More On Obama and the Social Security Cuts

See Krugman, Kuttner, Chait, Digby.  To reiterate the obvious, there’s no defense for this — it’s bad on the merits and and it’s bad politics, and whether the proposal represents Obama’s sincere preferences is irrelevant.  Sure, it will appeal to a few centrist pundits, but centrist pundits have no actual constituency.   And, yes, you could theoretically construct a chained CPI policy with subsidies that would ameliorate or eliminate the regressive effects, but 1)the chances that such a fix would survive the sausage-making process are virtually zero and 2)there’s no reason for a Democratic president to put any kind of Social Security cut on the table.