John Boehner: It’s His Shutdown And He’ll Cry If He Wants To
I guess this was inevitable.
John Boehner was driven to tears again today. This time it happened at a closed-door meeting of House Republicans.
According to sources inside the meeting, it happened while Boehner was speaking to the group about the latest on his negotiations with Democrats over government funding. Boehner talked about his meeting yesterday with President Obama and then, in a rousing conclusion, he thanked the House Republicans for standing by him and supporting him through these tense negotiations.
The Republican conference responded with a standing ovation for their speaker.
As you could imagine, that prompted the Speaker to cry.
Sure, but is there any chance the crying could become tears of joy after striking a deal? Time is obviously running out in a hurry — we’re now counting down by the number of hours, not the number of days — but there’s been some movement this afternoon.
Roll Call reported that the party’s leaders are at least talking again, and “there were indications that progress was being made.” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told reporters, “I feel better about it today than I did yesterday at the same time.”
This was not a unanimous view. Politico reported that “leaders from both parties are more pessimistic about cutting a deal before the government runs out of money.”
There was reportedly some progress on the spending-cut target. Boehner moved the goalposts this week, demanding $40 billion in cuts after agreeing privately to $33 billion, but top aides today apparently met to explore another compromise between the two numbers. The bigger hurdle, apparently, is the GOP demand for policy “riders,” which right-wing House Republicans continue to treat as having equal importance to the cuts themselves.
How party leaders can work around this is a mystery to me.
The odds notwithstanding, if a compromise is reached, what about the rule GOP leaders imposed on themselves, mandating that a bill is available for three days before a vote? In this case, Republicans are prepared to waive the rule, if there’s a deal to even vote on.
In the meantime, the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity held a rally this afternoon across the street from the Capitol, with several dozen right-wing activists on hand to listen to speeches from Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Reps. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), and others. The Republican voters chanted, “Shut it down!” during the rally, and every other sign at the rally urged the GOP to shut down the government.
I think we can say with confidence which side of the aisle is “rooting for a government shutdown.”
By: Steve Benen, Political Animal, Washington Monthly, April 6, 2011
In This Fantasy Budget Deficit And Debt Fight, the Tea Party Refuses To Take ‘Yes’ For An Answer
Suppose I told you that I knew of a simple way to alleviate the budget deficit problem, and that it would require Congress not to do anything at all. You’d conclude that this was the poor start to a late April Fools’ column.
But unhappily the April Fools’ joke unfolding in the nation’s capital is the fantasy budget and spending debate itself. It’s rooted in an unreality that is about to crash into an unyielding real world, possibly in the form of a government shutdown.
The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan fiscal scorekeeper, projects the budget deficit will be $1.5 trillion this year, or 9.8 percent of gross domestic product. In order to achieve budget stability and sustainability, according to economists, that figure should be around 3 percent of GDP. But here’s the good news: The CBO projects that the deficit will “drop markedly over the next few years as a share of output and average 3.1 percent of GDP from 2014 to 2021.” We’re saved! And it gets better: “Those projections . . . are based on the assumption that tax and spending policies unfold as specified in current law.”
In other words, all Congress has to do is what they seem ideally suited to these days—nothing. Ah, but there’s the rub. CBO continues that its projections “understate the budget deficits that would occur if many policies currently in place were continued, rather than allowed to expire as scheduled under current law.” Those policies include the Bush tax cuts. They also include annual spending punts that enjoy broad bipartisan support, like preventing the Alternative Minimum Tax’s bracket creep from snagging the middle class, and the “doc fix,” which pushes back a scheduled cut in Medicare payments.
So the solution isn’t so simple. But lawmakers wishing to do more than talk about dealing with the deficit could demand offsets for these policy changes. Instead, we’re reminded of the reality that even the toughest self-styled budget hawks–including Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who describes dealing with the deficit as a “moral imperative” but advocates extending the Bush tax cuts in full in perpetuity at a cost of nearly $4 trillion–are actually strutting budget peacocks more concerned with perception than results, or fiscal results anyway.
Take, for example, the Republican Study Committee, the hawkiest of the GOP budgetary birds of prey and enforcers of the party’s economic dogma. Going by reputation, they should be able to proffer a budget plan to bring the deficit into line. But the Concord Coalition, a group focused on eliminating the deficit, last month used CBO numbers to examine a scenario under which the Study Committee got its tax-and-spending wish list, which includes an extension of the Bush tax cuts, repeal of the Obama healthcare law (which CBO scores as a money-saver, meaning that repeal adds to the deficit), and $2.7 trillion saved in a spending freeze and cuts. The result? “Under this scenario, the resulting deficits would be $2.1 trillion larger over 10 years,” according to Concord, which concludes, “A budget that uses honest numbers and reflects Republicans’ current policy preferences will result in large continuing deficits.”
But nevertheless, and in the face of six recent years of GOP control over both the White House and Congress, Republicans have won the budget perception battle, and soundly. A poll released last week by Democracy Corps, a group of prominent liberal pollsters including Stan Greenberg and James Carville, found that independent voters are “still hesitant to trust Democrats on spending.”
Meanwhile the debate in Washington has focused almost entirely on spending cuts, even though polls show that voters are more concerned about jobs and the economy than the budget and the deficit—and even though most economists agree that the GOP’s proposed spending cuts would set back the recovery.
But the clearest example of the GOP having the Democrats on the run can be found in the current negotiations aimed at averting a government shutdown in a week. House Republican leaders originally wanted $32 billion in spending cuts for this year; that figure prompted a conservative backlash that ended with the House passing $61 billion in cuts. Now, according to press reports, negotiators have settled on $33 billion in cuts. In other words, the GOP, which controls one of three players in this negotiation, has already achieved its original budgetary goal. In this regard, House Speaker John Boehner seems to have (intentionally or not) used his Tea Party wing as a perfect foil to pull the debate to the right.
But judging by last Thursday’s Tea Party demonstration on the Hill—aimed at the GOP, mind you—conservatives don’t seem capable of banking their win and moving on to the next fight. They see anything less than total victory as an abject surrender.
And in that sense reality is about to intrude upon their budgetary-political fantasy land. The reality is that while voters like spending cuts in the abstract, polls show they object to the particulars of the GOP agenda. That reality is already taking hold at the state level where, Politico reported last week, the wave of newly elected governors trying to get tough on budgets have seen their approval ratings collapse.
And the experience of state governments also provides an insight into the possible winners and losers in a government shutdown. A pair of political scientists published a paper last year looking at the effects of such budgetary breakdowns (167 of them since 1988) at the state level, reports the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. The study found that voters tend to punish legislators while rewarding the executive. So a shutdown would benefit President Obama while hurting lawmakers in both parties.
So if members of Congress let the government shut down on Friday, they will be the real April fools.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U.S. News and World Report, April 6, 2011
The Budget Battles: Prosperity for Whom?
If the House Republican budget blueprint released on Tuesday is the “path to prosperity” that its title claims, it is hard to imagine what ruin would look like.
The plan would condemn millions to the ranks of the uninsured, raise health costs for seniors and renege on the obligation to keep poor children fed. It envisions lower taxes for the wealthy than even George W. Bush imagined: a permanent extension for his tax cuts, plus large permanent estate-tax cuts, a new business tax cut and a lower top income tax rate for the richest taxpayers.
Compared to current projections, spending on government programs would be cut by $4.3 trillion over 10 years, while tax revenues would go down by $4.2 trillion. So spending would be eviscerated, mainly to make room for continued tax cuts.
The deficit would be smaller, but at an unacceptable cost. Health care would be hardest hit, followed by nonsecurity discretionary spending — the sliver of the budget that encompasses annually appropriated programs. Those include education, scientific research, environmental preservation, investor protection, disease control, food safety, federal law enforcement and other areas that bear directly on the quality of Americans’ daily lives. The proposed cuts in such programs are $923 billion deeper than President Obama called for in his 2012 budget, which pushed the edge of what is politically possible.
Another big cut — $715 billion over 10 years — comes from mandatory spending other than Social Security and the big health care programs, a category that includes food stamps and federal retirement.
The blueprint does not call for any specific changes to Social Security, but, without explanation, it assumes a reduction of $1 trillion over 10 years in the program’s surplus. That would weaken the program by hastening the insolvency of Social Security.
When he unveiled this plan, Paul Ryan, a Republican of Wisconsin and the chairman of the House Budget Committee, declared, “This isn’t a budget. This is a cause.”
There is much truth in that. The blueprint is not a serious deficit reduction exercise for many reasons, the most important of which is that serious deficit reduction requires everything to be on the table, including tax increases. The plan released at the end of last year by the Obama deficit commission was one-third tax increases and two-thirds spending cuts. President Obama’s budget calls for a mix of tax cuts and tax increases, among the latter, letting high-end Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012. The Republican plan calls only for tax simplification. It would get rid of loopholes and reduce rates in a way that would not raise overall revenues but would invariably cut the tax bill of wealthy taxpayers for whom lower rates are more valuable than assorted loopholes.
The deficit is a serious problem, but the Ryan plan is not a serious answer. With its tax cuts above all, and spending cuts no matter the consequences, it is a recipe for more loud talk about the deficit but no real action.
By: Editorial, The New York Times, April 5, 2011
Congressional Budget Office Looks At “RyanCare” Rationing And It Ain’t Pretty
The Congressional Budget Office has released its preliminary analysis (PDF) of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget, and I wouldn’t say it’s pretty. According to the CBO, Medicare beneficiaries will be left paying more for less. The CBO goes about this in a bit of a confusing way, setting a “benchmark” that corresponds to the cost of purchasing a private plan equivalent to Medicare, and then seeing how much more that plan would cost than Medicare under two different scenarios. Compared with either scenario, RyanCare costs a lot more than Medicare:
Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system. For a typical 65-year-old with average health spending enrolled in a plan with benefits similar to those currently provided by Medicare, the CBO estimated the beneficiary’s spending on premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures as a share of a benchmark: what total health-care spending would be if a private insurer covered the beneficiary. By 2030, the beneficiary’s spending would be 68 percent of that benchmark under the proposal, 25 percent under the extended-baseline scenario, and 30 percent under the alternative fiscal scenario.
If Medicare’s beneficiaries are getting less for more, Medicaid’s are simply getting less, period:
Federal payments for Medicaid under the proposal would be substantially smaller than currently projected amounts. States would have additional flexibility to design and manage their Medicaid programs, and they might achieve greater efficiencies in the delivery of care than under current law. Even with additional flexibility, however, the large projected reduction in payments would probably require states to decrease payments to Medicaid providers, reduce eligibility for Medicaid, provide less extensive coverage to beneficiaries, or pay more themselves than would be the case under current law.
As the CBO recognizes, a lot of what Ryan is doing isn’t saving money so much as shifting costs. Poor people and seniors don’t need less health care because Medicare and Medicaid are providing less health care. They just have to pay for more of it on their own. And as the CBO says, it’s hard to imagine Congress simply ignoring their pleas for help:
Under the proposal analyzed here, debt would eventually shrink relative to the size of the economy — but the gradually increasing number of Medicare beneficiaries participating in the new premium support program would bear a much larger share of their health care costs than they would under the current program; payments to physicians and other providers for services provided under the traditional Medicare program would be restrained (as under the two scenarios); states would have to pay substantially more for their Medicaid programs or tightly constrain spending for those programs; and spending for federal programs other than Social Security and the major health care programs would be reduced far below historical levels relative to GDP. It is unclear whether and how future lawmakers would address the pressures resulting from the long-term scenarios or the proposal analyzed here.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, April 5, 2011
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