James K Galbraith provides the details.
Excerpt:
The report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, issued on December 1, 2010 by Chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is entitled “The Moment of Truth.” The words appear in block caps on the second page, weighty and portentous. They reappear in the first paragraph of the preamble: "Throughout our nation’s history, Americans have found the courage to do right by our children’s future. Deep down, every American knows that we face a moment of truth once again.”
These sentences set the tone. The first is a bald-faced lie, as a Westerner like Senator Simpson knows perfectly well. To the contrary, we have often fallen under the sway of robber barons, water barons, oil barons, bison-killers, clear-cutters and strip-miners, hell-bent on maximum pillage in the shortest time. Only occasionally have a few heroes like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and Harold Ickes Sr. emerged to battle for the most precious physical elements of our heritage — and then only with limited success....
The only other effort at economic analysis in the report is the section entitled “The Looming Fiscal Crisis.” This begins with the claim that, “Our nation is on an unsustainable fiscal path.” No evidence is presented. The current deficit is big, of course, because unemployment is high, but there is no program here to fight unemployment.
The rest of the section argues that something terrible will happen if the debt-to-GDP ratio rises, as projected, to 90 percent in 2020 — and then continues on to 185 percent of GDP by 2035. Yes, this would be terrible: it would mean that the private economy never recovered. But the commission assumes that the private economy does recover. In testimony to the Commission on June 30, I described the incoherent nature of the projections that produce these scary debt-to-GDP numbers. The Report makes no effort to rebut my work. Indeed, the fact that I submitted testimony, at their invitation, on behalf of Americans for Democratic Action, goes unmentioned on their witness list.
Read the whole thing; there's excellent analysis of the fear-mongering of the deficit hawks, a prominent component -- though only one -- of the political affect we need to analyze.
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