The Unkindest Cuts

Let's remember that the point of Austerity Hysteria is that the wealth redistribution in this country from 300,000,000 Americans to a handful of a couple of thousand oligarchs cannot be completed as long as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid still exist.  The goal is to cut or eliminate them, along with as many other social programs as possible.  D-Day reports on the latest efforts to convince America to slit it own throat, and how it is meeting resistance.

The America Speaks meetings held in 19 cities across the country today, funded to the tune of $1 billion dollars by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, were a study in how subtle messaging and deficit hyping can mold and shape opinions that move the public toward right-wing solutions about slashing social spending. Despite an insistence of neutrality, organizers of this series of town hall meetings allowed their agenda to show through, particularly in their presentation of options for how to deal with the nation’s fiscal future. But attendees in Los Angeles and around the country weren’t totally buying it in the first half of the meeting.

The Peterson Foundation is dedicated to balancing the budget by eliminating as much spending as possible, and starting with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  And they have a whole hell of a lot of money to try to convince us that if that doesn't happen, America will be destroyed.  They have a plan and they are executing it.

“Everything must be on the table,” said David Walker, and while everything certainly was at the meeting, it was tilted in a particular direction. The meeting was designed to provide an outline of the fiscal challenges of the nation, and offer solutions for how to meet it. But all the solutions were very prescribed and very narrow. An authoritative “Options Workbook” sets out potential budget solutions, on the spending and revenue side. 28 pages cover spending cuts, 15 pages cover revenue solutions. And the very first pages of the workbook talk about cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

While the workbook has pages and pages describing the health care system, the final menu of solutions simply list amounts of percentage cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, without mentioning how to achieve those cuts. The options to “achieve savings” in the program include means-testing, raising deductibles and co-pays, increasing the Medicare eligibility age, limiting Medicaid eligibility and voucher-izing Medicare. There are no progressive solutions nor is there anything close to the potential savings achieved in the Affordable Care Act, things like health IT and bundled payments and increased efficiency.

On Social Security, a more precise menu of options is offered, but so is a drastic description of the solvency of the program, without one mention of the trillions of dollars of surplus in the Social Security trust fund. The options in the workbook include raising the retirement age, cutting benefits through indexing or straight cuts, raising the payroll tax, raising the “limit of taxable earnings” (but not just eliminating the limit) and “creating personal savings accounts within the system,” the language of which has been taken completely from Republican Paul Ryan’s “roadmap” budget.

When the workbook finally gets around to tax increases, the language in the text constantly goes back to how taxing wealthier Americans would “reduce incentives for work and savings.” At one point it says that “Tax increases on upper-income Americans will discourage work and penalize success.” It talks about raising the corporate tax rate but not the effective tax rate, as in reality many corporations pay nothing in taxes. And writing about deductions, little in the workbook talks about the vast amount of subsidies for corporations and, for example, Big Agriculture. Only two specific corporate deductions, for depreciation for equipment and for producing goods in the US, get a mention. That a financial transactions tax makes it into the document (literally as the last option) is surprising, but predictably, the workbook says it could “move stock transactions to other markets.” Growing the economy and the effect of job creation on revenue appears nowhere in the document.

This is GOP economic dogma through and through, and the Peterson Foundation is launching "workshops" like these to scare the hell out of Americans across the country.   We need multi-billion dollar strike fighters and Predator drones and missiles to stop guys with AK-47s, but to pay for it we have to make poor and elderly people suffer because we can never tax the rich to the same extent we tax regular Americans.  Luckily, the folks in Los Angeles weren't drinking the neo-Hoover Kool-Aid.

The propaganda may have wound up being too subtle. Via the America Speaks twitter feed, the top three options at the meetings selected by the participants were: raising the limit on taxable earnings in Social Security, a 5% tax increase on people making over $1 million dollars a year, a carbon tax, and a tax on financial transactions. Whoops!

People would rather increase taxes than lose vital social programs.  Imagine that.