“Simpson-Bowles Rebaked”: Playing To The Peanut Gallery
Simpson and Bowles have returned to the stage with a far worse plan than the one they had before. Their old formula sought $2.9 trillion in cuts and $2.6 trillion in revenues, while this new one that they touted at a Politico breakfast this morning seeks just $1.3 trillion in revenues and jacks the cuts up to $3.9 trillion.
The change is driven not so much by any kind of ideological shift or decision that we need more pain as it is driven, or so says Ezra Klein, by their apparent decision this time not to create their own new thing wholly from scratch irrespective of what the pols are saying, but to use Obama’s and Boehner’s latest offers as sort of starting points and guides:
This isn’t meant to be an update to Simpson-Bowles 1.0. Rather, it’s meant to be an outline for a new grand bargain. To that end, Simpson and Bowles began with Obama and Boehner’s final offers from the fiscal cliff deal. That helps explain why their tax ask has fallen so far: Obama’s final tax ask was far lower than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles plan, while Boehner’s tilt towards spending cuts was far greater than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles.
That said, while this plan doesn’t include more tax increases than Obama asked for, it does include significantly more than the $1 trillion in spending cuts than Boehner asked for — about $500 to $700 billion more, if I’m reading it right. In increasing the total deficit reduction, Simpson and Bowles have put the weight on the spending side of the budget.
But why would they shift so dramatically in the Republicans’ direction? Derek Thompson of The Atlantic sees two reasons:
First, there aren’t enough people in Washington who want to raise taxes on anybody making less than $250,000 to make the original $2.6 billion figure work. Second, Congress has demonstrated a fairly strong appetite for scheduling budget cuts.
Well, alas, he’s undoubtedly right about that. But really, this is not to be taken seriously. I’m not usually part of the Entitlement Chicken Little Caucus, because I concede that something needs to be done, provided that “something” is first and foremost to change the way Medicare reimbursements are made, which would save many trillions over the years, and then see what else needs to be done. But to be “responsible” people inside the Beltway you must thirst for seniors and future seniors and poor people and future poor people to sacrifice more. Simpson and Bowles are just playing to that peanut gallery, for which a Politico breakfast is the perfect audience.
One might generously say that Simpson and Bowles are just bowing to the extant political reality. But I thought their job was to suggest the most responsible way forward. They of all people should be standing up to GOP intransigence, not accepting it.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 19, 2013
“The Party Of John C. Calhoun”: The Fall Of The GOP True Believers
Political parties rarely vanish altogether, and hardly ever over a single election cycle. So the demise of the Republicans as a national organization is probably exaggerated. At minimum, its strength across the old Confederacy and what Mencken called the “Cow States” should enable the GOP to keep Congress semi-paralyzed and the shrinking Fox News audience in a state of incipient hysteria even as it fights internal battles of surpassing nastiness.
In that sense, the fight over Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Secretary of Defense and Sen. John McCain’s erratic quest to turn the Benghazi tragedy into a huge scandal are symptomatic: all word-games, question-begging and make-believe indignation aimed not at governance, but TV appearances.
For all the theatrics, Republican senators apparently won’t filibuster their former colleague’s nomination indefinitely. I expect most are privately appalled at seeing Ted Cruz, the freshman senator from Texas, question Hagel’s loyalty—something I doubt he’d have the temerity to say anywhere except in front of a TV camera.
On Meet the Press, David Gregory asked McCain to stipulate what he thinks the Obama administration’s hiding about the Benghazi incident.
“A cover-up of what?”
“Of the information concerning the deaths of four brave Americans,” McCain sputtered.
What else could he say? The idea that the White House refused to call the assault on the U.S. Consulate a terror attack has been a media put-up job driven by the dark arts of selective quotation and malicious paraphrase. People who really care have long since figured that out; those who haven’t probably can’t.
Beyond mischief-making, however, there are signs that conservative thinkers are beginning to challenge moribund Republican orthodoxy. The water is moving under the ice. Heterodox opinions once limited to former GOP operatives like David Frum and Bruce Bartlett have started appearing all over.
Consider this shocking passage about tax rates by National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru in the New York Times:
When Reagan cut rates for everyone, the top tax rate was 70 percent and the income tax was the biggest tax most people paid. Now neither of those things is true: For most of the last decade the top rate has been 35 percent, and the payroll tax is larger than the income tax for most people. Yet Republicans have treated the income tax as the same impediment to economic growth and middle-class millstone that it was in Reagan’s day.
Ponnuru adds that GOP “tight-money” fundamentalism and scare talk about runaway inflation make absolutely no sense after five years of near-non-existent inflation. When it comes to fiscal matters, in short, Republicans are confronting today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions, substituting dogma for problem solving, and excommunicating heretics instead of encouraging independent thought. If Ponnuru can’t quite bring himself to agree with President Obama about the need for economic stimulus, at least he doesn’t sound like a parrot.
Far less polite is former GOP congressional staffer Michael S. Lofgren, who delivers himself of a veritable jeremiad in the Huffington Post. “As with many religions,” Lofgren writes, “political parties have a tendency to start as a movement, transform into a business, and finally degenerate into a racket designed to fleece the yokels. One organization which has gone out of its way to illustrate this evolution is the Republican Party.”
If that doesn’t clear your sinuses, Lofgren’s title might do it: “Scientology for Rednecks: What the GOP Has Become.” Now, as a matter of principle, I dislike the term “redneck,” an offensive ethnic insult like any other. A writer is on shaky ground objecting to racially coded attacks upon President Obama while using a term like it to characterize Republican voters.
Lofgren’s larger point, however, is well-taken. “Compared to the current crop of congressional GOP freshmen and sophomores, even George W. Bush looks like Henry Cabot Lodge.” Republicans have allowed themselves to become the anti-science party, indebted to tycoon-funded “think tanks” and in thrall to paranoid talk-radio ravers who encourage its dwindling voter base to see themselves as a “martyr-like… persecuted remnant of Real Americans.”
In consequence, GOP True Believers have rendered themselves incapable of noticing “the complete failure during the last 30 years of tax cuts for the wealthy to increase revenue, kick-start economic growth, or help the middle class.” They’re getting screwed, and blaming the wrong people.
Writing in The New Republic, Sam Tanenhaus launches an even more fundamental critique. “Conservatism Is Dead,” he writes, replaced by “inverse Marxists” preaching backward-looking utopianism that promises a return to an America that never existed.
In a companion piece entitled “Original Sin,” he laments that “the party of Lincoln—of the Gettysburg Address, with its reiteration of the Declaration’s assertion of equality and its vision of a ‘new birth of freedom’—has found sustenance in Lincoln’s principal intellectual and moral antagonist. It has become the party of [John C.]Calhoun.”
That is to say, of “nullification” and the Confederate States of America.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, February 20, 2013
“An Angry Old Man”: John McCain Plants His Flag In The Fever Swamps
It wasn’t that new or surprising, but Sen. John McCain’s insistence on Meet the Press yesterday that the Obama administration was engaged in a “massive coverup” of Benghazi! is an indication that conspiracy-shouting on the subject among Republicans won’t go away any time soon, or perhaps ever.
Now maybe I’m wrong, but it seems any line of inquiry about a past event that consists solely of questions rather than any specific allegations or even suspicions is designed to be eternal. All the semi-legitimate concerns about what happened and why should have been resolved by the State Department’s December report. Does it explain every utterance about the event by administration figures? No, because they really just don’t matter except in terms of some master narrative of Obama knowing the War on Terror is a more urgent priority than ever and deliberately hiding the evidence because he’s soft on Muslims or hates Israel or something.
Perhaps this is just McCain being an angry old guy who can’t let go of anything; he is, after all, about to vote against Chuck Hagel’s confirmation for Secretary of Defense because Hagel won’t admit he was wrong about McCain’s precious Iraq “surge.” But it also illustrates how fiercely today’s Republicans will hold onto any topic that leads into the soggy turf of vague but infamous fears about the 44th president.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 18, 2013
“Frontmen For American Austerity”: Sequestration Is Not Enough For Simpson And Bowles
Sequestration?
Cue the return of Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, frontmen for American austerity.
If sequestration is not averted by the end of the month, America will experience an arbitrary austerity agenda that shifts burdens from the wealthy onto working families. It makes across-the-board cuts to vital services. As President Obama noted Tuesday, sequestration would impose “automatic brutal spending cuts” to job creation, infrastructure and education initiatives. It would, as well, slash funding for air traffic control, federal prosecutions and Federal Emergency Management Agency grants that make it possible for states and local governments to hire needed firefighter and emergency personnel.
Even the parts of the sequester that are appealing—squeezing the bloated Department of Defense budget—will tend to harm low-wage federal employees rather than billionaire defense contractors.
Most troublingly, sequestration will slow, and perhaps stall, the economic recovery. “This is not an abstraction,” says President Obama. “People will lose their jobs.”
By any measure, the sequester is austerity.
But it’s not enough austerity for Simpson and Bowles.
The former Republican senator and defeated Democratic senate candidate who praises Paul Ryan’s budget don’t particularly like the death-by-slow-cuts of sequestration. They prefer a full frontal assault on the most vulnerable Americans and a redistribution of the wealth upward.
As President Obama has noted, Washington has already reduced the deficit by $2.5 trillion.
But the co-chairs of the failed National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform now want another $2.4 trillion.
To wit, in a “rehashed” plan to “Fix the Debt,” Simpson and Bowles are busy promoting schemes to “modernize…entitlement programs to account for” an aging population. That’s code for schemes to delay the point at which the hardest working Americans can get access to Social Security and Medicare.
Simpson and Bowles are arguing specifically for the adoption of “chained CPI.” That’s the assault on Social Security cost-of-living increases that Congressman Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, correctly identifies as “a benefit cut.”
“It’s a bad idea and it’s a stealth way to give people less,” Ellison explained in a recent interview. “It is a benefit cut—and here’s the real problem with it being a benefit cut: It would be absolutely horrible if it were a benefit cut but the cut was designed to extend the life of Social Security and to make the program more solvent. But that’s not why they’re doing it. They’re doing it so that they can preserve somebody else to have a tax cut and to not raise taxes on the top 2 percent.”
Ellison is right. As is invariably the case with austerity schemes, Simpson and Bowles—and the billionaire-funded “Fix the Debt” group they head—are proposing cuts to the top marginal tax rate for wealthy individuals and corporations.
The United States can and should address debts and deficits. And there are sound plans to do so, including the “Balancing Act” advanced by Ellison and other members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. That initiative rejects austerity and proposes a growth agenda based on tax fairness and investments in education and job creation.
That’s not Simpson-Bowles, which Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman dismisses as “terrible” economics. That’s responsible policy that avoids the “brutal cuts” of sequestration and the even more brutal cuts of full-fledged austerity.
“Almost $2 trillion has been cut over the past two years from teachers, firefighters, police officers, loans for college students, and infrastructure investments,” the congressman says of the warped federal budget priorities proposed by austerity advocates. “The American people shouldn’t continue to pay the price for massive tax breaks for millionaires and billions of dollars in subsidies to oil companies.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, February 19, 2013
“More Republican Denial”: This Time, The People Are On To The GOP
Whose “idea” was the sequester, and why should it matter? My Twitter feed these last couple of weeks has been overflowing with people going beyond the usual “communist” and “idiot” name-calling that I get every day and throwing the occasional “liar” in there because I “withhold” the information that the sequester was the Obama administration’s idea. Very well, consider that nugget hereby unwithheld. Let’s grant that this is true. But it’s true only because the Republicans were holding a gun to the administration’s head—and besides, the Republicans immediately voted for it. In any case the important thing now is that outside of Fox News land, it’s an unimportant fact whose “idea” it was. The Republicans are partial owners of this idea, and as the party that now wants the cuts to kick in, they deserve to—and will—bear more responsibility for the negative impacts.
A trip back through the full context of this saga tells the story. The idea of having these deep budget cuts called “sequestration” goes back to the summer of 2011 and the debt-ceiling negotiations. You’ll recall readily enough that it was first time in history that an opposition party had attempted to attach any conditions to increasing the debt limit. You’ll also recall that the Republicans made this intention quite clear from the beginning of 2011; indeed, from campaign time the year before. Remember Obama’s quotes from late 2010 in which he said he felt sure the Republicans would behave more reasonably once the responsibility to govern was partly theirs?
Instead, they almost crashed the economy. And they were also clearly the side pushing for drastic spending cuts. Let’s go back quickly over a partial 2011 timeline. In April, Obama spokesman Jay Carney said it was the president’s position that raising the debt limit “shouldn’t be held hostage to any other action.” On May 11, Austan Goolsbee, then Obama’s chief economic adviser, said that tying a debt-limit increase to spending cuts was “quite insane.”
On May 16, the United States went into technical default, but the Treasury Department was able to string things along a few more weeks. Tim Geithner made it clear that the real problem would hit August 1. A key moment, as Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress wrote in The Huffington Post, came on May 31. That’s when the GOP-run House voted on Obama’s request for a “clean” debt-limit increase. It failed, and all 236 Republicans voted no.
All this time, and right on up to August 1, Republicans were screaming for deep budget cuts, and the administration was saying no. But the Republicans had the leverage because it actually seemed plausible they were crazy enough to push the country into default. And so at that point, at least according to Bob Woodward in his new book, Jack Lew, then the budget director and now Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary, originally came up with the notion of sequestered cuts. Or maybe it was Gene Sperling. The White House’s idea was based on language from the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction act. It was also the White House’s notion that if the “trigger” was hit, what would kick in would be not only automatic budget cuts but also automatic revenue increases (an idea Republicans refused to go along with).
So fine, the White House proposed it. It did so only after months of Republicans publicly demanding huge spending cuts and refusing to consider any revenues and acting as if they were prepared to send the nation into default over spending. In other words, this was the administration’s idea in much the way that it’s a parent’s “idea” to pay ransom to a person who has taken his child hostage. There was a gun to the White House’s head, which was the possibility of the country going into default.
And then, when it was all put into legislation, it was the Republicans who passed the Budget Control Act of 2011 in the House, with 218 of them voting yes. So even if administration officials proposed it, it would have remained just a proposal if those 218 Republicans hadn’t supported it (no House Democrats backed it). Most Republicans agreed at the time that the sequestration trigger was a good thing—that it would force everyone to get together and agree to a path forward and a long-term budget deal.
Let’s say that I’m having a dispute with a neighbor I don’t really like or trust about some invasive weeds infesting both of our properties. We consider a range of options and then finally he proposes a solution that isn’t very appetizing to either of us—it’s expensive, might kill a lot of grass, say, or a couple trees. It’s not exactly desirable to either of us, but I endorse his suggestion and share the costs of implementation of his plan. If it ends up killing grass or trees, am I really then on firm moral ground in pointing my finger and saying, “Hey, it was your idea, bub”?
I guess maybe conservatives think that way, but of course I don’t. I assented to the plan. I share responsibility for the consequences. Where my little analogy collapses is that in my hypothetical, my neighbor and I are more or less equally affected by the negative outcome. The Republicans’ ace card is that they know, or they hope they know, they are not equally affected. Austere cuts will harm the economy, and the blame will fall on the president.
Normally yes. But the majority of the people are onto them. And it sure isn’t going to be looking very responsible to people, as the March 1 sequestration deadline approaches, for Republicans to be going before the cameras and saying that the cuts are unfortunate but necessary medicine, or whatever formulation they come up with. They’ve wanted these spending reductions for two years. It hardly matters much who invented the mechanism for the cuts. What matters, as the Republicans will find out, is that the people don’t want them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 19, 2013
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