Throwing a Spending-Cut Anvil to a Drowning Economy

Headline: Debt Commission Leaders: Everything - even new health-care bill - on Table for Cuts.

Everything on the table? Like the billions handed to defense contractors who electrocute troops in the showers and murder civilians in cold blood?

Like the tens of billions in agricultural subsidies handed to obscenely wealthy corporations like ArcherDanielsMidland for replacing diverse food crops with monocultures on the verge of collapse?

Like the hundreds of billions in subsidies handed to international oil cartels as a reward for killing ocean food stocks with oil spills?

No, of course not! What's on the table is Social Security. And Medicare. And Public Education. And Food Stamps. And Renewable Energy. And Unemployment Insurance. And public intrastructure projects that employ millions of people.

In other words, ignoring all the fat, waste and corporate welfare in order to cut the heart out of every job-creating and poverty-alleviating program we've got.

As Rep. John Conyers wrote at FireDogLake last week

(On Tuesday morning,) the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform will hold its first meeting and begin to consider ways to dig our nation out from the irresponsible deficits created by the Bush Administration. This presidentially-created 18-member commission is tasked with addressing “the growth of entitlement spending and the gap between the projected revenues and expenditures of the Federal Government.”

While I and many of my fellow Members of Congress support efforts to balance the budget, it is critically important that this commission examine every part of the federal budget during this process. For example, the Commission should most certainly consider the $985 billion dollars spent on foreign wars since 2001.
In order to ensure that the American people are informed about the Commission’s work, I am asking my House colleagues to join me in sending a letter to the Commission’s co-chairmen asking them to make every one of their meetings (including any working group meetings) public, to rigorously analyze the impact of every potential benefit cut or tax hike, and issue draft recommendations before Election Day, so that voters can ask candidates how they feel about the Commission’s recommendations.

Even Minority Leader John Boehner gets it – he wrote a similar letter to the Commission last month. Although we don’t see eye-to-eye on most issues, one thing the Minority Leader and I can agree on is that the more open and transparent the Commission’s process is, the better the outcome for the American people.
We all know how Americans react to backroom deals cut behind closed doors, and that is why it is critical that we maintain our promises to the people on transparency and openness.

We need transparency to make sure that the members of the Commission don’t buy into the right-wing myths being put forward by CNN, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and others that want to convince the American people that creating jobs and fighting poverty will damage the economy, that Social Security is going broke, and that achieving fiscal stability means cutting Medicare benefits for our seniors.
The large majorities of Americans who oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare haven’t bought into any of those distortions and neither should the members of the Commission. By opening up these meetings and shining sunlight into their deliberations, we can ensure that they won’t.

This has to be a joke, right? We've known since FDR made that mistake in 1937 that cutting spending in a recession is a recipe for catastrophe. So what the fuck is going on here? Digby explains:

It's important that we not let up on this. The deficit is going to be the shadow issue of the election and the president's deficit commission will submit its first report shortly after the votes are in. The commission is stacked with "entitlement" cutters, (only a few of them tax raisers well).

It's entirely possible that Obama is planning to go into 2012 with a "Barack Goes To China" campaign to cut the safety net and prove once and for all that Democrats are "responsible" with the taxpayers money. You'll recall that when Clinton did exactly that in order to change the way people think of the Democratic party, the Republicans impeached him, stole the election and then immediately gave the surplus to their rich friends. It didn't change a thing --- the teabaggers are screeching like harpies about socialism and communism as if that never happened. (Fool me twice ...)

It's important that the base makes it known in no uncertain terms that they will not be railroaded on this so that the Democrats can turn themselves into the party of Susan Collins and lose elections anyway. There's a fight that needs to be had, head on, over what kind of government we want. It's long past time the Democrats engaged it head on.

Read details about the kill-the-economy Deficit Scolds here.

Then call or email your members of Congress to let them know what you think about throwing a spending-cut anvil to a drowning economy.