DN Editorial: It's the jobs, stupid(s)

IF YOU BELIEVE a new CBS News poll - and we do - cutting the federal deficit is just about the last thing Americans want their leaders working on.

Only 4 percent of those who responded listed the deficit as their top priority for congressional action. Compare that with 56 percent who said the economy and jobs are the most important with health care a distant second at 14 percent.

And no wonder: Right now, 15 million Americans are unemployed, with maybe an additional 10 million who are working fewer hours than they want or who have given up looking for work.

But it seems that we are to be subjected to a new round of debate about it anyway because of the release of a draft report from Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the Democratic and Republican co-chairmen of President Obama's nonpartisan Budget Deficit Commission.

The commission has been meeting in secret for months and was supposed to provide a deficit-

reduction plan that would get an up-or-down vote in Congress - if 14 of 18 of the commission's members agreed to its recommendations. That wasn't going to happen, which is why Bowles and Simpson released their own report.

Some "realistic" and "pragmatic" analysts say there are "good points" in the Bowles-Simpson plan, but its principal benefit is that it allows us to repeat again some basics about the deficit, and alleged fixes for it. The short-term deficit - for the next decade - has been caused by four things: the severe economic downturn and the money spent by the federal government to prevent economic collapse; the Bush-era tax cuts; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Medicare Prescription Part D benefit, also unpaid for.

If you watch what they do and not what they say, it's clear that conservatives - and Blue Dog Democrats - don't really care about the deficit, either, since they insist that the Bush-era tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 be extended, adding $70 billion every year to the deficit.

As for the long-term deficit, it is caused primarily by one thing. Here's a hint: It's not Social Security. In fact, by law, Social Security can't add to the deficit at all: It pays out in benefits only what it collects in FICA taxes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if no changes at all are made, Social Security could pay 100 percent of benefits until 2037 and 80 percent after that. And while the program does need some changes eventually, increasing the retirement age to 69, as Bowles and Simpson recommend, would be a serious hardship to the people who need Social Security the most. Lower-income, less-educated men and women - people who tend to work physically demanding jobs - have a lower life expectancy than people who sit at desks. And where are the jobs for 64-year-old construction workers?

The culprit in the long-term deficit? Exploding health-care costs. The United States pays a much higher percentage of its wealth for health care than dozens of countries that have a higher life expectancy - among both poor and rich. For an eye-opening visual aid, check out the interactive health-care calculator put together by the Center for Economic Policy (www.cepr.net). The costs of U.S. health-care relative to GDP are soaring, while the comparable figures for Canada, Japan, Spain and other countries are relatively low.

If you watch what they do and not what they say, it's clear that conservatives, and Blue Dog Democrats don't really care about the long-term deficit, either. Otherwise, they wouldn't be trying to cripple or kill the Affordable Care Act, which is projected to reduce the deficit by $143 billion over 10 years.