I think this completely invalidates everything the deficit commission produces and I’d say the same if they were funded by a billionaire who shares my political beliefs:
[T]he National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has also come under attack for its unusual approach to staffing: Many of its employees aren’t employed by the panel at all.Instead, about one in four commission staffers is paid by outside entities, many of which have strong ideological points of view about how to tackle the deficit.
For example, the salaries of two senior staffers, Marc Goldwein and Ed Lorenzen, are paid by private groups that have previously advocated cuts to entitlement programs. Lorenzen is paid by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, while Goldwein is paid by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is also partly funded by the Peterson group.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
(h/t Reader D)
cleek
i am the opposite of shocked
Michael
If Pete Peterson and David Koch were to become victims of Dexter, the world would be a much better place.
4tehlulz
So basically it’s _Reason_ with better letterhead.
Zifnab
Oh, I see. You’d rather have government insiders doing all the number crunching. Maybe we should just let the GAO handle it. Cause they’re non-partisan.
Don’t you see, John. By having outside agents pay the salaries of the commissioners, we are ALREADY SAVING TAX DOLLARS! This just demonstrates how the commission was a complete success and illustrates how we can run government that much more cheaply and efficiently if we just let the billionaire special interests run things.
Steve
You missed the part where they try to defend this by saying “See, by letting the staff get paid by outsiders instead of paying them ourselves, we’re showing how responsible this commission is with the taxpayers’ money!”
I am not even kidding.
duck-billed placelot
Right, this is terrible. But if they HAD been government financed, and they had produced a plan that said, “Raise taxes on rich. Borrow money while interest is zero for massive infrastructure projects a la New Deal to stimulate economy. Pay govt. contractors same as govt. workers.” then what would have happened? Cue right wing noise machine about ‘Obama’s Deficit Panel Worsens Deficit: Obama Just Hiring People With Our Money Without Constitutional Authority!!!1!’
I mean, I thought this panel was a crock of crap to start with, for all the usual reasons, but it’s not like Obama could have avoided criticism for – well, for anything.
Bullsmith
@duck-billed placelot:
But if the criticism is a given, why do the wrong thing? Why allow ideological think tanks to secretly fund your own pet project?
BR
Here’s what I don’t get. What was Obama thinking when he created this thing?
I wonder how much stupidity this administration could have avoided by simply watching the West Wing. I happened to be watching some of Season 2 last night, and they were dealing with this very issue: the president trying to create a bipartisan deficit commission and having problems because they wanted to explore options to raise the retirement age and/or cut benefits and having it piss off the left and eventually have the whole thing come crashing down on their heads.
Comrade Javamanphil
[media]Hmmm, paid staffers of organizations that want to cut entitlements manage to get a government commission to call for entitlement cuts. Nope, sorry, too complicated. Beck smears Soros? Sorry, both sides have a point there. Did Sarah Palin tweet anything today? No? Guess I’ll pop down to the Applebee’s salad bar and find out what’s happening with regular Murkins.[/media]
MattR
Hasn’t Peter G. Peterson been on MSNBC a few times recently to provide “analysis” of this?
The Republic of Stupidity
Well… funny that…
I did notice the commission recommended cutting the highest income tax brackets by 12 points, from 35% to 23%, plus lowering corporate income taxes too, also…
Way to starve the
deficitbeast, guys – slash revenues… especially for the rich and powerful!Feed a fever!
Starve a cold!
Whatever…
MattR
@BR:
He was thinking “We really, really need to get the debt ceiling raised and Congress is not going to agree without a deficiit commission”
Comrade Javamanphil
@BR:
I have no way of knowing, of course, but I think he has been (and is still) naive enough to believe the GOP is actually serious about trying to govern. Why he would believe this I don’t know. Within the last two weeks Obama said his top priority is Middle class tax cuts. Mitch McConnell said his top priority is making Obama a one-term president. It really couldn’t be any plainer what motivates each side. Depressing.
The Moar You Know
@BR: I wish I knew; the choice of people he signed off on to run the thing are even more baffling. Regardless of who funded it, given who was on it they were going to come out with the same conclusions regardless.
I no longer know what to make of Obama’s actions. I can no longer ascribe them to some form of n-dimensional chess, and I’m not at the point where I’m willing to believe he’s a stealth Republican.
But I’m getting pretty close.
Tax Analyst
Imagine that, they stocked the shelves of this “Independent, Bi-partisan” committee with a bunch of paid-for shills. Oh well, it saves on cooking time – all you have to do is just re-heat all of those half-baked hack-arific ideological talking points and then just serve it up for media consumption.
No problem, right?
The Republic of Stupidity
Seems like an appropriate time to post this data set again…
Please note, dear readers… these filthy rich sons of guns aren’t even paying the same % of taxes, dollar for dollar, that most us are… they’re already paying LESS…
This is also for John’s thread below, about the Rich v Poor dichotomy…
burnspbesq
If you’re going to be intellectually consistent in your approach to the effect of funding, you would also have to say that any university scientific research that is funded through grants from outside the university is inherently unreliable, and would be unreliable even if it had been thoroughly vetted and peer-reviewed prior to publication.
Is that your position? If it’s not, how do you explain the apparent contradiction?
If money is inherently corrosive, then it is corrosive at all times and under all circumstances. Or it’s not inherently corrosive. And if it’s not inherently corrosive, then each situation has to be judged on its own merits. And you haven’t made any case at all on the corrosive effect of external funding of the deficit commission.
MattR
@burnspbesq:
Politics and academics are vastly different fields.
duck-billed placelot
@Bullsmith: See my confusion with about half of what Obama has done.
BGinCHI
@MattR: He was on Andrea “you are not allowed to mention who I’m married to” Mitchell yesterday and I thought she was going to blow him.
She mentioned that they are “old friends.”
He wasn’t completely evil, but he’s still a rich old white dude who wants pain to be distributed downwards so that our corporate overlords can make our paradise shinier.
The Baby Boom Gen is fucking killing us.
DougJ
@burnspbesq:
I am uncomfortable with grants that come from places other than the NSF, NIH, etc. Yes. I think I have written about this before.
Linda Featheringill
What was Obama thinking when he created this commission?
Don’t know for sure. I always thought that creating commissions is mainly for giving the commenting class something to chew on for a while. Then the executive in question can thank the commission profusely, cherry pick the recommendations, and do what he wanted to do all along.
Really, who takes commissions seriously?
Cermet
@burnspbesq: Who here has ever claimed that Prof’s at universities aren’t influenced by the people who support them? Tobacco, Big Pharm, Health Care and the list does on had paid for studies by these people and surprise, they all support their pay master’s causes – are you so stupid that you think you have made a big discovery? Maybe fake news will call you for that fair and balance shit they dish out.
kdaug
Could – could – be that he’s setting them up to knock them down. Staff the commission with ideologues. Let them propose to kick grandma’s SS payments down by 50%. Then in the resultant hue and cry, come riding to the rescue.
He’d come off as a defender of the poor and downtrodden, paint the conservatives as evil miserly bastards, and set himself up for the 2012 campaign (which, I’ve been told, started last Wednesday).
Or not.
ruemara
BR, MOAR, et al:
I’m gonna keep posting this until people remember this.
The Senate is expected to open debate Wednesday on the debt limit. Conrad and other Senate moderates had threatened to oppose a significant increase without a budget commission. Conrad plans to meet today with the group of about a dozen senators to review the agreement.
Under the agreement, the commission would have 18 members, including six lawmakers appointed by congressional Democrats and six lawmakers appointed by congressional Republicans. Obama would appoint six others, only four of whom could be Democrats.
Source
Poopyman
@BGinCHI: Hang on folks. There’s Pete Peterson, and then there’s Pete Peterson.
I think the culprit here is the latter. Was that Andrea’s “old friend”, or PP #1?
Mark S.
@The Republic of Stupidity:
This is why we should eliminate the capital gains tax!
@Linda Featheringill:
No one takes these kink of commissions very seriously, but it’s depressing that instead of looking at what’s really causing our long term debt (exploding costs of health care), these needledicks spent the whole time coming up with a policy paper that could have been written by an intern at Cato. We can’t ever have a serious debate in this country because half of it is living in a libertarian fantasy world where cutting taxes raises revenue.
MattR
@Poopyman: Based on this link at the Peter G Peterson Foundation’s website, I am gonna bet on the latter Peterson.
Kryptik
But remember folks, this whole problem and why Democrats lost is because Obama just didn’t listen to those poor Republicans enough.
aimai
@MattR:
True. Also–outside money is vetted and when pharma et al fund research there are usually some serious strings put on how and when they can control the output of the researcher. Where there aren’t such strings researchers can get into trouble with their peers and with other scientists trying to duplicate their research. Universities also often (though not often enough) turn down money that comes with strings attached for instance too clear guidelines for what a professorship will teach, ideologically speaking.
The comparison is terrible and just shows what an idiot burnpeseque is.
aimai
Mike E
@Linda Featheringill: For about 20 years, commissions have served two functions: When Repubs held court, to expose big bad evil gov’t; for Dems, to cover their asses.
Ash Can
I’d say the makeup of the deficit commission itself completely invalidates everything it produces. It’s loaded with legislators of both parties. By the time they have to issue actual recommendations, those recommendations will have been watered down within an inch of their lives in order to get the 14 commission votes required. Then once the recommendations are out there, Congress won’t touch them with a 10-foot pole, as even those watered-down recommendations will be seen as political kryptonite.
Is the commission a waste of time and money? Most likely. But it was an act of governance nonetheless, and a break from the Bush administration, which not only did jack-all about the economy, but crashed it in the first place.
BGinCHI
@Poopyman: The latter.
wengler
I know that there is a big debate on the firebagger v. Obot front on this website, but can we all agree that getting out in front of this story was important?
Calling it the Catfood Commission for months was the right thing to do. Remember people, socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. We bail out Wall Street and they pay record bonuses in the worst economy since the Great Depression. They feel no shame whatsoever. Because they “earned” it.
Instead of vague calls for violence in blog comments sections, perhaps we should hold everyone with power in this country accountable for the current situation.
FlipYrWhig
@Ash Can:
I’d say the makeup of the deficit commission was intended to create several veto points such that anything that actually _passed_ the deficit commission might actually be a pretty solid idea. (If you need 14 out of 18 to vote for it, and 6 are appointed by the pres., 6 by Congressional Repubs and 6 by Congressional Dems, for anything to run that gauntlet it has to win over at least 2 from some group.) So far, nothing has passed.
Feel Tha OUTRAGEZ1! 1one!1]
NR
@Comrade Javamanphil:
Obama simply cannot be that stupid. There is no way. If he were stupid enough to still believe this after the last two years, he would not be able to so much as tie his own shoes without help.
So, given this, we need to face facts: “Bipartisanship” is just a cover for what he really wants to do.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: Or, there are conservatives in his party who don’t want to do what he wants to do, and there is this little-known provision of our system of governance that allows legislators to legislate.
Martin
If this is to be believed, it sounds like Schakowsky has given up:
If Pelosi was the one giving that indication, the commission would be largely shut down. Its got to be Jan.
This statement is interesting though:
That’s almost reasonable, but you’ll never get 25% entitlement *savings* without seriously gutting programs. ACA should get as much as 15% savings, but not by 2015. That kind of money won’t show up until 2020 or later, especially as the boomers start signing up next year. They can (and should) get 15% of the solution from entitlement, but it really needs to be a combination of savings and contributions – even if the contributions are temporary to get us through the hump of the next decade.
Mnemosyne
@BR:
He was thinking he needed to get the stimulus bill passed and the Blue Dogs (not the Republicans, the Blue Dog Democrats) refused to vote for it without a deficit commission.
It was pretty much “no commission, no stimulus bill.” Which choice would you have picked?
Napoleon
@Poopyman:
The first job I had as an attorney was working for they guy who was Peterson’s General Counsel at the Department of Commerce under Nixon. He photos on the wall of him and Peterson and him shaking Nixon’s hand. So weirdly I have followed that guys career, just by chance, for over 25 years now.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne:
Bully pulpit! No compromise! LBJ! Win by losing because people will be able to see the contrasts! It’s negotiating 101!
burnspbesq
@MattR:
That may be the beginning of an answer, but it’s not a complete answer.
What makes them different? Why are those differences relevant on this issue?
Comrade Javamanphil
@NR:
So you are saying he’s a liar and his speeches and writings about what he truly believes aren’t true? Then we’d have to conclude he’s one evil SOB. Sorry, I don’t see it.
Corner Stone
Ok, so which is it? Was the Catfood Commission put together so the President could pass stimulus, or was it put together so the President could get the debt ceiling raised?
I keep seeing various individuals claiming each as THE definitive reason for the Catfood Commission.
Corner Stone
@wengler:
Yep, and anyone who doesn’t think the name “Catfood Commission” is perfect for this farce is a dumbfuck.
Corner Stone
Ack! The dreaded pen!s pill moderation trigger! That’ll teach me to block quote comment.
Dennis SGMM
@BGinCHI:
Speaking as a Boomer, I can assure that I personally haven’t killed anyone since 1972.
LosGatosCA
Actually what invalidates the work of the commission is the fact that the paychecks aren’t signed by George Soros the puppet master of the shadow world government bent on destroying the sovereignty of all US citizens wanting to own gold and not have their precious metal security hardware confiscated thereby invalidating their 2nd Amendment rights to protect their property and their inalienable right to keep the gubbermint out of their Medicare.
Joseph Nobles
The deficit commission’s executive order was February 2010.
The stimulus package was passed in February 2009. The debt ceiling was raised in January 2010.
I respectfully submit that the assertions of either bill’s passage relying on the deficit commission being enacted are incorrect.
Dennis SGMM
Look how far we’ve come: back when Cheney created his energy policy commission we had to assume that it was packed with industry shills and hacks because no one from the environmentalist side was invited. Cheney claimed Double Secret Presidential Privilege so we never really knew.
In this brave new era we can know for certain that a presidential commission was packed with shills and hacks. That’s progress, dammit.
Bullsmith
The idea of a debt commission was absolutely sound. The execution, however, was carefully designed to slew the results. It wasn’t accidental. SS cuts were on the table, taxing the rich fairly wasn’t.
Mnemosyne
@Joseph Nobles:
Sorry, I had my dates mixed up. The commission was formed shortly after Scott Brown’s election and was created partly to prevent the Republicans and Blue Dogs from getting together and passing legislation to create their very own commission that would have required Congress to adopt the Congressional commission’s recommendations. Instead, we got an executive-created panel whose recommendations are supposed to be reviewed by Congress but Congress has no legal obligation to adopt them as would have been the case with a Congressional commission.
Basically, bullet dodged and commission defanged, but for some reason people tend to forget that Republicans in the Senate were pushing hard to get a Congressional commission with a hell of a lot more power than this presidential one and think this was something Obama came up with all on his lonesome.
That’s what I get for not gathering my links to check the dates before posting, but links are here now.
Corner Stone
@Joseph Nobles: They’re going to tell you the Catfood Commission was a payback to the conservative D’s for passing both the stimulus AND the debt ceiling.
Winston Smith
Here’s our Deficit Deduction Plan — sponsored by Carl’s Jr.
Joseph Nobles
OK, continuing due diligence, I’ve found an article of the time saying that Obama promised moderate Democrats that he would enact a deficit commission to help the raising of the debt ceiling. And of course, having promised, he would do so. This would give them the ability to go back to their districts and say, yes, I raised the debt ceiling but this shows I’m still serious about cutting the deficit.
So I respectfully withdraw my submission.
liberal
@Zifnab:
I’m pretty sure I read exactly that justification, maybe in deadtree WashPost or something.
Dennis SGMM
@Corner Stone:
I wonder how they’d feel about raising the retirement age to seventy-something if you compelled all of those brave cost-cutters on the commission to work say, one month, as a day laborer, or an assembly line worker, or a janitor.
Corner Stone
@Dennis SGMM: As much as I despise the concept of Undercover Boss, I would honestly like to put these jokers in the Undercover Putz Reality Show.
Film them actually using their bodies to do something besides waddle up to the next open microphone.
IIRC most of them are in their 50’s if not 60’s.
That would be awesome. I wonder if there’s a way to start a grass roots movement to challenge them to do that? And when they refused it would be pretty clear.
liberal
@Dennis SGMM:
Agreed.
Worse, I think it’s Dean Baker who’s been making the point that while there’s been quite an increase in live expectancy over the past few decades, it’s actually rather small (1.5 yrs IIRC) for people at the bottom of the income scale. So that rationale for increasing the retirement age doesn’t add up.
Joseph Nobles
Son of a…
And now here’s a WaPo article which states that Conrad and others were threatening to derail a 2009 debt ceiling vote unless the commission was established.
However, Mnemosyne, I don’t see that the Blue Dogs and Republican threat to create a commission with teeth would have much effect. After all, they had just voted against that. If they wanted one that would force the Congress to vote on the results, why not support the one they trashed in February? That sounds like Gregg and others posturing.
Corner Stone
The vote to raise the debt ceiling will never fail. Some may vote against it, but it’s just posturing for the blowhards.
No Congressperson will be the one to end the world. They’ll always find the votes to pass the raise.
Martin
@Corner Stone:
The commission was put together because we have a real, honest to God structural deficit problem and one party absolutely, positively will not deal with revenues.
The debt commission’s job is to come up with a solution that Congress can tolerate but isn’t captured by 538 pet interests. I think it’s going to fail, but it’ll fail far more honestly than any proposal that Congress would come up with. The commission will have the ability to say ‘hey, tax revenues are down to 14.5% of GDP – the lowest they’ve been since WWII. Talking about tax cuts is madness beyond description, and getting spending under 14.5% of GDP is impossible. The only solution is tax increases – let’s not debate that point, but talk about the who and how much of those increases.’
Just getting us to that point would be enormously useful. Nobody will listen, but it’ll be a step beyond where we are today.
Emerald
@Linda Featheringill:
Which is why he created it. Nobody takes commissions seriously. Ya gotta problem that’s politically inconvient? Shove it off onto a commission.
Standard practice.
And of course none of it could pass, so there’s that.
Tsulagi
@Dennis SGMM: It’s the new transparency.
Funny and smart thing is Pelosi pushing that before adjournment of the 111th Congress the Senate must first vote on the commission’s recommendations before they bother in the House with any approved. Think she knows the chances of that happening in a timely fashion are far less than a dyslexic Alaskan voter spelling Murkowski’s name correctly.
Mnemosyne
@Joseph Nobles:
But it only went down because 7 Republicans flipped their votes. If they had gotten the changes they wanted and flipped back, we’d be stuck with the Congressional one.
I think the message is basically that there was rumbling for a long time from the Blue Dogs that they wanted a deficit committee. Obama was able to put them off for two years but eventually he had to bow to the pressure and give them one, especially once Brown was elected and we went back to 59 in the Senate.
I still say we dodged a bullet by getting a presidential commission and non-binding resolutions rather than a Congressional commission with actual legislation required.
Bill Murray
@Martin:
That’s not very reasonable since these don’t contribute the same to the deficit/debt or to government spending. IIRC, the Bush tax increases, defense spending and Medicare account for most of future deficit projections, so why are non-defense discretionary and SS being hit hard?
Corner Stone
And now we have a third reason tossed in there as THE reason the Catfood Commission was forced into being. Because something worse was coming if the President didn’t!
Corner Stone
@Martin: We have a looming deficit issue, no doubt. I don’t know anyone who’s arguing otherwise.
I disagree with you on what the goal of the commission is. If the full report is ever submitted to daylight it should be fun reading.
Mnemosyne
@Corner Stone:
Third reason?
President proposes the stimulus. Blue Dogs say, “Okay, but we want a deficit commission.” President says okay, Blue Dogs vote for stimulus.
President proposes health insurance reform. Blue Dogs say, “Well, okay, I guess we’ll vote for that, but you promised us a deficit commission.” President says okay, Blue Dogs vote for health reform bill.
Blue Dogs say, “Hey, this guy has been promising us a deficit commission for two years now and he still hasn’t done it. Let’s get together with Judd Gregg and come up with a bill for a Congressional one.” President keeps the lid on it for a while, but eventually it comes close enough to winning that the president says, “Hey, that deficit commission you guys keep nagging me about? Here it is!”
I’m really not getting why you think there must have been a single reason for the commission to have been formed so there’s no way that it could have happened because of a series of events.