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[by Sam Stein]
And on Monday, one of the top progressive figures on the [president's deficit reduction] panel, departing SEIU president Andy Stern, derided the "the Washington assassins of change" who are discrediting the panel.
"If this group of people reaches a conclusion on almost anything, it will mean something," Stern said, in an interview with the Huffington Post. "Forgetting me, these are not insignificant people. I would say that the most interesting thing is that publicly everyone has low expectations... Everybody's scared that we have meetings and everybody can't see what's going on because somebody may do something wrong. I would say my conversations with the people on the commission, everybody appreciates that this is really a bad problem."
Exactly how big a problem has become a source of contentious debate. In a winding conversation from his office next to Dupont Circle, Stern stressed that Congress (which he labeled "a failed experiment of fiscal responsibility") has to sober up to the reality that the financial path it was on is no longer sustainable. Waste needs to be eliminated, defense programs need to be un-bloated, the tax system needs simplification. Stern was warm to a proposal from Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) requiring that budgets have two-year windows and he spoke admiringly of Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-Okl.) campaign to eliminate earmarks. In fact, at the fourth positive mention of Coburn's name, the Huffington Post asked whether Stern and the archconservative Oklahoma Republican had begun hanging out on weekends.
"I wouldn't say that I hang out with him," Stern replied. "But I do have a notebook from him listing all the waste, fraud and abuse." (He then produced a two-inch think black binder entitled "$150 Billion in Discretionary Savings, Waste & Duplications in the Federal Bureaucracy.")
Even entitlement systems -- which are fiercely protected by progressives in any discussion of deficit reduction -- need to be reexamined, Stern said, before stressing that "there's a certain amount of money it needs to spend on safety nets and taking care of people who otherwise have issues they can't deal with." Most important of all was that all the recommendations had to be considered together. Taken alone, they won't work.
"There's not a debate about do we have to do something," he said. "There's not a debate about how serious is this; this is a catastrophe waiting to happen if nothing is done. But I think Congress has a long history of dumbing down big things into small things and I think there is a challenge here to get them [not to do that.]"