According to the court intellectuals from the Brookings & Heritage workgroup (pdf), the best way to approach gutting entitlements is through hostile, 'triggering-event' additions to the budget process and the elimination of the entitlements' automatic adjustments to keep up with real world costs. In this way they can avoid the appearance of explicit attacks. The people who perform the gutting can wring their hands and cry, "the Budget made us do it!". As the gutting unfolds, there would be no single activist decision anyone could point to. An explanation of what had happened would take time. Anyone trying to explain would have to be careful not to step on the brand-loyalty corns of the listeners.
Needless to say once the changes have been made, undoing the harm would require more effort than went into it. The defensive collegiality of the dirty legislators would work against it.
The wonks feel the decision to pursue passive aggression has been forced on them by the lack of a "level playing field". There is nothing quite like the endless search for victimology of court intellectuals. And typically, for court intellectuals, they're proud enough of their nasty, contemptible little planning sessions to make the results of them available for public consumption.
The double-speak of fiscal responsibility is remarkable in itself, as sincere pecksniffian budget mania has never been anything but a disaster. The addition of egghead preening and gloating makes it sadistic.The first step toward creating a more level playing field and achieving long-run fiscal sustainability in the federal budget is to take the three major entitlement programs off autopilot. We recommend the following changes:
• Congress and the president should enact explicit long-term budgets for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that are sustainable, set limits on automatic spending growth, and have a required review every five years. Since people depend heavily on these programs and plan their lives around them, they must be budgeted on a long-term basis and should not be adjusted frequently. Reviewing them every year like discretionary spending programs would cause too much uncertainty for retirees and place too great a burden on Congress. The three major entitlement programs should be budgeted for longer periods (for example, 30 years) but be subjected to review every five years. These five-year reviews would allow reconsideration of the trade-offs between entitlement spending and other purposes and might cause adjustments in benefits, premiums, taxes, or all three.
• The rules for the five-year review must include a trigger or action-forcing device that requires explicit decisions when projected spending exceeds budgeted amounts. The trigger might involve automatic benefit cuts or revenue increases (including premium increases) that could only be over-ridden by an explicit vote or enactment of alternative policies that would achieve budget outcomes similar to the automatic adjustments. Alternatively, the trigger process could require that a commission make recommendations for closing the gap to the president and Congress on which an up or down vote must be held. The trigger process that forces an explicit vote when the long-run budget for any of these programs is exceeded will dramatize the importance of modernizing these entitlement programs to reflect increased longevity, higher incomes, and the rising cost of medical care. If the public wants the increasingly expensive health benefits provided by Medicare and Medicaid because they judge them to be well worth the costs, then those benefits will have to be paid for with some combination of revenue increases and cuts in other spending.
• The long-run costs of these three programs should be visible in the budget at all times and considered when decisions are made. Benefits should not be increased—either at the five-year review or in between—without ensuring that they are fully financed.
Comments (9)
doin' the fuckle-buck
working principle:
make the pain automatic
but leave the continuance of
"real " levels of pleasure
to the discretion
of the center aisle swingers
butt fuck sure tells ...
combo-ing the ultimately benign SS benefit/revenue projections
with
the dread medi triplets
no serious discussion
of a change
in revenue source or tax mechanism
for any one of the medi gals A B or C
cost containment
for the three wicked sisters
---unlike benefit reduction
and premium increase proposals---
left to another task force
to be formed at a later date
Posted by op | January 21, 2009 8:41 AM
Posted on January 21, 2009 08:41
Diluted agency for all, eh? No single villain, no single moment anyone can point to. Count on socratic obscurantism to make the marks do all the convincing -- of themselves, by themselves. That works best on the brainiacs, whose self-regard is so inflated that they can't back away from a bogus argument once they get a chance to publish a peer-nuzzled paper on it.
Posted by Al Schumann | January 21, 2009 8:57 AM
Posted on January 21, 2009 08:57
Just pucker up to watch your federal benefits slip away, unless you are; born stupid or irresponsible to the point of not being able to afford to live. Because we won't let people stay completely helpless, we like to watch them struggle forever from on top of the foot hills of middle class and feel good we let schizo homeless veterans and unskilled workers with litters of children continue to collect benefits funded mainly by other people who elect to live off credit and scrape a few bucks together who eventually will probably join the helpless echelon after this corporate rapeing of Americans who elected to take an ARM at record lows because their credit was in the toilet already and they felt entilted to the American dream of home-ownership after taking out loans and running up credit cards they couldn't pay to take the required number of Western Civilization and Political Science-Fiction classes required to have a degree in Communications from "No Where University" so they could work in an insurance companies claims dept. and try to fuck everyone out any claim made because you have to pay them but they can skirt around paying you. Next thing you know you're a day late on your Discover card payment and the rate jumps to an APR that makes Berkshire Hathaways inception return look like a fuckin' savings account from 2004 and the Insurance company lays you off on a merger deal and you can't get a job because no one likes claims dept people because everyone's dealt with one of those dirt bags before. The bank wants their money and the student loans collection agencies are calling you night and day one morning your SUV is missing and your Gas gets shut off and you worry 'cause your son wets the bed and he might get hypothermia and have to stay home from his day care center known as elemtary school. Next thing you know you're both at home cutting the eyes out of pictures of women just when the neighbor brings you some tuna fish which happen to be on special and they were thinking of you. They see you two playing eye-collage and child protection repos your kid because the system will teach him how to steal cars and rob liquor stores which is far more marketable these days then a guy with a communications degree. So, you pull all the money out of 401k plan which just took a beating worse Jesus Christ and you figure I'll grab a beer and a pizza. After two beers you leave with your pizza floating around .08, just a Hells Angel passes with out a helmet and you get pulled over for not wearing your seat belt and the nerd you stood up for in junior high is the cop who takes his job more seriously than the lawyer you're gonna pay 5K to get you out of the DUI charge you aquired on top of it. And you think maybe if you actually got tanked and killed someone you'd be lucky enough to go to prison, at least you'd get to eat three times a day hit the gym and get laid.
I don't know what to make of this benefits disaster but I'll keep on thinking about it.
Posted by Son of Uncle Sam | January 21, 2009 10:07 AM
Posted on January 21, 2009 10:07
Al: when they say "budget" here, do they mean the whole federal budget, or just the SS or Medicare budgets? If the latter, haven't they been speaking about the "trigger event" for a long time -- when Medicare especially goes into the red because of the influx of babyboomers? So they'd start right off with a trigger event -- one that would be visible for all to see, and thus still point to the party in power as the Judas of the American dream.
Posted by seneca | January 21, 2009 12:08 PM
Posted on January 21, 2009 12:08
son of s
youre too angry to commute to a job
or have a one piece domestic partner
so why the fuck dopn't ya
join the service boy-oh
they need pissy heels like you
oh you already done that ..okay
so ah...ya ...ya...
prisons good prisons good
Posted by op | January 21, 2009 4:10 PM
Posted on January 21, 2009 16:10
Seneca, I believe they mean the entire federal budget. They refer to it constantly by that name. Although given the convoluted thinking they perform, they could easily be shifting back and forth as needed for better spin.
Yes they have -- good catch, I overlooked that -- and they've been conflating Medicare financing with financing all the other entitlements.
I think that's right on the money.
Posted by Al Schumann | January 21, 2009 4:15 PM
Posted on January 21, 2009 16:15
"Since people depend heavily on these programs and plan their lives around them, they must be budgeted on a long-term basis and should not be adjusted frequently. Reviewing them every year like discretionary spending programs would cause too much uncertainty for retirees and place too great a burden on Congress."
I for one would be relieved in not having to wonder whether my benefits will keep up with the rising with the cost of living each year. And Clinton thought he was being slick with his fine tuning of the CPI.
Posted by Peter | January 21, 2009 6:38 PM
Posted on January 21, 2009 18:38
RE: Semeca's remarks, was Social Security 'in the red' when the baby boomers dependents as were infants, children and adolescents? This baby boomer nonsense is a red herring to aimed to enable the destruction of the remaining aspects of government where the public benefits and no profit is to be had.
Posted by Peter Ward | January 21, 2009 10:03 PM
Posted on January 21, 2009 22:03
"Diluted agency" (thanks Al) is a very important concept. It underlies the creation of public authorities -- water boards, transit and school districts, and of course the great white whale of my adopted home town, The Port Authority Of New York And New Jersey.
It should be noted that these manifestly antidemocratic fortifications have always been greatly beloved of earnest, white-collared Good Government types, Progressives, technocrats and meritocrats, and generally speaking of anyone who's spent much time in the credentialling sector -- on either side of the bars.
Posted by MJS | January 23, 2009 12:32 AM
Posted on January 23, 2009 00:32