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Alice the Malice Rivlin went on with Andrea Mitchell yesterday to discuss the boring sequester debate and, as usual, she trumpets what every other deficit scold in the Beltway says: Cut entitlements or adopt Simpson-Bowles. At least she admits that switching to a chained CPI is an actual cut in benefits.

Rivlin:... one thing is the reform of the consumer price index which is really a technical adjustment, but it would mean slightly lower social security benefits and other benefits going forward. Now you could offset that with other changes in the law, but it is the right thing to do and his own troops were kind of unhappy about that, but he put it out there and he has certainly put Medicare adjustments, various sorts on the table.

Now, why is cutting benefits to seniors the 'right thing' to do, Alice? Why do we have to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan war and not the rich? And why do we have to pay for the financial economic collapse and not the rich, Alice? And WTF are these mythical offsets to draconian cuts to Social Security that she speaks of? Is she talking about the proposed 'birthday bump? That's really a horseshit thing to do.

And it doesn't cover anything for like twenty years after you retire, which won't help many people since only the wealthy have seen an increase in life expectancy.

Some propose adopting the chained CPI with an added “birthday bump” – a 1
percent benefit increase for each of years 20 to 24 after initial retirement eligibility. But this supposed “sweetener” only affects those who live until becoming eligible for the birthday bump. Wealthier seniors live longer than their lower-income counterparts, so the “birthday bump” does not adequately protect those who need Social Security benefits the most. Even with it, the birthday bump does not fully compensate for the cut the chained CPI entails.

Digby explains in detail how the chained CPI hurts seniors moving forward.

The problem is not that their private pensions run out. (Not very many people have private pensions anymore.) The problem is that the Chained-CPI reduces the cost of living adjustment down by 0.3 percentage points annually. That translates into a cut in benefits of 3 percent for those who have been retired ten years, 6 percent after 20 years, and 9 percent after 30 years.

The people who have been retired the longest and are, therefore, the poorest, will see the largest cuts. A 1% "bump" isn't going to make much of a difference. This is a cut. And it's substantial. It will affect the poor the most and it's going to take a lot more than "tweaking" to make up for it. Moreover, it's not just the poorest of the poor who will be affected. There seems to be some belief in Washington circles that 70-year-olds who are living on 25k- 35k a year won't feel a cut in their incomes, which just goes to show how distant they are from the way people really live.

And why bring in Social Security at all, since it has nothing to do with the federal deficit? The GOP needs its pound of flesh from the working class, but the Beltway never asks them why? Why be so f*&king cruel and inhumane? I wish we lived in the Land of Oz and we could throw water on the Fix The Debt and Alice Rivkin assholes of the world so that they would all melt away for good.

The entire Beltway cable TV establishment never has on any liberal members of Congress or any other proponents that are against cutting safety net benefits --except when they want a Crossfire-style formatted segment with another deficit scold.
(h/t Scarce for the video)

Alice Rivlin is a Very Serious Person on deficit reduction.

It's very important that we all buy into the extreme sense of urgency around all this "fiscal cliff" hysteria, so that when they spring the Grand Bargain that solves everything, we understand that there was Simply Nothing Else To Be Done. Now that you have your marching orders, start laying in the cat food for your retirement years:

WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats — holding firm against extending tax cuts for the rich — are proposing a novel way to circumvent the Republican pledge not to vote for any tax increase: Allow all the tax cuts to expire Jan. 1, then vote on a tax cut for the middle class shortly thereafter.

The proposal illustrates the lengths lawmakers are going to try to include new federal revenues in a fix for the “fiscal cliff,” the reckoning in January that would come when all Bush-era tax cuts expire and automatic spending cuts to military and domestic programs kick in.

Virtually every Republican in Congress has taken the pledge, pushed by Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, never to vote for a tax increase — a pledge both parties see as a serious impediment to a tax compromise. But if tax rates snap back to the levels of the Clinton presidency on Jan. 1, any legislation to reinstate some of those tax cuts — but not all of them — would be considered a tax cut.

[...] Lawmakers on both sides are now lamenting the fiscal train wreck that many of them voted to create, a confluence of spending cuts and tax increases that the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Tuesday could send the economy into recession.

At the same time, former Vice President Dick Cheney was meeting with Senate and House Republicans, in part to warn them of the dire consequences he sees in $500 billion in automatic military cuts that will begin to hit on Jan. 2. Off Capitol Hill, a broad bipartisan coalition of fiscal hawks, led by the co-chairman of President Obama’s 2010 fiscal commission, Erskine B. Bowles, restarted efforts to pressure Washington to reach a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction.

Fiscal cliff, Grover Norquist, tax pledge, deficit reduction, blah blah blah. Grand Bargain!

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According to Village protocol, the only permissible "debate" on the deficit is over how much do we cut, and how? Should we cut into the veins, arteries or capillaries? Should we use a hatchet, a knife or a scalpel, or all of the above?

On This Week with Christiane Amanpour, the closest thing they had to a liberal voice was Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who tried to have it both ways. He kinda-sorta sidestepped the idea of tax increases, proclaimed his support of "fiscal responsibility" but defended Obama's call for certain kinds of spending:

President Obama's deficit-reduction speech wasn't just about numbers but what kind of country America will become, Governor Deval Patrick said this morning during an appearance on ABC's "This Week" news program.

While Republicans have criticized the partisan nature of last week's address, in which Obama proposed cutting $4 trillion over 12 years, Patrick said the critics glossed over its overarching theme.

“It’s a fiscally responsible but also mutually responsible kind of community, and I support that," the governor told host Christiane Amanpour.

Patrick also said: “It thought the speech … was a real leadership moment. I think that the president took us to the place where we really ought to be debating — it’s been the subtext for a long time — and that's, what kind of country do we want to be? That’s the underlying question in terms of the budget and the deficit and health care, as well, for that matter, and that’s what we should be debating.”

George Will, of course, is worse than useless. He talked about the grand days under Jack Kennedy, when people paid a much bigger proportion of their medical expenses -- with nary a hint of understanding that medical expenses have gone through the roof since then, and that U.S. wages have actually declined in the last 30 years. But that isn't as much fun to harrumph about.

The next time a wealthy talking head talks about our need to have some "skin in the game," why don't we peel ours off and leave it on his doorstep?