A Meaningless Trial Balloon To A Meaningless Commission

It's all so utterly, completely....meaningless:

Leaders of President Barack Obama's bipartisan deficit commission on Wednesday proposed reducing the annual cost-of-living increases in Social Security, part of a bold plan to control $1 trillion-plus budget deficits.

The proposal also would set a tough target for curbing the growth of Medicare and recommends looking at eliminating popular tax breaks, such as mortgage interest deduction.

Before you exclaim, "WOW!  THEY'RE TAKING ON SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE!", remember this: This is a recommendation to the rest of the commission, which is charged with making a recommendation to Red Barry, which neither he nor Congress is obligated in the slightest to accept or implement.

In other words, it's meaningless.

And not nearly as WOW-worthy as it looks:

They want to repeal state and local tax deductions. Looks like the mortgage thing only applies to 2nd homes and mortgages over 500K, not entirely.

They also say roll non-defense, discretionary spending back (starting in '12) to 2010 levels. In other words, lock in all of the Obama spending forever and always.

They can go fuck themselves.

Which, unsurprisingly, is the already-consensus of the Donk side of this meaningless commission:

“This is not a package that I could support,” Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, said during a break in a private meeting by the commission. She said any package able to win fourteen votes on the panel would have to look “very different” from the options being discussed…

“We’re not going to have an up-or-down vote on this,” said [Senate Majority Whip Ali-Dickbar al-]Durbin[i]. “There are proposals in there that are painful. I told them I said there are things in here which inspire me and other things which I hate like the devil hates holy water. I’m not going to vote for those things.”

And this is where things, on balance, get a lot tougher for The One and Democrats than they do the Good Guys.  Forget actual, concrete results from this dog & pony show (because there won't be any) and think in terms of political positioning for the 2012 election:

1) A huge tax overhaul, highlighted by a new top income tax bracket of just 23%

2) Social Security solvency via gradually raising the retirement age and reducing COLA

3) Eliminating 10% of the federal work force by 2015

4) Various measures to slow the growth of Medicare.

By my tally, that's four "fuck yous" from the Dark Side and only one from us.  But the majority of Americans share ours while being on the other side of the Dems on pro-growth tax reform and pink-slipping federal "workers" while being persuadable on entitlements.  The 2010 midterms were waged on the explicit premise that our fiscal woes were solely a function of too damned much spending and too damned much government which is leading inexorably to too damned much taxation, all of which is sucking our already comatose economy dry.  The Bowles-Simpson trial balloon largely aligns itself with those same sentiments but doesn't go far enough in the right direction where it really matters.

Barack Obama's purpose for this deficit commission was to put Republican fingerprints on Obamanomics' economic corpse by embarrassing the hapless GOP contingent and its center-right recommendations after a big Democrat midterm victory fueled by Hogzilla and ObamaCare.  What he's going to get is those same center-right ideas reinforcing the issues that returned the House to GOP control and the Senate within sight of same getting conspicuously shot down by many of those same Democrats in a spectacular fireworks display of arrogant, defiant tone-deafness.

Expect the White House to bury this commission and its recommendations, whatever the hell they turn out to be, as fast as humanly possible.  This is NOT a conversation they're going to tolerate.