Social Security

President Obama’s parting gift to Speaker Boehner – a ‘grand bargain’ to clean out the barn?

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Barn“I don’t want to leave my successor a dirty barn,” John Boehner, the soon-to-depart Speaker of the House, told CBS News’ John Dickerson in September. “I want to clean the barn up a little bit before the next person gets there.” Mr. Boehner, Clean Up This Barn.

Word comes today that there may indeed be a “grand bargain” between the White House and Congressional leaders to “clean the barn” out of Tea-Publican hostage taking threats to shut down the federal government.

Roll Call reports Big Budget Deal Could Clean Out Boehner’s Barn:

Speaker John A. Boehner’s effort to “clean the barn” before leaving Congress is gaining momentum, with the four corners of congressional leadership and the White House hoping for a budget and debt limit deal.

The Republican from Ohio does not want to leave a crisis behind for Ways and Means Chairman Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., who is expected to be elected as the new speaker on Thursday.

Under discussion is a deal that would suspend limits on the nation’s borrowing authority until March 2017, along with two years worth of partial relief from the budget caps known as sequestration. The package would also address the Medicare Part B issue, aimed at protecting millions of seniors from significant increases to their health insurance premiums and deductibles.

An agreement could be announced as early as Monday evening, according to two familiar with the talks. The House Republican Conference scheduled a meeting for 6 p.m. to discuss the “October agenda,” according to a GOP aide.

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The GOP plots the next round of hostage takings and ransom demands

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Greg Sargent noted in his column on Friday, Chaos in Congress is about to get a lot crazier:

The quote of the week, one that will likely reverberate through the halls of Congress for many months to come, is this one from GOP Rep. Charlie Dent, lamenting the inability of the House GOP caucus to unite behind, well, anything at all:

“We really don’t have 218 votes to determine a bathroom break over here on our side. So how are we going to get 218 votes on transportation, or trade, or whatever the issue?”

If you thought that the GOP clusterfuck over the Department of Homeland Security funding fiasco was fun, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The GOP is plotting the next round of hostage takings and is sending more ransom demands to the White House. This week, McConnell will delay Lynch unless Dems cooperate on trafficking bill:

hostageSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday said Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s nominee to succeed Eric Holder as attorney general, will not move until Democrats cooperate surrender on a human trafficking bill.

Democrats have threatened to [filibuster] the bipartisan trafficking measure because Republicans included a provision that would prohibit restitution funds from paying for abortions.

McConnell told Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Lynch’s nomination will remain in a holding pattern until Democrats allow the trafficking bill to move forward.

“This will have an impact on the timing of considering the new attorney general. Now, I had hoped to turn to her next week, but if we can’t finish the trafficking bill, she will be put off again,” he said.

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Ayn Rand fan boy Paul Ryan’s plan to destroy social security in order to ‘reform’ it

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EddieMunsterNo one despises the GOP’s alleged boy genius, Ayn Rand fan boy and failed vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-WI), more than I do. Not even Professor Paul Krugman, who has accurately portrayed Paul Ryan as The Flimflam Man.

Well, I take that back. Charles Pierce at Esquire does share my despise for Paul Ryan with an equal level of contempt. Paul Ryan’s Dubious Leadership: The Margin Of Finagle Revisited:

There are three things that have happened over the past few weeks that are connected, albeit with largely invisible tendrils of bullshit and cupidity. First, under the leadership of Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin and First Runner-Up in our most recent vice-presidential pageant, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, of which Ryan will be chairman of the House Ways And Means Committee, determined that, henceforth, a three-card monte technique called “dynamic scoring” would be employed by the CBO to judge the effect of what Ryan insists on calling “tax reform.” Dynamic scoring is a scam.

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Martha McSally’s first substantive vote in Congress sets up a fight over social security

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Congressman Ron Barber hammered Martha McSally with her previous statements on social security and Medicare during the campaign. Martha McSally swore up and down during the campaign that “I would never do anything to undermine social security,” really.

Yet her very first substantive vote in Congress, vote No. 6 on H.Res. 5 for House Rules Changes, passed 234-176 on a party-line vote, sets up election-year battle over Social Security’s finances in 2016:

McSallyBuried in new rules that will govern the House for the next two years is a provision that could force an explosive battle over Social Security’s finances on the eve of the 2016 presidential election.

Social Security’s disability program has been swamped by aging baby boomers, and unless Congress acts, the trust fund that supports it is projected to run dry in late 2016. At that point, the program will collect only enough payroll taxes to pay 81 percent of benefits, according to the trustees who oversee Social Security.

To shore up the disability program, Congress could redirect payroll taxes from Social Security’s much larger retirement fund — as it has done in the past.

[Reallocating revenue from the much larger Social Security retirement benefits fund to SSDI would cover the shortfall, and trust fund managers have performed such reallocations 11 times since the late 1950s.]

However, the House adopted a rule Tuesday blocking such a move, unless it is part of a larger plan to improve Social Security’s finances, by either cutting benefits or raising taxes [not going to happen in a GOP controlled Congress.]

Long the third rail of American politics, tinkering with Social Security has never been easy. Throw in election-year politics and finding votes in Congress to cut benefits or raise taxes could be especially difficult.

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No country for austerity pushing Democrats

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

deficit cutting

My biggest problem with centrist establishment Democrats has been their insistence on trying to prove they’re the bigger grown-ups in the room by embracing punitive conservative economic ideas and more successfully implementing them. Welfare reform was a perfect example of this. Democratic support for it, including President Clinton’s, was supposed to neutralize the issue for Democrats forever. Oddly, though, I never noticed the tendency of voters to associate Democrats with “welfare” to diminish. What happened was that the idea of “welfare” simply expanded to include any public assistance whatsoever, whether or not the recipient worked for wages, and then further to mean 47% of the country. People still defend welfare reform to me on the policy merits but no one can reasonably argue that it was a long-term political success for Democrats, unless they want to make the perverse case that Mitt Romney lost because at least half the country was offended that he thought they were on welfare.

President Obama embraced deficit reduction from the beginning of his presidency. And he did succeed in shrinking the deficit. Does he get any credit for it? Nope.

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