Progressive Pushback on "Entitlement Reform" and Disingenuous Deficit Hawks

Continuing our coverage of attempts by conservatives to wage generational warfare on the issue of entitlements, I'd encourage everyone to read this opinion piece by Robert Kuttner in today's Washington Post. As the President's suddently-low-key entitlement summit is underway today, Kuttner skillfully pulls apart the disingenuous arguments of so-called deficit hawks and tries to drive a stake into the heart of the "generational theft" meme:

The deficit hawks' story also contends that we are sacrificing our children's future by too much (deficit) spending on the elderly. In fact, today's young adults are already falling out of the middle class because of the high costs of the investments we don't adequately finance socially -- child care, college tuition and health insurance. But fiscal conservatives seldom call for increased investment in the young. Today's young, of course, will be tomorrow's retirees, and they will need social insurance, too.

The overall bottom line? The economy we bequeath to our children has everything to do with getting growth back on track and almost nothing to do with imagined future deficits.

Also worth checking out today is a new project of Demos and the Century Foundation: The Fiscal High Road. It's a data-rich site meant to push back on the misleading arguments and generational claims made by the Petersen Foundation and other "entitlement reformers." Here's a quick slideshow they put together explaining the status of three distinct programs - Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - that are often disingenuously lumped together under the term "entitlements."

As an aside, while I think this slide show has some great graphs and data in it, and I'm glad to see Demos and the Century Foundation pushing these ideas, they might be better served repackaging this data in a short video/animation (like this) rather than as a Power Point presentation.