“A Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy”: This Is Not Westminster; Congress Writes Laws, Not Presidents
Niall Ferguson responds to critics once again. Read it and make your own mind up. Here’s his summary:
My central critique of the President is not that the economy has under-performed, but that he has not been an effective leader of the executive branch. I go on to detail his well-documented difficulties in managing his team of economic advisers and his disastrous decision to leave it to his own party in Congress to define the terms of his stimulus, financial reform and healthcare reform. I also argue that he has consistently failed to address the crucial issue of long-term fiscal balance, with the result that the nation is now hurtling towards a fiscal cliff of tax hikes and drastic spending cuts.
Niall is surely aware that the Congress writes laws, not presidents. This is not Westminster. And Niall’s preferred top-down approach was indeed pursued by the Clintons in 1994. Healthcare reform failed that time spectacularly prcisely because it didn’t flatter Congress’ prerogatives; under Obama’s “failed” executive leadership, universal healthcare passed for the first time in history. It’s very close to Romneycare. Was that as big a mess as well?
The well-documented difficulties on economic policy come from Ron Suskind’s book, which was subject to strong pushback from the people it quoted. I’m sure there were divisions and fights in the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s. But the results are pretty clear: the economy under Obama has performed much better than the British economy under Osborne, or Europe or Japan. The private sector has recovered at Reagan-like rates. It’s the slashing of public sector jobs that has kept employment so subdued – but far less subdued than anywhere else in the developed world. If this is executive mismanagement, more, please.
Then the notion that Obama “has consistently failed to address the crucial issue of long-term fiscal balance.” What, then, was the Bowles-Simpson Commission about? Ryan didn’t create it – he merely torpedoed it because it dared to raise revenues in order to cut the deficit! Obama actually created it and if the necessary majority in Congress had backed it, he would have gone a long way to sign it. Why not? It would give him credit for the biggest deal since 1993. And that’s precisely why the GOP – spearheaded by Ryan – killed it.
Yes, Obama deserves a shellacking for not owning Bowles-Simpson – in what was, in my view, the biggest error of his presidency. But I have no doubt he wanted and wants a Grand Bargain – and revealed how far he would go by cutting $700 billion from Medicare in the ACA (which Ryan is now exploiting on the campaign trail). But how do you get a grand bargain between the two parties when one party refuses to bargain on its central priority, no tax increases? Given Obama’s record of Medicare cuts (never before imposed by a Democratic president), it’s clear who the culprit is for the fiscal cliff: a Republican party that wanted the US to default rather than agree to even a tiny revenue increase, and that pledged in the primaries to refuse a budget deal that was 10-1 spending cuts to revenue increases.
As for the executive banch, the commander-in-chief role is part of the job. Niall doesn’t mention the extremely successful attack on al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the end of torture, the killing of Osama bin Laden and capture of mounds of intelligence, or the fact that, unlike his predecessor, Obama has not presided over a major terror attack in this country or authorized grotesque torture that effectively destroyed America’s moral standing. As for Iraq, Niall says the exit was premature. It was negotiated by Bush. Maliki didn’t want us there any more. Niall thinks we should occupy a country with all the massive expense that entails – against its will? Seriously? And it’s Obama who is unserious on the debt?
By: Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast, August 21, 2012
“A Deliberate Political Calculation”: Mitt Romney Is Betraying The Tea Party
Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, journalist most likely to echo their talking points Jennifer Rubin, talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh, conservative movement favorite Charles Krauthammer, and usually sensible right-leaning policy wonks Yuval Levin and Avik Roy are all doing something extraordinary, given their avowed beliefs: They’re attacking a Democratic president for a spending cut, or else defending Republican challengers who want to reinstate hundreds of millions in spending.
The spending isn’t part of the defense budget.
They’re attacking President Obama for cuts to an entitlement program passed as party of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. And they’re insisting that the funds be restored to the program.
Why would right-leaning folks do that?
Cuts to Medicare are unpopular with voters — and Republicans care more about winning elections than cutting entitlements, something last demonstrated when they passed Medicare Part D during the Bush era, a budget-busting vote that supposed fiscal conservative Paul Ryan joined.
Attention, Tea Partiers: What we’re seeing right now is another instance of political calculation trumping spending discipline. Republicans tell themselves that they need to win now to better advance their agenda later, a process that just repeats itself with each election cycle, the deficit reduction never actually coming. The tactics that Romney and Ryan are employing make the chances of GOP led entitlement reform grow dimmer by the day. Yes, President Obama was going to attack Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for wanting to cut Medicare. And this preemptive attack by Team Romney may prove effective. But ponder its consequences for a moment.
Medicare cuts are central to Ryan’s plan to get America back on sound fiscal footing, and health-care reform that addresses Medicare costs is widely regarded as necessary to any serious deficit-reduction plan, given the rapid pace at which the program’s costs are increasing. Says Avik Roy, after observing Team Romney’s latest attacks, “The dream scenario is possible: that the 2012 election gives Medicare reformers a mandate to put the program on permanently stable footing. One might even call it the audacity of hope.”
That is almost exactly wrong. What voters are hearing from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan is that Barack Obama cut their Medicare, and the Republicans will reinstate it. That message does not produce a mandate to reform Medicare. It produces a mandate to preserve the status quo, and to oppose future cuts. Thanks to Romney and Ryan, it’s likely down-ticket Republicans will be using the same talking points.
Thus Medicare cuts will be an even less likely GOP accomplishment.
A lot of right-leaning pundits are getting deep in the weeds about the attacks and counterattacks flying back and forth. Team Romney is right about X! Team Obama is wrong about Y!
They’re ignoring the incoherent elephant in the room. As Josh Barro puts it:
What Romney and Ryan are up to is simple: They want to have it both ways on Medicare. They are for Medicare cuts, because Medicare is expensive and the federal budget needs to be controlled. And they are against Medicare cuts, because Medicare cuts are unpopular.
The political impulses behind this strategy are clear. Why any policy experts would try to offer a substantive defense of it is not.
Scott Galupo at The American Conservative makes a related point: that there’s no coherent reason to think that the relatively small cuts implemented by President Obama are an affront to seniors and their care, while the relatively deeper cuts that would be implemented ten years hence under the Romney-Ryan plan would be unobjectionable. “Never asked, let alone answered … if Romney’s Medicare reforms are so painless, why not demand that current beneficiaries accept them?” he writes. “Why is it necessary to spare them from structural reforms that are so self-evidently ‘sensible’?”
Take a look at Ryan’s response:
“We’re going to have this debate, and we’re going to win this debate,” Ryan said. “It’s the president who took $716 billion … from the Medicare program to spend on Obamacare. That’s cuts to current seniors that will lead to less services for current seniors. We don’t do that. We actually say end the raid and restore that, so that those seniors get the benefits today that they organize their lives around.”
Whether or not you buy his fairness argument, the political truth is that it gets harder to pass Medicare cuts every year, because the necessity of cuts is partly a function of the fact that America is aging, and the demographic of Medicare recipients is just going to keep on increasing. Even the presumption that you can pass a law now calling for cuts beginning 10 years in the future, and that successive Congresses will sustain the arrangement, is dubious. It’s just typical politician “pain for others later, not for us now” responsibility evasion. All the more reason why, from a deficit hawk’s perspective, it’s insanity to reinstate an entitlement cut Obama already made.
They should celebrate it.
That’s the one part of Obamacare that Republicans should want to keep if they have the courage of their convictions. But the point is actually that they never have and don’t now have the courage of their deficit convictions, and are very unlikely to ever pass anything like the Ryan plan the Tea Party fell in love with. Reihan Salam sensibly suggests that it would be better to get Medicare savings sooner than a decade from now. It’s telling that the conservative movement and the GOP are presently campaigning against that proposition. Why anyone trust them to cut the deficit at this point is beyond me, given the fact that they find a way to fail every time.
But promising to repeal cuts that were already passed is taking it a step farther.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, August 16, 2012
“Phony Hawkery”: Paul Ryan Is A Conservative Ideologue Who Couches “Right Wing Social Engineering”
This is something that other people have mentioned, and Jamelle brings up in his extremely helpful post about Paul Ryan, but it really needs to be emphasized: Paul Ryan is not a “deficit hawk.” No matter how many times the news media tell us, it doesn’t make it true. As I’ve said before, you can’t call yourself a deficit hawk if the only programs you want to cut are the ones you don’t like anyway. Show me someone who’s willing to cut programs he favors (Ryan isn’t), and would actually take potentially painful measures to balance the budget (Ryan wouldn’t), and that’s a deficit hawk. Ryan, on the other hand, is a conservative ideologue who couches what Newt Gingrich appropriately called “right-wing social engineering” in a lot of talk about making tough choices. But I’ve never actually seen Paul Ryan make a “tough” choice, at least one that was tough for him. There’s nothing “tough” about a conservative Republican who tells you he wants to slash Medicare and Medicaid, increase defense spending, and cut taxes for the wealthy. That’s like Homer Simpson telling you he’s making the tough choice to skip the salad and eat three dozen donuts instead.
But oh boy, have the media ever bought into the idea of Ryan as the courageous budget-cutter. “A Beltway Budget Hawk Gets a Chance to Sell Vision” says The Wall Street Journal. “Paul Ryan: Hawk on Budget and Tea Party Darling” says the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We know Paul Ryan is a budget hawk. But what about other issues?” says the Christian Science Monitor. And that’s just a few headlines; there are hundreds of stories referring to Ryan as a “fiscal hawk,” a “budget hawk,” and a “deficit hawk.”
So why does he get described this way so often? I think it’s because the establishment media have become devoted to a particular narrative, which says that the country is deeply threatened by the future growth of Social Security and Medicare, and anyone who has the “courage” to propose cuts to those programs is a hero (Time‘s Michael Grunwald did an excellent examination last year of all kinds of people weirdly praising Ryan’s courage). And even if, like Ryan, you also want to slash taxes and increase the deficit, you’re still a hero.
It’s strange how you never see the members of the congressional Progressive Caucus, who want to cut defense spending and bring in more tax revenues than Ryan does, described as “deficit hawks,” or, heaven forbid, “courageous.” Representative Jan Schakowsky, for instance, put out a plan that balances the budget in a much shorter amount of time than Paul Ryan’s plan, but does so primarily through a combination of tax increases and defense cuts. Nobody calls Schakowsky a “deficit hawk” or praises her “courage” on fiscal issues, even though her proposal is far more realistic and less cruel than Ryan’s. Could it have something to do with the fact that your average Washington 1 percenter actually thinks slashing programs for the poor and cutting taxes for the wealthy is a smashing idea?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 13, 2012
“Tax Returns And Now Tax Policy”: Mitt Romney’s Two Front Tax-Withholding
You’d think Mitt Romney’s campaign would be happy about the report this week by the Tax Policy Center—the demands for the former Massachusetts governor to release more of his tax returns have finally been quieted. Of course they’re none too pleased that the obsession with his making public more tax returns has been replaced by calls for him to release more of his tax plans.
Romney’s tax plan contemplates an across the board 20 percent tax cut, among other things. He and his people swear that the plan would be revenue neutral—it would not cause the budget deficit to further balloon—because while he cut rates he would also close loopholes. Which ones? He has pointedly not said, and scoffed whenever any independent groups tried to run the numbers to figure out how his plan would work. “It can’t be scored because those kind of details have to be worked out with Congress and we have a wide array of options,” he told CNBC in March. How could he be sure that his tax plan is revenue neutral if the details haven’t been worked out yet? You’ll just have to trust him on this.
But the new Tax Policy Center blows this argument out of the water—they ran the numbers and figured out that no matter which numbers Romney plugs in (even magical, supply-side, dynamic scoring numbers), there aren’t enough loopholes to close to pay for the tax cuts. The result would be what the New York Times’s Paul Krugman calls Dooh Nibor—reverse Robin Hood economics: Rob from the middle class to pay the wealthy.
Romney’s team has flailed around trying to discredit the Tax Policy Center, calling the group’s credibility into question (though Romney-cons cited it as authoritative earlier in the campaign) and arguing that it doesn’t take into account the special economic growth mojo of tax cuts (it in fact does). Here’s what they haven’t done: release the missing details that make his plan add up. Maybe that’s because they haven’t worked out the details yet (so how do you know the numbers will add up?). Or maybe it’s because the details involve numbers of Romney’s own invention which defy the ordinary laws of arithmetic and exist at a frequency which can only be heard by dogs traveling down the highway at high speeds while strapped to the roofs of cars. That would actually answer a few questions.
Romney’s two front tax-withholding—not giving an inch more on his tax returns or his tax plans—reminds me of the old aphorism attributed to Abraham Lincoln that it’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. It seems like the Romney campaign is updating and adapting the sentiment for modern politics. They’re testing whether it’s better to be silent and thought to be hiding something damaging than to fully disclose and remove all doubt.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, Washington Whispers, August 3, 2012
“Romney’s Tax Plan In Disgusting Perspective”: Making The Bush Tax Cuts Look Like A Gift To Poor People
In my post this morning on Cory Booker, I noted that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would save households taking in more than $1 million per year an average of at least $250,000 ever year. Let us just dwell on this number for a minute.
Earlier this month, Obama claimed the $250,000 figure. Politifact got to work on it. It turns out, says Politifact, that Obama was telling the truth, and in fact if anything could be described as using the more conservative of two ways of looking at the matter, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center.
You can read the Politifact description, which is thorough and clear. It comes down to this in plain language. As you know the Bush tax cuts are set to expire at the end of the year. Let’s say Romney is elected and the Bush cuts are extended, as Romney says he’ll do (and then some). If you don’t credit Romney with extending the Bush cuts–that is, if you just assume they were going to be extended anyhow–then his plan cuts the tax bill for those making more than $1 million a year by $250,000.
But if you credit President Romney with the extension of the Bush cuts, then Romney’s gift to uber-million households come to $390,000 a year. To see how insane this is, let’s add a little perspective: Let’s look at those same Bush tax cuts.
According to this report from Democratic staff in Congress on the impact of Bush cuts that was issued in 2007, households earnings $1 million or more per year received an average cut of $120,000 per year. Let’s think about this.
The Bush tax cuts “accomplished” the following: lowered the tax burden of the very rich to lowest point in 50 years; added $1.8 billion to the deficit; exploded the publicly held debt as a share of GDP; and didn’t really lead to a single net job (depending on how you measure, which will be the topic of a future post).
In other words, they were a disaster for the economy, and brutally inequitable.
And now, Romney’s plan would give the above $1 million per year households twice as much as Bush did, or three times as much. It’s really and truly sad and unbelievable that something like this is even discussed seriously by serious people. This plan makes Bush’s look like a gift to poor people. Of course Romney would say he’s cutting the lower classes’ taxes too, which he is, but that just proves how much more aggressively the Romney plan would deplete the treasury, which again we’ll dig into in detail at other points.
Voters know Bush wrecked the economy. For Romney this deserves to be and can be much a bigger pain than Bain.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 21, 2012
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