Send The Grandpas Back To The Home

You’ve heard of the birthers and the truthers, and even the tenthers and the nullifiers.

But now it’s time to meet the Simpson-Bowlers.

Over the past few years, we’ve gotten used to hearing a lot of crackpot ideas.

First there was Donald Trump and his jolly gang of truthers, who to this day still claim that President Obama was born in Kenya.

Then came the Koch-brother funded climate change deniers, who, despite record temperatures and unprecedented super storms, claim there’s no such thing as climate change. 

Finally, we have the tenthers and the nullifiers, who think they have the power to ignore federal laws, just because they don’t like them. 

But none of these outlandish and nonsensical ideas are anything compared to the “new” Simpson-Bowles fiscal plan. 

That’s right. Washed-up deficit hawks Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson have returned to the spotlight. 

Yesterday, the pair introduced a rebooted, or should we say, rebaked, version of the original Simpson-Bowles “Let’s Get America Back on Track by Cutting Our Way to Prosperity – Which Has Never Been Done before Plan for Deficit Reduction”.

Unfortunately, the media is still in love with these irrelevant hustlers and their crazy ideas for our economy, which makes understanding the absurdity of the Simpson-Bowles plan that much harder. But let’s give it a try.

In the original Simpson-Bowles plan, the pair sought a whopping $2.9 trillion in budget cuts combined with $2.6 trillion in revenues.  

Under the new Simpson-Bowles 2.0 plan, which is being proposed as a grand bargain alternative to the looming sequester, the pair of crackpots now seek just $1.3 trillion in revenues, meaning they jacked up budget cuts this time around to a staggering $3.9 trillion.  While the original plan had roughly one-to-one spending cuts to new revenue formula, the new plan is three-to-one in favor of cuts to revenue.

Simpson-Bowles 2.0 calls for $2.4 trillion in new savings over the next 10 years, through “serious tax and entitlement reforms and cutting additional spending.” So what are the exact devastating cuts and reforms that Simpson and Bowles want to make in federal government spending?

First, they want to reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, meaning fewer and fewer elderly Americans will have access to healthcare and medications.

Next, Simpson and Bowles want to enact “comprehensive, pro-growth tax reform” which is really just a fancy way of saying “we want to give corporations even more corporate tax breaks.”

Of the $2.4 trillion in new savings that the Simpson-Bowles 2.0 calls for, nearly $600 billion of it comes from so-called tax reform. 

Finally, the old washed up hustlers want to “strengthen limits on discretionary spending” and reduce non-health mandatory spending”  which means cuts to thinks like social security, higher education and farm subsidies just to name a few.  

The bottom-line here is that Simpson-Bowles 2.0, much like its predecessor, is entirely about helping out corporate America, and screwing over the rest of us.  Along with the so-called “pro-growth tax reforms” come the entitlement reforms that basically mean we have to abandon elderly Americans and watch our loved ones die, if we want to save the American economy. 

The only people that should be happy with Simpson-Bowles 2.0 are the corporate sponsors that are undoubtedly funding them, and profiting from their recommendations.

The rest of us, working class Americans, need to see through all the smoke and mirrors, and past the media circus, and realize that, much like the birthers and the truthers, the Simpson-Bowlers completely off their rockers. 

No country in the world has ever cut its way to prosperity, and whether Simpson and Bowles like it or not, America won’t either.

So, let’s shut down the cameras, turn off the TV’s, and roll Grandpa Simpson and Grandpa Bowles back to the old folks home, where they can’t do any more damage to our economy and to our country.