(Let's not get blindsided by this, okay? - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
As they say, even paranoids have real enemies. In the last couple of weeks there has been a renewed effort to push the parallel bills Conrad-Gregg and Cooper-Wolf each of which would establish a Bi-Partisan Commission to tackle the 'Entitlements Crisis' by sending a set of proposals to Congress that could only be voted up or down on a model set by BRAC (the Base Realignment and Closure Commission of the 1990s. The current push is to attach this to whatever legislation is used to raise the Public Debt Ceiling, something that has to be done in the next few weeks to avoid defaulting on some interest payments.
The problem is that Conrad-Gregg and Cooper-Wolf did not come out of nowhere and 'bi-partisan' does not mean what it would normally mean. Instead these bills exist to realize the vision of one man, a man who has founded and lavishly funded a series of 'Bi-Partisan' Institutions and Working Groups whose goals are, at times perhaps unknown to many of the participants in them, explicitly to destroy the crown jewel of the New Deal, that is Social Security, while also doing as much collateral damage to Medicare and Medicaid as possible in the process. Much more below the fold.
