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The co-chairs of the President’s Deficit Commission released their much anticipated report yesterday. Former Senator Alan K Simpson and President Clinton’s former chief of staff Erskine Bowles laid out their plan to cut spending including from Medicare and other programs, and to reform the tax code by lowering taxes for everyone including the wealthy and corporations, in order to reduce the deficit. Even though the proposal has come out of the commission, the 18 member panel has yet to endorse it and plan to vote on it tomorrow. So far 6 members have endorsed it and one has rejected it. Fourteen affirmative votes are needed to move the panel’s recommendations to a vote by Congress. The single member who has so far rejected the proposal, Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowski, has offered a progressive alternative which involves preserving the social safety net. Several changes were made to the original proposal in order to woo more votes, including $50 billion in immediate spending cuts and a scaling back to 2008 spending levels which made the plan more attractive to Republicans. For Democrats, the commission’s co-chairs backed off from their proposals to cut Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher program. Also taken out of the plan was a proposal to impose a 6.5% federal sales tax. However, a 15c per gallon increase in the federal gas tax is still part of the final plan.

Immediately after the release of the commission’s report, a panel of prominent economists and budget experts held a press conference recommending an alternative plan to fiscal responsibility. On Monday morning we covered that plan in a conversation with Rebecca Thiess of the Economic Policy Institute.

GUEST: Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate and former Chief Economist of the World Bank and a professor at Columbia University