I've stated many times that the Cat Food Commission has to simply cease to exist as it serves no useful purpose. Actually, now that the person who's apparently the sole liberal on the Commission has spoken up, there might be a purpose to allowing it to continue to exist after all. Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) has come up with a plan that's considerably better than the Bowles-Simpson plan ($427 billion in savings by 2015, vs. $250 billion) and it doesn't touch Social Security at all.
She takes over $120 billion in expenditures out of the war-making budget by following the recommendations of Representative Barney Frank's (D-MA) bipartisan Strategic Defense Task Force. In a recommendation that I refer to as "red meat for progressives," She proposes to "Raise $132.2 billion by closing tax subsidies for companies that ship American jobs overseas." She plans to increase collections through "progressive reforms to the estate tax, treating capital gains and dividends as regular income, and enacting a cap and trade proposal that includes protections for lower-income people." Oh, and she also proposes spending $200 billion on another stimulus. As of the one-year anniversary of the stimulus passing through Congress, it was pronounced a qualified success. Essentially, it was good, but it would have been better if it had been larger.
Will the other commissioners take Schakowsky's proposal seriously? I kinda doubt that as I think they're just looking for an excuse to cut down the standard of living of the non-rich, but hey, for purely political "optics," it's far better to support a long shot than to appear to be a completely stubborn rejectionist.
mentions Schakowsky's competing plan:
ReplyDeleteAlso not mentioned: Rep. Jan Shakowsky, (sic) a member of the fiscal commission who strongly disagrees with the Simpson-Bowles approach and who has produced her own dept-reduction plan.
In other words, we can pretty much ignore the fact that Schakowsky's plan even exists.