Washington Post Editorial Board: Democrats losing their ‘balance’ on entitlement reform

 DEMOCRATS LIKE TO say that they are for “balance” in the fiscal debate and that Republicans favor spending cuts. That argument is increasingly difficult to credit.

Since the election last month, a few modest proposals have been floated to slow the growth in entitlement spending. None of these would fix the problem, but they would at least acknowledge that a problem exists. One by one, the ostensible advocates of balance have shot them down, portraying each in turn as a mortal threat to the poor or the aged.

Nudging the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67, which President Obama supported last year?

Unconscionable. Changing the way cost-of-living adjustments are calculated, which Mr. Obama also supported? Brutally unfair to veterans and seniors. Reform of Medicaid provider taxes, which liberal Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) only days ago described as a “charade” used by states to jack up funding from Washington? Unthinkable, the White House now says:In fact, with the Supreme Court having struck down a facet of Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act involving Medicaid, nothing in that program can be touched. And, while they’re at it, put Social Security off the table, too. We’re asked to accept the mythology that, though the pension and disability program is facing ever-widening shortfalls, it isn’t contributing to the overall deficit.

We’ve said time and again that revenue must rise. The latest Republican position on taxes, while an improvement, remains inadequate. GOP leaders now admit the need for more revenue, but they refuse to say how they would obtain it. Given the political difficulty of limiting any deduction or loophole, their supposed commitment to tax reform isn’t worth much without specifics.

But the underlying fiscal problem is that federal expenditures are slated to rise faster than economic growth because of rising health-care costs and an aging population. The long-term drivers are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and subsidies for the health-care exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act.

That’s not a partisan statement. It is reality. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that, without reform, spending on Social Security and federal health-care programs will rise from 10 percent of gross domestic product today to 16 percent 25 years from now. If that sounds manageable, consider this: Over the past 40 years, the entire federal budget has averaged 18.5 percent of GDP.

The cartoon version of the fight is that Democrats want to soak the rich, and Republicans want to slash the poor. But here’s the problem: There’s no way for either of them to solve this problem without affecting the middle class, which in the end will have to pay more and accept something less than what has been promised. Neither party likes either side of that equation.

There are better and worse ways to bend the entitlement curve. Raise the Medicare age, but shield the neediest seniors. If you think Republicans are proposing the wrong way to adjust the cost-of-living index, finance expert Robert C. Pozen has proposed a progressive alternative.

But there’s no way to fix America’s problem without doing something on entitlements. If the Democrats — and Mr. Obama, in particular — don’t get more seriously into that discussion, they have no standing to complain about the Republicans’ lack of balance.

Surprise! Treasury IG probing multi-million-dollar fraud in green-energy grants, tax credits

 And the probe doesn’t involve some bit players in an obscure program, either.  The 1603 Program was one of the centerpieces of Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus, designed to subsidize a transition from hydrocarbon-based energy to renewables in the residential market, and federal government sunk $13 billion into the effort.  Now the Inspector General of Treasury has opened a probe of the three largest providers of solar panel installations, who gained the most from the 1603 Program, and who may have fraudulently calculated their bills in order to claim more taxpayer cash:
Three of the country’s most prolific installers of residential solar panels are under federal investigation to determine if they inflated the cost of their work to increase the payments they would receive from the government, according to government and industry officials familiar with the probe.
SolarCity, SunRun and Sungevity have received subpoenas from the Treasury Department’s office of inspector general for financial records to justify more than $500 million in federal grants and tax credits the firms tapped for performing work. The probe seeks to determine whether the companies accurately reported the market value of their costs when applying for federal reimbursement, which was calculated at one-third of the costs.
The solar companies received money through the Treasury’s $13 billion program, known as the 1603 program, which used funds from President Obama’s stimulus initiative to offer cash grants to clean-energy developers. The goal was to spur the spread of wind farms, solar panels and other clean power sources nationwide.
SolarCity, SunRun and Sungevity have been by far the largest recipients among companies installing solar panels on homes. Working heavily in the sunny states of California and Arizona, the three firms collected hundreds of millions of dollars in federal cash grants to pick up a share of their costs on thousands of home installations during the past three years.
You know who’s missing from this story?  Sheriff Joe Biden.  Recall that when critics of the $800 billion porkfest predicted widespread fraud, Obama put Biden in charge of making sure that the money didn’t go to scams, which Biden admitted a few months later was an unachievable goal.  Obama himself warned that his wrath would be mighty indeed if local-government recipients of Porkulus cash got sticky fingers.

Perhaps they didn’t have enough room at the Ritz Carlton for Biden to invite scrutiny of the three largest players in the 1603 Program.  It’s tough to find parking there, after all.

And here’s another shocker:
SolarCity and SunRun have been generous political supporters of Obama. At SolarCity, for example, officials in the company and its two key venture capital firm backers, along with their relatives, donated an estimated $579,000 to Obama in 2008 and 2012, according to campaign reports.
Lucky for Obama that the announcement of the IG probe happened after the election, then.  What a coincidence!