Yes, you heard right. After years of anticipation and speculation, 81-year old former senator Alan K. Simpson and his youthful ward Erskine Bowles have finally announced and released a long-awaited followup to their 2010 megahit, The Simpson-Bowles Plan.
The new plan, Simpson-Bowles 2: Escape from Necron 7, goes even further than the original plan in reducing the nation’s deficit. While the original had a semblance of balance between spending cuts and revenue increases, the new plan is much more heavily tilted towards extreme austerity (which mostly involves cuts from Medicare and Medicaid), thanks in large part to the deficit hawkish Simpson, who once called Social Security “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”
The plan is also supposed to somehow serve as an “outline for a new grand bargain” between Republicans and Democrats, despite the fact even Bowles thinks the idea of a grand bargain is “at best on life support.”
Critics are calling the sequel “lame,” “vague,” “unbalanced,” and “a waste of everyone’s time.”
[Salon]