Ted Marmor has an interesting piece on the Huffington Post concerning the work of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Marmor believes that the Commission seems determined to recommend deep cuts in Social Security benefits. Here is a brief excerpt:
[T]he same attacks on Social Security have been going on -- in different guises -- for at least four decades. ... What is crucial to understand is how devious and misleading such lines of argument are. They are best understood as an ideological remedy searching for plausible occasions to celebrate what was presumed.
Marmor's piece must be hitting home. Andrew Biggs has chosen to respond on his own blog. Biggs seems to feel that it is inappropriate for anyone to respond to the right wing attacks upon Social Security. He calls Marmor's piece an attack upon the character and motivation of those who want to dismantle Social Security. Biggs takes offense at the suggestion that he and others who want to gut Social Security are ideologically motivated. Yeah, right, you're just a scholar and a patriot, Biggs. You've got no ideological ax to grind.
"Critics ... were not prepared to attack the desirability of social insurance programs directly. Instead, claims varied from how ungovernable such programs seemed during the 70s to the follow-up charge of affordability.
ReplyDeleteWhat is crucial to understand is how devious and misleading such lines of argument are."
Sounds like a pretty clear attack on the "the character and motivation" of critics to me. "Devious" and "misleading" are quite loaded terms, bordering quite closely to what people used to call slander (or libel in this printed case).
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/06/07/deficit-commission-out-of-money/
ReplyDeleteSaddled with a tight deadline and great expectations, members of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission say they may not have the resources necessary to meet their task.
The White House has set aside the resources to provide the equivalent of four full-time salaries and $500,000 in operating costs for the commission, fiscal commission Executive Director Bruce Reed told Tax Analysts.
The commission has as many as 15 employees, two full-time, for their work. Congress has allocated $500,000 in operating costs apart from the four full-time employees for the life of the panel, which produces its report on December 1. That is about $50,000 per month to analyze the federal budget and develop proposals for cuts, based on having an unpaid commission full of supposed experts in this field. I ran a call center of 45 people with a budget just over four times that much, which included the salaries and a lot of costs that the Deficit Commission won’t have to address, such as phone lines, rent, capital depreciation, and so on.
This is a microcosm of the very problem that the commission is supposed to fix, and the reaction from Washington pols is priceless for understanding it. The gripe from Harry Reid is that the staffing doesn’t match that of Congressional panels, such as the House Ways and Means Committee. That panel employs 90 staffers and spent over $8 million in FY2009. Ninety staffers equals more than 20% of the entire Congress. Maybe the problem isn’t that the NCFRR doesn’t have enough people, but that Ways and Means spends way beyond our means. In fact, the entire federal government spends way beyond our means, and we can thank the Democrats who added over a trillion dollars in annual federal spending in just three short years for that, increasing the budget by 40% during their control of Congress.
Meanwhile, let’s just savor the irony of a deficit commission that couldn’t get halfway to its goal without running its own deficits.
For what it's worth, my complaint was with Marmor calling references to the declining worker/retiree ratio as "deceit" when it's not at all clear that there's anything wrong with doing so, much less that anyone does it deceitfully.
ReplyDeleteI have no problem with people bringing their philosophical beliefs to the policy game; that's totally legitimate on both the left and right. But Marmor effectively calls people liars when there's no strong evidence to back it up.