Peter Orszag, President Obama’s former OMB director, has a rather depressing column in which he predicts the future of health care in America. He thinks employer health care will go the route that private pensions have gone, being replaced by individual 401(k) plans. He also thinks the Affordable Care Act he helped create will accelerate this trend

The big question for banks like Peter Orszag’s Citigroup then becomes “what do we do with all that property?” For them, these are “non-performing assets” that have value but produce no revenue and in fact will even cost them money to maintain like mowing the lawn, paying the taxes, etc. Repairs and such make them even more expensive to hold.

And the icing on the cake is reading reports uncritically telling us the White House is, gosh darn it, really upset that Peter Orszag would embarrass the Administration by walking through those million dollar revolving doors at CitiGroup.

Good grief. You’d think this Administration had a stringent policy of not hiring people from Wall Street or allowing those steeped in its ethics from running the economy or defining the limits of financial “reform” and the purpose of HAMP. Please.

We have a party that failed to make the argument, and a President clearly following the blueprint of his deficit hawk ex-budget director, with the emphasis on extending the tax cuts, “fixing” Social Security through benefit cuts and rapprochement with the business community. This is not, then, just about negotiating. It’s about policy, a policy that liberals see as completely misguided, at odds with the real problems facing the country (the continuing unemployment and housing crises) and simply more concerned to pleasing banks and elites than making the economy better for working people.

The Bowles-Simpson plan isn’t a fair and equitable way to reduce the long-term federal deficit, whatever its co-authors might claim. In fact, it’s the biggest proposed experiment in supply-side economics since early Reagan.

The Democratic deficit hawks are moving their attack on Social Security into high gear. They hope that progressives will be sufficiently disoriented by the election defeat to allow them to attack this essential program.

Peter Orszag has an OpEd in the New York Times regarding Social Security. It’s full of the usual Orszag claptrap in which he sets himself up as the sober, responsible judge, while “the left… seems adamantly opposed to restoring actuarial balance to Social Security.”

In early 2009, the Administration proposed to put the banks through “stress tests” to see how they’d survive more adverse scenarios. So why didn’t the economic team also have a test in case their own recovery plans proved to be insufficient?

Three (sorta) “positive” stories about economic stimulus all came together in the last couple of days. They suggest that even when the forces of darkness are trying their hardest to make us stupid, it’s possible we can actually sort out the truth.

Orszag wants all the Bush tax cuts to expire. Obama doesn’t; he wants to keep them all but the ones on the top 2%. That’s a $3 trillion dollar difference over the next ten years.