Though Peterson claims to favor policies that boost savings rates, the Cato Institute's Moore says this plan would "punish people for saving. Most people get their retirement incomes from personal savings. Moore argues that means- testing programs through tax increases would push working Social Security recipients out of the workplace and make individuals more dependent on tax- funded retirement programs. Peterson, Moore says, "really doesn't think incentives matter."
Taxing Social Security benefits isn't the only tax increase with support on the commission, however. At the commission's opening meeting in June, left- liberals, led by Greenstein, United Mine Workers Union President Richard Trumka, and former Rep. Tom Downey (D-N.Y.) urged the group to confront "tax expenditures, such as home-mortgage and business-expense tax deductions. The liberals asserted that wealthy Americans unfairly benefit from those tax exemptions and that cutting them could raise federal revenue.
During their opening statements, Cox, Rep. Bill Archer (R-Tex.), and Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) challenged that idea. "The underlying rationale of the tax-expenditure concept," Archer said, "is that the government owns all of the earnings and wealth of all Americans, and that it is only through the grace of government, determined by Congress, that they get to keep any of it."
As the discussion between commissioners became testy, Kerrey and his co-chairman, Sen. Jack Danforth (R-Mo.), tried to defuse the situation. "One thing Bob and I have assumed, Danforth said, "is that in whatever we do, net increases in taxes are not going to be a part of it."
In ideological contrast to the tax raisers, Cox and Wallop take the most radical approach of anyone on the commission: They want to challenge the concept of entitlement. At the first meeting, Wallop said, "The commission will succeed only if we end the fantasy that individuals and groups of Americans have a right to, are entitled to, the benefits financed by federal tax revenue." He refused to endorse the commission's initial report because it did not include a statement saying that no one has a constitutional right to the income of another.
For his part, Cox proposes subjecting the entire federal budget, except for Social Security and interest on the debt, to annual review. Federal spending programs would have specific price tags attached, and Congress would have to approve the price. Cox says that entitlement programs "aren't really uncontrollable--they're just uncontrolled."
Such proposals will be unlikely from this or any other "independent commission." Notes Moore, who was a staff member on the deficit-fighting 1989 National Economic Commission, "The only way these commissions work is when they do not have too-ambitious agendas and [when] they can find areas [for reform] with nearly universal agreement."
For now, look for the commission to do no more than tinker with the status quo. As one source close to the commission put it: "We have two [political] parties--one that's for expanding the state and one that passionately defends the existing statism but wants no more."
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