Alan Simpson gets after AARP

As we speed toward the fiscal cliff—with its radical cuts in spending and steep tax hikes and, if you believe the press, the recession that combo will inevitably cause—the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson Plan has been getting a lot of renewed attention. (Including an interesting Atlantic article today, which notes that report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform—the formal name for Bowles-Simpson—is actually tougher on the super-rich than Obama’s proposal.)

Former Sen. Alan Simpson, the rough-hewn Republican half of the duo, was on the Daily Show With Jon Stewart a couple of nights ago, talking about what needed to be done to right the country’s fiscal ship. Stewart tried to get Simpson to admit that his Republican cohorts were the problem, the “real crazy people” in the negotiations.

Simpson countered by saying that the AARP was the most unreasonable group he had to contend with. In the video below he describes his fix for Social Security, which includes a bump in the retirement age to 68 by 2050, which he says AARP can’t abide. “Senior citizens groups are organized…Every young person is [being] wiped out by those groups.”