Bill Sher confronted David Walker on the latest leg of his Little Friskies Fiscal Scold Tour and seemed to make him quite upset. He really doesn't like to be confronted with the fact that social security is solvent for the next thirty years. And he certainly doesn't want people to recognize that in order to fix medicare and medicaid there must be comprehensive health care reform. It seems he prefers to obsess about how everyone needs to sacrifice even if the problems of the moment require different solutions.
And I too have wondered why Pete Peterson didn't form a foundation and devote millions to protest government spending on an unnecessary, expensive war in Iraq. For some reason nobody ever says anything about that. It's only when you try to help sick and old people that the fiscal scolds really put their money where their mouths are.
As Sher writes:
Peterson could have spent $1M on ads opposing the Bush tax cuts. He could spend that money now supporting comprehensive cost-saving health care reform.
But he only chooses to spend it on attacking Social Security and Medicare, when they are in fact, not the underlying fiscal problem.
That speaks to blind ideology, which is what The Fiscal Wake-Up Tour is all about.
They aren't going to give up. This is just too perfect an opportunity to dazzle people with BS and misdirect them from the failures of the Pete Petersons of the world to government programs.