Paul Krugman
11/12/2010

Krugman says he didn’t have much hope when President Obama created a bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, but when it released an outline of its proposal it was worse than he and cynics expected. The co-chairmen are proposing a mixture of tax cuts for the wealthy and tax increases for the middle class, resulting in a transfer of wealth upward without any effect on deficit reduction. It also proposes raising retirement age for Social Security as life expectancy increases, but Krugman says that is impractical for laborers, whose life expectancy is not increasing at the same rate as knowledge workers. It seems the commission has been hijacked by a Republican ideological agenda. He doubts anything can be salvaged from the proposal.

Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

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