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lolololol
careful, or nbadan will call this a circlejerk.
Ok.
You go, girl!
TB _FY
"Would you like to solve the puzzle?"
lolololol
careful, or nbadan will call this a circlejerk.
Bring on the "cliff".
NBADan called out B_D for getting too much spunk on him from the blue team circle jerk.
I called it the most damning post that I have ever seen on spurstalk.
I think the only post that could overshadow it would be this.
lol in nbadanland, two or more people who disagree with him cons ute a circle jerk. Kinda telling, really.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolit...-treasury-post
Ask the average person — even in Washington — who serves as President Obama's chief of staff and you'll probably get a blank stare.
Jack Lew hasn't been heard or seen in the "fiscal cliff" drama unfolding between the White House and Congress. But the former budget director, who took over the top White House job last January, has become a key player behind the scenes.
If Obama has one person to thank for being in the catbird seat on the fiscal cliff talks, it's Lew, who could be Obama's pick to be the next Treasury secretary. Lew finessed the August 2011 deal that set up the automatic, across-the-board tax hikes and spending cuts that both sides are now scrambling to avoid — especially the Republicans.
"The way they wrote the cliff a year and a half ago was strategically a victory for Obama, and that's just a fact," says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "They wrote it in a way that he ends up having all the advantages in the fight right now."
Those 2011 negotiations over the debt ceiling turned out badly for the president. He got no "grand bargain," the nation nearly defaulted on its debts and the president himself was widely perceived to have caved in to Republican demands.
But the deal that came out of it was designed to put Obama in a better negotiating position if he won re-election. Now that he has, he's enjoying the benefits, says Jared Bernstein, the former top economic aide to Vice President Biden.
"The White House was very forward-looking and strategic in the way they shaped the sequester," Bernstein says. "This is a very tough situation for Republicans, in no small part because of the skill of the negotiators from the Democrats' side."
For instance, in making sure that programs like Medicare, Pell grants or food stamps are not on the chopping block when the automatic spending cuts hit. Instead, it's defense spending and the Bush-era tax cuts that are at risk — things that are Republican priorities.
Bernstein says Lew gets a lot of the credit for that.
"Jack Lew's fingerprints are all over the parts of this sequester that protect vulnerable people, whether it's exempting the en lements or many of the things that help low-income families," he says. "One of the things Jack always deeply understood was just how important that role of government is for people who are retirees, for people who are poor, for people who aren't connected to the economy and the market in the way that a lot of Republicans envision everybody is, but they're really not."
Lew has had years of experience toiling in the fiscal trenches.
Gingrich — who as speaker negotiated the historic balanced budget agreement with President Bill Clinton in the 1990s — says Lew's experience gave Democrats an edge.
"On their side, they have somebody who's playing chess, and on our side we are wavering between tic-tac-toe and checkers," Gingrich says. "He knows so much and he's been through this so often, he can think about three and four permutations down the road."
Before he was White House chief of staff, Lew was Obama's budget director — a job he'd also held in the Clinton White House. After serving in the Clinton administration, Lew followed the well-worn path from White House to Wall Street.
But his experience as an investment banker didn't help him with Republicans when he returned to Washington to work for Obama. During the debt ceiling negotiations, House Republican leaders said they found Lew impossible to work with, rigid and arrogant.
Bernstein says there was discord, but he interprets it differently.
"There was a time during these negotiations where Reps. [John] Boehner and [Eric] Cantor said to the president, 'We don't want to negotiate with Jack Lew anymore. We want to negotiate with [Treasury Secretary] Tim Geithner.' Now, you know, Tim Geithner is a guy I like and respect also, but to me that just kind of elevates Jack Lew's negotiating skills because he was being a little too tough on his opposition there for their liking," Bernstein says.
Because the fiscal cliff negotiations are at a sensitive stage and because Lew may be nominated to be the next Treasury secretary, the White House decided not to make him available for an interview. But it's clear he retains the same strong support from the president as he did when Obama named him chief of staff a year ago.
"Jack's economic advice has been invaluable and he has my complete trust, both because of his mastery of the numbers but because of the values behind those numbers," Obama said at the time.
In Lew's tidy White House office, there are mementos from 30 years of bipartisan negotiations — including the balanced budget deal between Clinton and Gingrich and the Social Security deal of the 1980s between Lew's old boss, House Speaker Tip O'Neill, and President Ronald Reagan. That was the deal that eventually raises the Social Security retirement age to 67.
Lew is clearly proud of those deals, but he'd be even prouder if he manages to move the current negotiations to a deal worth celebrating.
That worked real well this election cycle.
Obama agrees to cut Social Security in fiscal cliff deal
Negotiations to avert falling off the ‘fiscal cliff’ before the end of the year have compelled President Obama to agree to cuts in Social Security payments.......
Democrats should be disappointed in President Obama’s willingness to abandon his promises to protect Social Security. Congressional and Senate candidates will surely face devastating losses in the next election if they go along with a deal that takes money out of seniors’ pockets every month, while simultaneously raising their taxes.
Obama might think that raising taxes on the rich is the Holy Grail of fiscal cliff negotiations. But there are some 40 million Americans who would likely disagree.
The average Social Security payment is about $1,230 a month. If Obama signs a deal that includes using a chained CPI to reduce payments over time, for seniors struggling to make ends meet, life is about to get harder.
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed...cal-cliff-deal
Hope/Change
http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/12/18/progr...l-cliff-offer/Obama agrees to cut Social Security in fiscal cliff deal
Negotiations to avert falling off the ‘fiscal cliff’ before the end of the year have compelled President Obama to agree to cuts in Social Security payments.......
Democrats should be disappointed in President Obama’s willingness to abandon his promises to protect Social Security. Congressional and Senate candidates will surely face devastating losses in the next election if they go along with a deal that takes money out of seniors’ pockets every month, while simultaneously raising their taxes.
Obama might think that raising taxes on the rich is the Holy Grail of fiscal cliff negotiations. But there are some 40 million Americans who would likely disagree.
The average Social Security payment is about $1,230 a month. If Obama signs a deal that includes using a chained CPI to reduce payments over time, for seniors struggling to make ends meet, life is about to get harder.
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed...cal-cliff-deal
Hope/Change
The White House had previously suggested cuts to Social Security were off the table in fiscal cliff talks.
================================================== =======================
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama, with his latest fiscal cliff offer, proposes extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone earning less than $400,000 a year, and paying for it by increasing taxes on the middle class and cutting Social Security and Medicare.
Obama's offer would allow the payroll tax holiday to expire, meaning middle class workers will see smaller paychecks in 2013. Economists have warned that the recovery is too fragile to risk a broad tax hike on workers. It would also gradually reduce Social Security, pension and disability benefits seniors are due to receive, taking a small bite up front, but building up to much larger cuts over time.
Don;'t get your posts, 210. Doesn't Red team preach that we need to cut en lement programs? There is no bigger one than SSN.
He isn't a red teamer, he is an army of one.
Who's on red team?
I keep it real
You're all over the map tbh.
I'm anti-bull and ant-corruption. Both red/blue are corrupt, minus the few exceptions like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. I'm against all this murder and war, they are both responsible as well as their voters. I don't choose to be blind just because Obama is on Blue team (although he is really on red team)
Jill Stein isn't corrupt.
I like Jill Stein, but they don't give her a chance, neither do voters
I voted for her.
Well if you voted for her then my hat is off to you on that, honestly.
Congress is no place for ideologues.
So who is driving the SS CPI cuts? I searched several links, and they elude to saying it's the GOP, but since they don't outright say it, I assume it's the democrats...
Changing the CPI is not right. It is already lagging behind real inflation of the basic necessities like food, housing, and energy. If anything, the CPI needs to be re-indexed to include these real costs more accurately.
The budget cuts in en lements need to be on the social programs supporting able bodied workers. Not SS and medicare.
Last edited by Wild Cobra; 12-19-2012 at 04:56 AM.
Many economists say the alternative version of the Consumer Price Index, known as the "chained CPI," is a more accurate measure of inflation. Chained CPI accounts for the way consumers avoid higher prices by subs uting purchases. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a favorite example: "If the price of pork increases while the price of beef does not, consumers might shift away from pork to beef."
The cut is small at first. After the first three years of a chained CPI regime, the average retiree on Social Security would receive $258 less in ulative benefits, according to calculations by Social Security Works, a Washington-based advocacy group that opposes reducing benefits.
But the ulative reduction for long-term beneficiaries would be more significant. If the chained CPI had been in place all along, today an 88-year-old who'd started drawing benefits at age 62 would receive 7.32 percent less in benefits this year, according to the group.
For Carrie Pete, a retiree in Silver Spring, Md., that would mean something like $1,080 less in annual benefits, and a ulative reduction of roughly $15,000. The lower benefit would increase the burden on her kids to help pay for her living situation.
At 88, there are some things Pete can't do for herself anymore.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/1...n_2324907.html
Many $Ts for the 1%, cut their taxes to silly low levels, then go the 99%, esp the old, sick, disabled, young, poor.
The Tax Policy Center calculated the income tax increases that would be caused by a switch to chained CPI. They’re not big — a little more than $100 a year for most families — but they’re oddly regressive [...]But Republicans don’t want that small tax increase, so they’re trying to block the use of chained CPI for tax brackets. They want it only to apply to benefits.
The group getting the biggest tax hike is families making between $30,000 and $40,000 a year. Their increase is almost six times that faced by millionaires. That’s because millionaires are already in the top bracket, so they’re not being pushed into higher marginal rates because of changing bracket thresholds [...]
All told, chained CPI raises average taxes by about 0.19 percent of income. So, taken all together, it’s basically a big (5 percent over 12 years; more, if you take a longer view) across-the-board cut in Social Security benefits paired with a 0.19 percent income surtax.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/12/...e-discussions/
Why does anyone think that changing the CPI on SS will reduce the deficit?
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