To the degree that it endorses Ryan's schemes, in a sane political climate the GOP would be risking political obsolescence. This was the same party that only a year ago pitched a fit over Sarah Palin’s imaginary "death panels." Now its leading thinker wants to control costs by asking grandma to bargain for cheaper heart surgery?

Standards, however, are anything but rational. The president faces a defining challenge. I often wonder whether Obama has mistaken the U.S. government for the Harvard Law Review, where the emollient balm of his personality persuaded rival factions to reason together.

Ivy League intellectual that he is, I’m afraid he definitely underestimates public ignorance on everything relating to the budget: where the money comes from, where it goes, and what’s at stake in the coming showdown over the U.S. government debt limit. It’s hard for somebody as obsessed with public policy as Obama to grasp how little his countrymen know.

Congress can repeal Medicare and Social Security, but it can't renounce their lawful debts. Ordinarily, an establishment Republican like John Boehner would refrain from even bluffing about the idea, which he dare not follow through.

Obama's seeming passivity, however, has made the GOP reckless.

Batter up. [my emphasis]

But it is worth understanding just how conservative this debate has become -- and how far the president has retreated. The most progressive president since Johnson has now embraced a center-right agenda -- even before entering negotiations with the Republicans.

The president effectively announced the demise of a reborn Keynesian era that has expired before the economy revived. 25 million Americans are in need of full-time work. Home values are still sinking; gas prices are at $4 a gallon and rising. Consumer confidence is plummeting. Europe's growth is slowing. But the federal government will join the states and cities in immediately cutting spending and laying off workers.

With this premature embrace of austerity, mass unemployment may become the new normal. Wages will remain stagnant. The concentration of wealth will grow and the middle class will continue to decline.

The president allowed that he was "sympathetic" to the view that we shouldn't cut spending until the economy is fully recovered. But he embraced the conservative argument that "doing nothing on the deficit is just not an option," because we could do "real damage to the economy" if we don't "begin a process now."

But mass unemployment and stagnant wages represent "real damage to the economy" that is here and now, not speculative. There's no sign of the potential harm that might be caused by deficits in the sometime future. Interest rates are low; America has no trouble financing its debt. The president started down this path prematurely in 2009; now he has forced the pace. [my emphasis]

Another significant concern stems from the President’s proposal to limit the annual growth in Medicare costs per beneficiary to the per capita rate of growth in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) plus only 0.5 percentage points and to require automatic cuts in Medicare if this target would otherwise be exceeded. This goal is laudable. But it may be unrealistic. Historically, Medicare costs per beneficiary have risen about 2 percentage points per year faster than GDP growth per capita. The health reform law will launch a series of demonstrations, pilots, and research projects to find effective ways to slow health care cost growth without reducing the quality of care or access to care. But we don’t know yet how much or how quickly we can lower health care cost growth, especially since the principal driver in cost growth is medical advances that improve health and save and prolong lives but add significant costs.

Finally, the President’s plan calls for a mechanism to trigger automatic reductions in programs and tax expenditures if the debt would exceed certain benchmarks (measured as a share of GDP). The goal of stabilizing the debt as a share of GDP is precisely the right one. But all triggers like this that have been designed in the past have suffered from a fatal flaw — they required the deepest budget cuts when the economy was weakest and the smallest cuts when it was strongest — the opposite of what sound economic policy entails. The President’s plan calls for the trigger to "include a mechanism to ensure that it does not exacerbate an economic downturn." No one has succeeded until now in producing a mechanism that meets this test, and it remains unclear whether it can be done. This new proposal bears some similarities to the trigger in the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law, which was not successful and which Congress ultimately repealed.

To be sure, the President's plan represents an important step forward in the debate. But it should be recognized that this plan is a rather conservative one, significantly to the right of the Rivlin-Domenici plan. While we worry about some particular elements of the President’s plan, we worry much more that the deficit-reduction process that’s now starting could produce an outcome that is well to the right of the already centrist-to-moderately-conservative Obama proposal, by reducing its relatively modest revenue increases and cutting more deeply into effective programs that are vital to millions of Americans. [my emphasis]

Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen.Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who caucuses with the Democrats, are all openly calling for reform, and making it plain that the party is disunited on the issue when a titanic debate over debt is gathering momentum.

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) refuses to give an inch on benefit cuts, arguing that the program has not contributed “one penny” to the debt.

The Gang of Six approach is based on Obama's commission, which called for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. Obama never endorsed the plan, and his proposed 2012 budget called for only $1.1 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. But White House press secretary Jay Carney said the president knows much more is required.

It's hard to imagine why any Democrat ... finds they are in agreement with Joe Lieberman, whose sole purpose in political life is now to piss on anything remotely progressive or important to the Democratic base, particularly on something as important as Social Security.

Representative Dave Camp of Michigan took pre-emptive aim at a value-added tax, saying, "Washington has borrowed enough from the American people."

But Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Senate Democratic leader, denounced suggestions of an administration VAT plan as the "musings of right-wing cable shows."

He also admonished "bleeding heart liberals" to be open to program reductions to restore fiscal balance. An hour after the commission’s meeting, however, several liberal activists held a conference call with reporters to press for additional spending to create jobs, lower military spending, higher taxes for the wealthy and no cuts in Medicare or Social Security. [my emphasis]

President Obama told his bipartisan debt commission on Tuesday that "everything has to be on the table," while the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, suggested overhauling the nation’s tax code to raise more revenue. ...

Former Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, the panel's Republican co-chairman, warned the panel, "The extreme right and the extreme left will savage our final product."

That assumes, however, that the commission will agree to one before its Dec. 1 deadline. Expectations are low given the party polarization, especially in an election year.

Still, administration officials have suggested that should the commission reach a deadlock, Mr. Obama could adopt proposals left on the table.

While Fed chairmen typically stick to monetary policy and shy away from advising elected officials about budget policy, Mr. Bernanke's remarks were the latest in his recent string of calls for elected officials to make "hard choices" soon, before debt threatens the economy’s recovery and growth.

"Choices regarding Medicare, Social Security and other spending programs cannot be made in a vacuum but must be combined with decisions about how much revenue the government will raise and how it will raise it," he said. [my emphasis]

The country in which most people live is experiencing an economic disaster. More than 25 million people are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for work altogether. Tens of millions are now underwater on their mortgages, with millions facing the imminent loss of their homes. Furthermore, there is little prospect that the situation will improve anytime soon.

Many fewer live in the other America, the world of Wall Street and Washington lobbyists. This is where you’ll find former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson and investment banker-turned-Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, the co-chairs of President Obama’s deficit commission, which on Wednesday outlined its plans for what it calls “fiscal responsibility.” In their world the key fact is that, today, corporate profits are back to their pre-recession peaks. As long as the bonuses on Wall Street are again hitting record highs, the economy must be just fine, so what else is there to do but worry about deficits?