President Obama organized a fiscal commission back in February, composed of 18 members and tasked with crafting a solution to America’s long-term debt problem.

Its full report is not due until Dec. 1, however the co-chairs of the commission released a plan of their own a few weeks early.

Having had a couple of weeks to digest the early proposal, it is prudent to reject it out of hand as a non-starter.

The co-chairs’ proposal calls for reducing Social Security benefits for future retirees, increasing the retirement age to 70, cutting the top income tax bracket from 35 to 23 percent and slowly reducing military spending. There are smaller proposals too, but these are the major ideas.

First to be discussed is the obvious — that the tax cuts for the richest 1 percent of income earners is being paid by making middle-class America work for more of their life. When they do retire, their benefits are reduced. The rich get richer, everyone else works harder. No one should take this seriously.

An argument is being made that Americans are living longer, so raising the retirement age makes sense. The counterpoint, to paraphrase Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, is it is like telling a janitor she has to work until she is 70 because lawyers are living longer than ever.

Asking people who work for their paychecks to work even longer is fundamentally unfair.

The next idea is that the top income bracket, those who make $250,000 or more annually and which represents just 1 percent of the American population, should have their taxes eventually lowered down to 23 percent from the current 35 percent. Their reasoning is that those lower taxes will stimulate job growth, and each job will pay taxes.

The problem with this is twofold. First, they provided no evidence for the claim that lower taxes on high-income brackets create jobs, or even that it is the best alternative. Secondly, there is in fact evidence that lower taxes for the wealthy do not improve job growth, with the painful example being the tax cuts President Bush pushed early in his presidency. Looking through findings from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics makes it clear that compared to either President Clinton or President Obama, President Bush’s policies had an atrocious job growth record.

If lower taxes on Paris Hilton does not create jobs, then it is only logical to conclude those cuts will serve no purpose other than blowing a giant hole in the federal debt.

To their credit, the co-chairs took a realistic look at military spending.

Including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America spends more on military and defense spending than the rest of the world combined. The co-chairs want to cut from new weapons and no-bid contracts, however they disappoint by putting non-combat compensation on the table. Even if a military member is not on the ground they deserve a hero’s paycheck.

Hopefully the Dec. 1 report is significantly more serious about debt reduction, and less willing to shaft the middle class in favor of the wealthy.