America Says "Cut DOD, Not Social Security"

Every so often, I'm pleasantly surprised. Not often, but occasionally. This is one of these times, as a focus group of Americans choose a path to deficit reduction that Washington's big deficit hawks weren't expecting:

President Obama’s deficit commission is moving forward with Social Security and Medicare explicitly in their sights. They got a dry run for how this effort is likely to sell with the public on Saturday as the Peter Peterson funded group America Speaks sponsored a series of 19 "21st Century Town Meetings." It seems that events didn’t quite go as planned.

The exercise was intended to convince people that there were no options other than large cuts to Social Security and Medicare to hit their deficit targets. To ensure this result, the America Speaks crew put together a booklet that exaggerated future budget problems (the exercise was for the year 2025) by assuming a worse budget path than the country is currently facing.

America Speaks also excluded the possibility that the Fed would buy and hold more debt, in effect continuing its current course. This would substantially reduce the interest burden facing the country in 2025. While in normal times this could cause inflation, that is unlikely to be a problem in the foreseeable future. In comparable circumstances, Japan’s central bank has bought an amount of debt nearly equal to the country’s GDP (the equivalent of $14 trillion for the U.S.) and its economy is still facing deflation. There is no reason that the Fed could not follow the same path, unless the goal is to force cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

The America Speaks folks also denied participants the option of reducing public sector health care costs by reforming the U.S. health care system. As they say at America Speaks, everything is on the table, except reforms that would hurt powerful industry lobbies. The America Speaks crew also neglected to mention the Social Security trust fund and that it would have enough assets to pay all benefits through the year 2043, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Given this stacked deck the participants rose up in revolt. They demanded the option to vote on a single-payer type health care system. The idea being to reduce costs by making health care more efficient rather than just cutting services in Medicare and other public sector programs. They also voted overwhelmingly for defense cuts and for every progressive tax option in the book, even though many had been seriously mischaracterized. For example, they listed the potential revenue from a financial speculation tax in 2025 as $30 billion a year even though there is good reason, based on the experience of other countries, to believe that we could raise close to ten times this amount.

I would not have expected this, considering how public opinion and the "acceptable options" are portrayed in the media. Nevertheless, here we are, with ordinary Americans saying "keep the 'entitlements', enact REAL health care reform, and ditch the wars".

It does raise a question, though. Considering these results, how on earth is it that the Dems aren't doing better? Is it because the people are being misled as to the options? Or is it because the Democrats don't understand what Americans actually wants?