But The Catfood Commission Came Back, The Very Next Day, Part 6

Former Clinton official Erskine Bowles is confident the Catfood Commission will soon have its way in Washington and tells the Dirty F'ckin Hippies to go screw themselves (and I am really, really getting sick of writing posts that involve Former Clinton Officials and Hippie Punching.) 

Mr. Bowles had harsh words for fellow Democrats. He dismissed the idea that raising taxes alone might help erase the deficit, saying "raising taxes doesn't do a dern thing" to address health care costs that are projected to be a big driver of future fiscal problems.

He also said the White House, and House and Senate leadership would have to step in and help drive the process forward. "We're going to have to have leadership...to get to the promised land," he said.

Luckily, Jon Chait is there to beat him with a math stick.

The Affordable Care Act has a wide-ranging series of reforms to transform the incentive structure of insurers, hospitals and physicians, so as to control the long-term rise in costs. Bowles-Simpson just says, we're only going to pay so much and no more, without doing anything to ensure that the cost of the care actually stays within those bounds.

The problem is, if health care costs continue to skyrocket, we're in trouble no matter what. Simply shifting more of the cost onto people will replace public debt with private debt. Moreover, setting a cap in perpetuity isn't a terribly effective way to bind future policymakers. You can say they can only spend so much, but if the caps are hard to meet, they'll go around them. You need mechanisms to make the caps effective, but Bowles-Simpson has little of that.

The one step that actually would reduce the deficit substantially and in the correct time frame is letting the Bush tax cuts expire. I can't think of a good fiscal rationale for Bowles to dismiss that, though the political logic of doing so is clear enough.

The bottom line is the biggest single deficit creator over the next ten years is the Bush tax cuts.  These need to go away for the wealthiest Americans at the very least.  But nobody is talking about that, not Erskine Bowles and certainly not Republicans, whose solutions to the deficit include trying to deal with trillions by cutting $60 million from Public Broadcasting and saying the Democrats aren't serious about deficit reduction, then saying we should bomb Libya.

The people talking seriously about the deficit are few and far between, and none of them have "Former Clinton official" on their job resume.