Will Anyone Pay the Bills?--David Broder

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/26/AR2005102601911.html?referrer=email


By David S. Broder

Thursday, October 27, 2005; Page A27





At a panel headed by the DLC's chairman, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, the answer that emerged was: Strike a bipartisan bargain that would involve some short-term tax increases in return for long-term savings on entitlement programs and improvements in the administration of government. Gene Sperling, who served as an economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, acknowledged that such a trade-off would simply be a repetition of the kind of bargain Clinton and his Republican predecessors, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, made with Congress in their own time. Those deals -- including the tax increases Reagan signed in 1982 and Bush in 1990 -- limited but did not erase deficits. The budget agreement that Clinton signed in 1997 actually put the federal government briefly back into the black.

Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, another of the DLC panelists, said the principle on which Democrats should approach the next campaign is a simple one: "Anything worth doing is worth paying for." Carper said that implies restoring the old budgetary rule of pay-as-you-go for both tax cuts and spending programs -- something Bush and the congressional Republicans have refused to do. It also implies a greater readiness on the part of Democrats to reexamine the entitlement spending that poses the long-term danger of unsustainable deficits.

This message was spelled out by Maya MacGuineas, a panelist from the New America Foundation and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. As one who has worked with Republican moderates as often as with Democrats, she was particularly insistent that Democrats must ante up for any bipartisan solutions to become possible. Specifically, the Democrats who have profited politically this year (as in the past) by opposing any change in Social Security must, she said, recognize the necessity of reforming the country's retirement system before it becomes an impossible economic burden on working-age Americans.

MacGuineas urged the Democrats to begin examining ideas she and others have put forward that would not simply reduce future benefits or postpone the age at which retirees could claim them but would instead adapt the whole social insurance concept of the 1930s to the realities of a new millennium. Her concepts include mandated programs of individual savings for the predictable expenses of child-rearing, education and retirement; social insurance for the costs of catastrophic but unforeseeable medical bills; and some guarantee of safety-net income for people who, through no fault of their own, lose jobs or retirement benefits because of broad economic changes.



davidbroder@washpost.com



So, I propose that we look at long-term tax increases on profiteers and the upper 5% of the population, an immediate cessation of the Iraq fiasco, and confiscation of all assets of the PlameGate indictees. It's the least they can do for ruining the economy and sacrificing New Orleans.

But it won't be a republican, thats for damn sure.

Their approach validates the Repug lies about government and taxes.

We need a truly progressive program, not warmed over 1950's Republicanism.

tax breaks for the poor and middle class, everyone above that

rape them,

like they raped the environment,
healthcare, insurance, banks, student education, supporting the poor, credit card bullshit, war profiteering companies, pension rapers
and other

DLC related supporters and contributors.

there would be plenty $ for the programs that real democrats support.

Her solutions sound exactly like republican light crap:


"MacGuineas urged the Democrats to begin examining ideas she and others have put forward that would not simply reduce future benefits or postpone the age at which retirees could claim them but would instead adapt the whole social insurance concept of the 1930s to the realities of a new millennium. Her concepts include mandated programs of individual savings for the predictable expenses of child-rearing, education and retirement; social insurance for the costs of catastrophic but unforeseeable medical bills; and some guarantee of safety-net income for people who, through no fault of their own, lose jobs or retirement benefits because of broad economic changes."