Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles Are Budget Arsonists Wearing Firemen's Hats

This is worse than I had thought, even though I thought this was going to be very bad.

Matthew Yglesias:

Bowles-Simpson vs Current Law: Surely the strangest thing about the Bowles-Simpson debt reduction plan is that, relative to current law [and relative to the Alternative Fiscal Scenario], it... increases the public debt load over the next ten years....

[W]ouldn’t it be easier politically to stick with current law than to do Simpson-Bowles’ huge series of unpopular changes? After all, the American political system has a ton of veto points. Barack Obama saying “I will veto any laws that increase the deficit relative to current law” would do more to reduce the debt over the next 2 or 6 years than would adopting Simpson-Bowles.

As Napoleon said: "If you plan to take Vienna, then take Vienna." People who really want to see the public debt in ten, twenty, or thirty years reduced will vote against and veto any bill that increases the public debt in ten, twenty, or thirty years.