ON APRIL 10, PRESIDENT Obama released his formal budget for Fiscal 2014 beginning this October. Liberals should not act shocked and surprised: Obama’s repeated offers to cut Social Security cost-of-living adjustments, and other yet undefined Medicare measures, are a continuation of his practice and approach for the past two years.

The budget will usher in the final stage of negotiations over the proposed deficit cuts — Austerity American Style — that began with the recommendations of Obama’s Deficit Cutting Commission, referred to as the Simpson-Bowles report, that was made public in November 2010.

The Simpson-Bowles Commission — chaired by arch-conservative retired Senator Alan Simpson, and Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, now investment banker Erskine Bowles — proposed an approximate $4 trillion cut in U.S. deficits and debt for the subsequent decade. Their report has been the ‘template’ for deficit cutting negotiations ever since.

Issued around the time the Teapublicans took over the U.S. House of Representatives in late 2010, the report was offered by the Obama administration as the basis for negotiating a “grand bargain” of $4 trillion in deficit cuts in summer of 2011. The $4 trillion target was agreed by virtually all parties in Congress and the administration at that time — and ever since. The only difference was, and remains, “the mix:” how much in spending cuts vs.