Let me update my story about the push by labor and Democratic politicos to highlight John Boehner’s Social Security comments and offer an alternative to the deficit hysteria.

Trumka’s entire speech is now available, and you can see he doesn’t mince words at all. First on the recent past:

We should be honest about what’s causing deficits over the next ten years. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “The tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.” And “without the economic downturn and the fiscal policies of the previous administration, the budget would be roughly in balance over the next decade.”

Although more than half of the 2009 deficit is due to the recession, Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer points out that “in the absence of [Bush administration policies that we failed to pay for], we could have had an economic downturn as severe as the current one and responded to it as aggressively as we have, all while keeping the budget roughly balanced over the next ten years [2010-2019].”

The Speaker’s office joined in on some of this today, pinpointing the source of current deficits.

And then on the future:

We should also be honest about what’s causing projected deficits over the long term. We do not face a crisis of entitlement spending generally, caused by the retirement of the Baby Boomers. In the long term, we face a crisis of public and private health care costs growing faster than GDP, especially after 2035. Social Security has its own source of dedicated funding and is not responsible for our unsustainable long-term debt, and spending on other entitlements is projected to fall as a share of the economy over the long term [...] premature withdrawal of economic stimulus threatens to throw the global economy into a double dip recession, or worse [...]

According to Paul Krugman, “Both textbook economics and experience say that slashing spending when you’re still suffering from high unemployment is a really bad idea. Not only does it deepen the slump, but it does little to improve the budget outlook, because much of what governments save by spending less they lose as a weaker economy depresses tax receipts.”

I didn’t realize that some of the other deeply unserious riff-raff was invited in to testify before the Fiscal Commission today. Philistines like respected economist Jamie Galbraith:

For a quick snapshot, Galbraith’s testimony is divided into ten sections, which address the following points:

• That the Commission’s work is illegitimate
• That current deficits and rising debt were caused by the financial crisis.
• That future deficit projections are generally based on forecasts which begin by unrealistically assuming full recovery
• That, having cured the deficits with an unrealistic forecast, CBO recreates them with another, very different, but equally unrealistic forecast.
• That the only way to reduce public deficits is to restore private credit.
• That Social Security and Medicare “solvency” is not part of the Commission’s Mandate.
• That as a transfer program, Social Security is also irrelevant to deficit economics.
• That markets are not calling for deficit reduction, either now or later.
• That in reality, the US government spends first & borrows later; public spending creates a demand for Treasuries in the private sector.
• That the best place in history (for this Commission) would be no place at all.

You can read Galbraith’s full testimony here. It’s searing. And that’s the exact response that should be given to this cherry-picked commission: contempt. They are hyping a problem and seeking to choose irrelevant policies to that problem which will cause incredible amounts of pain.