Wealthier Americans would receive lower benefits while poorer Americans would get more, but Blumenthal believes “everyone should get it and no one should have to prove a need for it.â€

President Obama, as the rare Democratic voice of calm and reason, wisely cautioned that “before anybody starts shooting down proposals, I think we need to listen, we need to gather up all the facts,†he said. “If we are concerned about debt and deficits, then we’re going to have to take actions that are difficult and we’re going to have to tell the truth to the American people.â€

But who listens to him?

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.

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