Battle isn't over until Democrats stop buying into the deficit obsession

from digby:

. . . as I wrote yesterday, as long as the Democrats keep putting the "entitlements" on offer, the activist left must remain on alert. Assuming that nobody really means it or the right will never accept it is foolish. It's right there in the president's current budget, ripe for the picking . . .

Recall that Social Security is not included in the budget so there is no reason it should be included in any deficit reduction package. One must suspect that this is being done at least partially to obscure the fact that the Chained-CPI is a tax increase on working and middle class workers. Interestingly, Republicans have a way around that:

-- Conservative groups are warning lawmakers they have “strong concerns” that a proposal to slow the rate of inflation for government programs could result in tax increases. .. “We are not opposed to chained CPI under any circumstances,” the groups wrote in a letter to lawmakers dated Monday. “In the context of bracket-flattening tax reform which is revenue-neutral or a net tax cut, chained CPI may be an acceptable component. But as a standalone tax measure, chained CPI is a $100 billion tax increase in the first decade alone.

The next few weeks are going to be about how to "replace" the slash and burn sequester cuts with something less immediately brutal. (I haven't heard a peep about repealing it, which should be the rallying cry of the left.) Reports are that the Republicans hate it as much as the Democrats so there is incentive on both sides to find a better way. But keep in mind that even though the president has held fast on his pledge to "ask the wealthy to pay a little bit more as part of a balanced approach", both sides remain committed to deficit reduction whether they are able to lift the budget caps a little bit or not. So the question is really about where these cuts will fall not whether these cuts will fall. You can certainly see the incentive to push the pain into the future in the form of "entitlement cuts" that will hit long after most of these people will have moved on to their comfortable K-Street sinecures.

The American people got their government open again, avoided default and lived to fight another day on entitlement cuts. This is a good day. But the battle isn't over until the Democrats stop buying into the deficit obsession and fool themselves into thinking that if they can just "get that out of the way" they will be able to do all the things they'd really like to do. The last 20 years have proved that to be an absurd delusion that has brought us to the point at which a Democratic President has repeatedly offered up the signature achievement of the Democratic Party --- and the only thing standing between some of the most vulnerable citizens in our nation and indecent poverty --- as a form of human sacrifice. Until that proposal comes off the Democratic agenda permanently, the fight must go on . . .


read: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/dispatch-from-tealamo.html