Like it or not, most of the news coming out of the nation's capital over the next month will be about the "fiscal cliff." And that means that liberal and conservative advocacy groups and think tanks will chime in with their corresponding position papers on how to deal with the financial situation at hand.
The Institute for Policy Studies is a liberal D.C. based group that is taking on those CEO's and their "Fix the Debt" offensive that calls on Congress and President Obama to come together on a deficit reduction deal. The institute just released a report primarily about the huge retirement benefits for those CEO's, as well as the shortfalls in their employee pension funds.
Just as Republicans are acting intransigent in raising taxes (or at least tax rates), Democrats are now arguing that the big drivers of the deficit, Medicare and Medicaid, need not be addressed immediately as "taxmageddon" approaches at the end of the year.
That's why you've been seeing prominent Democrats like Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin questioning raising the age of beneficiaries for Medicare, for example. And Durbin, like many others, said that Social Security has nothing to do with the debt and deficit in this country and should be left off the table.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid agrees, saying, "I personally believe there are things that we can do with entitlements that don't hurt beneficiaries. But I'm not going to negotiate this with you simply other than to say that we hope that they can agree to the tax revenue that we're talking about, and that is rate increases. And then as the president has said on a number of occasions, we'll be happy to deal with entitlements."
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2012.