Charlie Pierce:

As we begin what appears to be the final long, slooooowwww roll down the Gentle Fiscal Incline, it is becoming clear that, among our governing elites, and among the courtier press that serves their interests, it is taken as a given that some sort of austerity agenda, which will not materially affect any of their lives, is going to be dropped on the rest of us, probably for our own good, as that good is defined from some tony little bistro in Georgetown, or from the parlor at [Washington Post VP] Ben [Bradlee] and [his wife] Sally [Quinn]’s.

It fails to account for what economists call upper-level substitution bias, and what my mother would call plain common sense: If the price rises for a certain commodity in the basket of goods used to measure inflation, consumers will choose a cheaper alternative. In my house, when the price of beef soars, we substitute chicken.  

I suspect the concept of “soaring” as it relates to food prices is rather different in the Marcus house than it is out in the United States Of Ongoing Recession, wherein, when the price of chicken “soars,” they can substitute Meow Mix.

As a result, every commission that has examined the issue and endorsed the change has coupled it with additional benefits for the poorest recipients. Opponents of the switch – including AARP and, more convincingly, the National Women’s Law Center – insist these protections are inadequate. The administration assures me that, under its approach toward the oldest seniors, the poorest would be shielded and perhaps even better off.

This is courtier reporting at its apogee. All the data and empirical evidence says my idea is bad, but the Very Important People Who Call Me Back say something else, and anonymously, too, so I believe them. Thus do social calendars remain full and lively.

The far left frontier of acceptable Democratic thought is the president’s telling us that ‘we” all have to make sacrifices, while the far Right frontier of acceptable Republican thought resides somewhere over the horizon, beyond the curve of the earth, and well past the plane of the ecliptic. It’s a wonder that, one day, the American political spectrum doesn’t keel over altogether to starboard and plunge to the bottom of the Laurentian Abyss…

…The social costs of an austerity agenda — and, certainly, all the available evidence from those European countries wherein one was imposed [link added] — are profound. Whether you like it or not, there has been a general political consensus for the paste eight odd decades that a social safety net is one of the legitimate products of that creative enterprise of self-government, that it is part of what we agree to when we form the political commonwealth. To have an austerity agenda imposed from above, and by a relatively unaccountable political elite, and because of the damage done to the nation’s finances by an absolutely unaccountable financial elite, is to make an obvious mockery of that political commonwealth, and to do so hard upon an election in which the existence of that safety net was so directly and democratically validated, is to spit in the eye of a self-governing people. This, in turn, will engage all the worst popular instincts, including ill-directed and abandoned popular wrath…