When fully in control of Washington, the Republican Party has traditionally shown no concern for budget deficits. They had no problem passing both unpaid-for tax cuts or huge entitlement expansion on nearly party line votes. As Republican Vice President Dick Cheney famously said, “Deficits don’t matter” –at least as long as Republicans are in the White House.

Firedoglake has obtained an advance copy of the final report from the Simpson-Bowles Catfood Commission, which presents the plan from the co-chairs since the committee has failed to meet its mandate of producing a super-majority endorsed plan. They had been required to produce such a plan by today when Obama created the commission. In trying to convey the “wisdom” of their “sober” analysis of the national debt situation, the commission unintentionally demonstrates that the best current alternative is gridlock in Washington preventing any “fixes” in the near term, allowing laws already in place to improve the debt outlook, primarily through expiration of the Bush tax cuts and ending adjustments to the Alternative Minimum Tax and Medicare.

We’ll shortly be hearing the objections of deficit hawks to the deficit reduction package Demos, The Century Foundation, and the Economic Policy Institute. No doubt they’ll echo the criticisms that have already been leveled at the deficit-shrinkage roadmap Rep. Jan Schakowsky put on the table earlier this month. To get a sense of what those criticisms are likely to be, I recently had a close look at a Schakowsky critique by The Atlantic’s resident deficit hawk, Derek Thompson.

The Century Foundation, Demos and the Economic Policy Institute have released a liberal counterpoint budget plan, as a response to the plan put forward by Erskine Bowles and Alan “The Greediest Generation” Simpson on deficit reduction. The counterpoint is fundamentally different in that it demands increased employment levels before spending reductions kick in.

The basic difference between Schakowsky’s plan and Bowles-Simpson is not that it relies more on revenue-raisers than spending cuts – although conservatives will surely highlight this – but who bears the brunt of the pain.

It’s not often that I see three perfect quotes in the same day, so I thought I would gather them all together in one place and hope that maybe, just maybe, someone in the White House will read them.

Bernie Sanders will ride to the Catfood Commission’s rescue with some deficit reduction ideas of his own.

Sadly, it appears the Obama Administration now falls firmly in the same camp of having “deficit reduction” just mean stealing from the poor to give to the rich. While the president talks about how we need to reduce the deficit, he has his staff and surrogates fighting diligently to increase the deficit by making sure hedge-fund managers and wealthy Wall Street investors pay a lower tax rate than teachers and police officers.