And it is a very good one--a much better one than the amateurish, unthought-through and far-right Simpson-Bowles or the professional but inequality-increasing and right-wing Domenici-Rivlin.
Matthew Yglesias has beat me to the punch and already written about the thing:
Yglesias » The Left and the Budget: Liberals didn’t like the Simpson-Bowles deficit plan largely because neither Simpson nor Bowles is a liberal.... Today the Our Fiscal Security coalition, comprised of Demos, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Century Foundation have released their fiscal blueprint which shows you would that liberal take would look like... the heavy (and appropriate) emphasis in the short term on mobilizing excess capacity to increase growth and decrease unemployment rather than austerity budgeting that will only increase resource-idling... No Cost Shifting, namely:
Policies that simply shift costs from the federal government to individuals and families may improve the government’s balance sheet but may worsen the condition of many Americans, leaving the overall economy no better off...
[M]edium term balance can be achieved basically entirely on the tax and defense sides. For the longer-term, like all long-term budget plans they need to rely... [on hand-waving to control] health care costs. .. OFS offers the least hand-waving on this point of any plan....
This chart from OFS is an excellent illustration of what the Social Security debate is about:
Note that the bottom 40 percent don’t live as long as richer people, so the impact of raising the retirement age is especially regressive.
Document at: http://epi.3cdn.net/b3c2500a206a5ea13a_n7m6vzdpr.pdf
