I think Bob Kuttner and Mark Schmitt have said most of what needs to be said about the Heritage-Brookings "bipartisan" compromise that suggests we cut the deficit by implementing budgetary rules that trigger deep, automatic cuts in Social Security and Medicare if Republicans refuse to shrink the deficit in other ways. This is, as Schmitt says, the "popular front" strategy for choking out welfare state. The document really shouldn't be thought of as a fiscal policy proposal so much as a clever conservative gimmick to attract center-left support for dismantling the safety net by couching it as "deficit reduction" and "fiscal responsibility." If it were anything else, entitlement programs wouldn't be the sole focus; health spending, defense spending, farm subsidies, the Bush tax cuts, and much else would be explicitly on the chopping block. The counter-coalition organized by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, which includes such worthies as Brookings(!!) Henry Aron, Robert Solow, and Brad DeLong, has a proposal that makes a whole lot more sense. I'd add to their analysis that it's pretty perverse to put entitlements in the lead position for cuts. As a recent poll from the Kaiser Foundation showed, Social Security and Medicare are the government programs most valued by the public. Defense spending, which is both larger than entitlement spending and treated as totally sacrosanct, doesn't even come close.
Yet somehow, the "liberals" in the Brookings-Heritage coalition didn't put in a provision for automatic increases in the top marginal tax rate in the face of political inaction, nor did they subject defense spending to automatic cuts if politicians couldn't get their act together. That mechanism was reserved for the legacies of the Great Society and the New Deal. And all this so folks from the Heritage Foundation would be willing to call some center-left types "fiscally responsible." Sheesh. I've never quite figured out why dangling the term "fiscal responsibility" in front of self-styled centrists makes otherwise sane people eager to throw someone else's grandma off of Medicare. But I guess there's lots about Washington that I don't understand.
Yet somehow, the "liberals" in the Brookings-Heritage coalition didn't put in a provision for automatic increases in the top marginal tax rate in the face of political inaction, nor did they subject defense spending to automatic cuts if politicians couldn't get their act together. That mechanism was reserved for the legacies of the Great Society and the New Deal. And all this so folks from the Heritage Foundation would be willing to call some center-left types "fiscally responsible." Sheesh. I've never quite figured out why dangling the term "fiscal responsibility" in front of self-styled centrists makes otherwise sane people eager to throw someone else's grandma off of Medicare. But I guess there's lots about Washington that I don't understand. 
