[The tax hikes in Pres. Obama’s deficit reduction proposal] would raise $1.6 trillion [in revenue] over the next decade; [in contrast] raising the Medicare age would save $113 billion in federal funds over the next decade.
For those who don’t have a calculator handy, $1.6T is about fourteen times $113B. And yet proposing to raise the Medicare age seems to be regarded by the blathering class as the more serious of the two. Go figure.
And Michael Grunwald:
It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan… [It’s] simply a fact that Republicans controlled Washington during the fiscally irresponsible era when President Clinton’s budget surpluses were transformed into the trillion-dollar deficit that President Bush bequeathed to President Obama… It’s simply a fact that the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default on its obligations. The press can’t figure out how to weave those facts into the current narrative without sounding like it’s taking sides, so it simply pretends that yesterday never happened.