The Catfood Commission is what they call the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform over at firedoglake.com. For those too young to remember life before Medicare, catfood is what a lot of seniors ate in order to pay their medical bills.

If we’re not careful, we could be headed back in that direction.

Follow up:

Listening to Alan Simpson’s dreadful banana joke the other night, I could only wonder how he got into the good graces of a Democratic president. Does he remind Obama of his grandfather? Maybe you can come up with a better explanation.

The former Republican senator’s recent characterization of Social Security as “a cow with 310 million tits” only reminded this writer of his shameless attempts to discredit Anita Hill when she testified about Clarence Thomas’s misbehavior during his Supreme Court hearings. Before that, Simpson viciously attacked the journalist Peter Arnett as a sympathizer with Saddam Hussein after Arnett interviewed the dictator, falsely claiming that Arnett’s ex-wife’s brother had been part of the Viet Cong. He later backed down about Arnett's brother-in-law, but you see the pattern.

As for Erskine Bowles, Simpson’s Democratic co-chair, the bemused expression on his patrician face was an oh-so-perfect clue as to what might bring the two men together: something sweet for the rich. The commission fell four votes short of passing its recommendations along to Capitol Hill, but not before recommending that recipients wait until the age of 68 for their Social Security benefits to commence.

Both Simpson and Bowles expressed satisfaction that they had advanced as far as they have. It’s all about reducing the national deficit, right? So how can they and the president ignore the fact that the solution is hiding in plain sight: Let the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more than $250,000 a year. (This is individuals, mind you; couples can earn $500,000 with no new taxes, and the president scoffed at New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s proposal to raise the limit to $1 million.)

The catfood commissioners had barely shuffled off when President Obama announced a new deal: extend the Bush tax cuts another two years in exchange for Republican approval of an 18 month extension of unemployment benefits, plus a $120 billion cut in payroll tax that, of course, comes out of the Social Security fund.

If Obama went to Washington to dismantle the fragile safety net that has been fraying ever since Ronald Reagan came to town, he never told anyone. That progressives, who worked so hard for his election, are enraged should be no surprise. His posturing that he was unwilling to gamble the needs of the recently unemployed in return for a possible tax increase was galling. The deal he made, in case you haven’t noticed, does nothing to reduce the deficit. (Neither is the deficit affected by Social Security cuts.) The unemployment benefits must be borrowed while the tax revenues we might have collected go into the pockets and investment accounts of those who need them least.

A few points are worth noting.

*The unemployed most needy are those whose benefits ran out long ago. A Brookings Institute study this fall showed that 25% of the unemployed have been out of work for a year and 10% for two years. http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2010/1105_jobs_greenstone_looney.aspx

*Employees who lost their jobs after the age of 55 have a much tougher time finding work than younger workers. (35 weeks for older workers compared with 23 for younger, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

*Extending the age at which one is eligible for Social Security would mean that some people who haven’t worked for years have to wait three more to get Medicare and Social Security benefits.

*Corporations are sitting on huge piles of cash that could be used to hire more people but all too frequently are invested in buying back company stock to make people at the top even richer.

People like Pete Peterson who have invested millions of dollars in the dismantlement of Social Security try to sell it on the idea that we are doing a great disservice to future generations by saddling them with the costs of providing benefits for baby boomers. It seems to me that the policies which seem so appealing to Republicans, and now to Obama, are the very ones that guarantee grandma and grandpa will come to live with them.

I’m not investing in Purina just yet, but it’s worth a thought.