Amid all the fiscal slope machinations comes one bit of good news, at least in the near term. House Speaker John Boehner has pulled back on raising the Medicare eligibility age in this deal, although he holds it out as a possibility for the conclusion of the deal next year. This suggests that the White [...]

Jon Chait has clarified some of his points on raising the Medicare eligibility age, and with the temperature now lowered a bit, let’s just assess his argument. I find it kind of amusing that he quotes me quoting him talking about the debt limit deal in 2011, where he said, essentially, “exchanging a series of [...]

Liberal groups have targeted Democratic Senators in a campaign to forestall benefit cuts to social insurance programs as part of any deal to avert the fiscal slope. The groups, which include CREDO, Progressives United, the PCCC, DFA, MoveOn, the Campaign for America’s Future and Rebuild the Dream, have segmented the Senate into three categories, based [...]

The ferocious pushback on a trial balloon offer to raise the Medicare eligibility age continued today, at a very high level.

Raising the Medicare eligibility age has been taken down a notch, as well it should. Apart from everything else – privatizing a known commodity that reduces health care costs more than comparable private insurance, making health insurance costs go up across the board – it’s quite regressive and hurts at-risk populations the most: Medicare eligibility [...]

Staffers in this White House in particular float trial balloons on a continual basis on virtually every issue of importance to gauge public response, and the whole point of that exercise is to actually respond to it rather than not take it seriously. And if that’s the case, and the eligibility age conversation represented a trial balloon, I think we can say it’s been effectively and efficiently popped. Because over the weekend, Dick Durbin, perhaps the closest US Senator to the White House, criticized the idea.

So my old college pal Jon Chait (I promise before the end of my time here to pull out the parody my college humor magazine did of his column in the Michigan Daily) has responded to my criticism of his endorsement of raising the Medicare eligibility age, America’s worst new idea. I’ll get to batting [...]

Since Jon Chait has never met a concession he didn’t like, he comes out with an endorsement of raising the Medicare eligibility age as part of a long-term deficit deal. So his cover for what is universally regarded as a terrible idea surely led deficit scolds seeking to use the problem to weaken the safety [...]

Politico’s VanDeAllen team have a exclusive inside must-credit-Politico rundown of the fiscal cliff talks that merely recycles known information and makes a bunch of guesses. Cut through the fog, and here’s what to expect: Taxes will go up just shy of $1.2 trillion — the middle ground of what President Barack Obama wants and what [...]

I don’t think this will be a regular feature, but here are a few things on everybody’s favorite cliff/slope metaphor that caught my eye at the end of the day: First of all, unions are so far following through on protecting social insurance against potential attacks from both parties: The American Federation Of State, County [...]

The story I covered on Sunday about how the Romney-Ryan campaign would have to cut current Medicare benefits because of the box they’ve shoved themselves into by promising to “restore $716 billion in Medicare cuts” finally gets picked up by the New York Times in a front-page story. If the story gets a bigger platform, [...]