Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Nevada politicians muted on recommendations to reduce national debt

If Nevada’s politicians had strong reactions to the announcement from Washington yesterday that cutting future entitlement programs and raising taxes may be the best way forward to bring down the federal debt, they were doing their best to muzzle it.

The president’s appointed debt commission co-chairs released their preliminary recommendations for putting the country back in the black yesterday, and nationally, there were several hard pills to swallow.

The chairs, Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson, put forward a proposal to reduce costs by trimming everywhere from the military budget to Social Security and Medicare, and raising revenues by doing everything from instituting gas taxes to getting rid of mortgage interest deductions.

Those are just some of the myriad changes contained in the 50-page proposal that are bound to affect Nevadans, if they move forward.

But while the reception across the country was split — at least one Republican governor said the proposed cuts “don’t go far enough” while outgoing Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called them “simply unacceptable” — among Nevada’s lawmakers, it’s been muted.

“While I don’t agree with every one of their recommendations, what they have provided is a starting point for this important discussion,” Sen. Harry Reid said Wednesday.

That’s saying not much for a senator who is pushing initiatives that are exactly opposite to certain recommendations. For instance, Reid has pledged to have the Senate vote during the lame duck period on a bill to give Social Security recipients an extra $250 — an effort to make up for the fact that low inflation means there won’t be any cost of living adjustment this year. It’s highly unlikely that anything like that would be able to happen under a system that envisions reducing future increases in Social Security payments by clipping the cost of living adjustments and raising the retirement age to 68.

The proposal isn’t by any means final — at least 14 of the 18 members of the commission would have to approve it to force Congress to consider the recommendations, and they haven’t even met yet to officially review the proposal. Also, the release of this preliminary document was a surprise — which may suggest it doesn’t have enough commission votes for approval — and thus was meant more as a conversation-starter than the final word.

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