The single biggest driving force behind trying to cut your Social Security in Washington is President Obama. At every turn Obama has worked hard to keep the idea alive despite it is a horrible idea that is incredibly unpopular. This is not something Obama is being forced to accept, it is what he has been pushing for.

In 2011, before he was the Republican nominee for vice-president, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) proposed a federal budget. He called it, “The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise.”

Two years later, now in his second year as chair of the House budget committee, he dusted off and polished his old proposal. He calls this one: “The Path to Prosperity: A Responsible Balanced Budget.”

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan wrote an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal extolling the virtues of austerity while claiming anyone who disagreed with his plan to destroy Medicare was, ironically, going to destroy Medicare. While blaming Senate Democrats for the Sequester because they did not pass a budget Rep. Ryan offered a Greece style austerity budget while claiming to oppose austerity.

Republicans have managed to whip themselves into a frenzy about the failure of Senate Democrats to pass a “budget” in over four years. What seems to be lost in this discussion, though, is the fact that the normalization of the filibuster has effectively eliminated any reason for a Senate majority to adopt a budget.

The budget battles in Congress have an interesting, if not wholly unexpected casualty, the Defense Department. Due to budget uncertainty DoD has been forced to slow down its notoriously extravagant contracting process.

House Republicans are about to fold on the debt limit. They are no longer going to demand that any increase in the limit be matched with spending cuts. But because nothing in Congress can be simple and easy, the House Republicans are going to wrap up the debt ceiling in a convoluted face saving measure.

Tim Huelskamp (FarRightR-Brownbackistan01) has been in the news lately for standing up to John Boehner (NotQuiteSoFarRightR). Last month, Boehner kicked Huelskamp off the House Agriculture committee, leaving Kansas without a member of that committee for the first time in 150 years. Note, please, that Huelskamp prides himself on being a farmer first, and Huelskamp’s most favorite map (his vast congressional district) is packed with farms, so this hurts him not just in his ego, but in his ability to deliver for his constituents.

Given another map that’s making the rounds these days, that ought to make his constituents, very nervous, if not very angry.

Hearings in Congress today pile on the political debate over the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. The hearings come on the heels of the Pickering-Mullen report, which looked at the actions of the State Department and foreign service leading up to the attack, finding serious deficiencies in management and “grossly inadequate” security at the consulate. As a result four senior State Department officials resigned.

According to reliable sources, the Obama administration is seriously contemplating a deal under which the annual cost of living adjustment for Social Security benefits would be indexed to the chained consumer price index rather than the CPI for wage and clerical workers (CPI-W) to which it is now indexed. This will lead to a reduction in benefits of approximately 0.3 percentage points annually. This loss would be cumulative through time so that after 10 years the cut would be roughly 3 percent, after 20 years 6 percent, and after 30 years 9 percent. If a typical senior collects benefits for twenty years, then the average reduction in benefits will be roughly 3 percent.

To say that “we have a budget deficit” is no different than saying “we’re in the middle of a recession.” The correlation between deficits and economic growth is very tight. A large part of deficits are composed of reduced tax receipts from less people working, and increase in utilization of automatic stabilizers like unemployment benefits, Medicaid and food stamps, which recedes in better economic times.