Senator Kurt Conrad is working closely with Senaotr Gregg to form the deficit/debt commission. This commission would be tasked with developing recommendations for reducing the national debt. These recommendations would include cuts in spending, and, so the story goes, means if generating increased revenues (that’s Washington-speak for tax increases).

Progressives are concerned for a number of reasons. Primarily, there is concern that the entitlement programs will be cut. The concern is well-founded. Most recently, Ben Bernanke said he’d balance the budget on the backs of Social Security and Medicare because “that’s where the money is”. Unfortunately, we face a baby boom retirement wave; if we’re to keep grandma in a warm house with food to eat, she’s going to need her Social Security. That said, social security should be easy to fix and shouldn’t require any cuts; the real problem is Medicare.

As we see in the current health care debate, big Pharma and the insurance lobby have a stranglehold on our government. They will protect their profits. And increasingly, those profits derive from treating old folks. If we don’t start talking about what kind of care is reasonable for folks getting “free” treatments (especially at the end of life), I’m not sure I see a way to curtail the growth of Medicare.

I’m fairly certain Senator Judd Gregg is dead wrong in this video. The entire reason we doubled the Social Security tax under Reagan is that the actuaries saw what was coming today. They knew we’d never be able to pay retirement benefits to the baby boomers unless they paid their fair share into the program while they were still working. When Gregg says the fix worked for 30 years, he’s being slick. The last fix wasn’t designed to keep Social Security solvent then; it was designed to keep the program solvent forever.

Remember Al Gore and his “lock-box”. Man, his incessant repeating of the phrase in the 2000 debates virtually demanded that he be mocked by Saturday Night Live. And he was. But you know what? He was also correct. George Bush raided the surplus revenues generated by Social Security taxes (that should have been put away to keep the program solvent as more and more seniors begin to collect) to give his base (the rich) enormous tax cuts. In a fair world, those tax cuts would be clawed back to re-capitalize Social Security.

Of course, politics is almost never fair. So what we are likely to see is some sort of regressive national sales tax, across the board increases in income/FICA taxes and more cuts in education, scientific research, national parks, etc.