Tornado Alley (PROG)

[n4807g]

But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?

They (the American voter) never will accept cuts, at least not to their own benefits. We see in Obama's healthcare plan that those benefits will expand. In fact neither party will successfully cut benefits.

So the beast is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission.

A joke....this commission is political cover. A basic tool in any politicians bag of magic tricks.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page denounced any such means-testing, because “middle- and upper-middle-class (i.e., G.O.P.) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes.

His assertion (i.e., G.O.P.) and idiotic too boot. The WSJ is correct, the program was billed as a binding agreement, a sacred trust, between government and taxpayers. If the politicians want to fairly recover tax dollars raise the tax rate on retirement income, for all types of retirement income, not just Social Security.

What Krugman can't say: these programs have become the noose around the economies neck. It's easy to blame one party or the other when the cost of these entitlements is slowly strangling the economy.

When's he going to write a damning piece on the public sector and demonize their political patrons?