"Gregg said Obama had asked him specifically to serve as Commerce secretary to help address entitlement reform," reports The Hill. As you may imagine, this isn't warming progressive hearts. Judd Gregg does not like entitlement programs. Shredding them has been the primary cause of his political career (which does, of course, bring up the question: Why was he chosen?). But skeptical of Gregg's nomination though I am, I'm not particularly concerned about this.In recent years, the question of "the entitlement crisis" has developed a new answer. An odd bedfellows coalition of centrist economists ranging from Dean Baker to Henry Aaron to Paul Krugman to, well, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman have been forcefully arguing that there is no such thing as an "entitlement crisis." Social Security is safe. The crisis is in Medicare. But more than that, the crisis is in health care. As Peter Orszag has argued, the problem is not “that we’re going to have more 85-year-olds. It’s primarily that each 85-year-old in the future will cost us a lot more than they cost us today.” To illustrate the point, Orszag likes to show this graph in his presentations:
To believe Gregg will lead the administration on some Samuelson-esque crusade to rip privatize Social Security and slash Medicare is to assume that he will have more power than Orszag, Furman, Summers, and the entirety of the left-of-center economics establishment. It's not likely. But he does bring some credibility to the idea of an entitlements commission. And it's not hard to see an entitlements commission being re-conceived as a "long-term fiscal security" commission (hopefully with a better name). And it's not impossible to see such a commission being used as a vehicle for health reform. The fact that the administration is already stocked with powerful voices interested in defining entitlement reform as health reform makes Gregg's inclusion much less threatening.
To believe Gregg will lead the administration on some Samuelson-esque crusade to rip privatize Social Security and slash Medicare is to assume that he will have more power than Orszag, Furman, Summers, and the entirety of the left-of-center economics establishment. It's not likely. But he does bring some credibility to the idea of an entitlements commission. And it's not hard to see an entitlements commission being re-conceived as a "long-term fiscal security" commission (hopefully with a better name). And it's not impossible to see such a commission being used as a vehicle for health reform. The fact that the administration is already stocked with powerful voices interested in defining entitlement reform as health reform makes Gregg's inclusion much less threatening. 
