“Looking Past The Spin”: The Right’s ‘Etch a Sketch’ Imperative
Clarifying moments are rare in politics. They are the times when previously muddled issues are cast into sharp relief and citizens get a chance to look past the spin and obfuscation.
Americans were blessed with three such moments last week.
Rep. Paul Ryan made absolutely clear that he is not now and never was interested in deficit reduction. After a couple of years of being lauded by deficit hawks as the man prepared to make hard choices, he proposed a budget that would not end deficits until 2040 but would cut taxes by $4.6 trillion over a decade while also extending all of the Bush tax cuts, adding an additional $5.4 trillion to the deficit. Ryan would increase military expenditures and then eviscerate the rest of the federal government.
Oh yes, Ryan claims he’d make up for the losses from his new tax cuts with “tax reform” but offered not a single detail. A “plan” with a hole this big is not a plan at all. Ryan’s main interest is in cutting the top income tax rate to 25 percent from the current 35 percent. His message: Solving the deficit problem isn’t nearly as important as (1) continuing and expanding benefits for the wealthy and (2) disabling the federal government.
Robert Greenstein, president of the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is tough on deficits, careful in his use of numbers, and measured in his choice of words. These traits make his assessment of Ryan’s proposal all the more instructive.
“It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history),” Greenstein wrote.
“Specifically, the Ryan budget would impose extraordinary cuts in programs that serve as a lifeline for our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, and over time would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their health insurance or become underinsured.”
Thanks to Ryan, we now know that this election is not about deficits at all. It is about whether we will respond to growing inequalities of wealth and income by creating even larger inequalities of wealth and income.
Last week the nation also focused seriously on the “Stand Your Ground” laws that the National Rifle Association has pushed through in state after state. These statutes came to wide attention because of the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager.
George Zimmerman, the man who pulled the trigger, was not under serious investigation until there was a national outcry because under the Florida law, a citizen has a right to use “force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”
These laws perfectly reflect the NRA’s utopia. No longer will we count on law enforcement to preserve the peace. Instead, we will build a society where all citizens are armed and encouraged to take the law into their own hands. If you feel threatened, just shoot.
Since when did conservatives start believing that laws should be based on “feelings” and subjective judgments? What kind of civilization does this create? Surely this moment should inspire the peaceable majority to challenge the entire gun lobby worldview — and that most certainly includes the legions of timid Democrats who have been cowed by the NRA.
There was, finally, that toy metaphor from Eric Fehrnstrom, a top aide to Mitt Romney. Asked on CNN if the primary campaign had forced Romney “to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election,” Fehrnstrom replied that “everything changes” after the primaries. “It’s almost like an Etch a Sketch,” he added, “you can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”
The context matters because Romney later said Fehrnstrom was talking about post-primary changes that would be made “organizationally,” a claim that is plainly untrue. Ironically, the semi-denial reinforced the lesson Fehrnstrom taught: To win, Romney is willing to change not only his own positions but also reality itself.
Conservatives will need an exceptionally powerful Etch a Sketch to wipe the nation’s memory clean of the education it received during the 2012 campaign’s most enlightening week so far.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 25, 2012
“Twisted Minds, Politics Edition”: Mitt Romney’s Remarkable Work of Staggering Dishonesty
As Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, and others have amply demonstrated, Mitt Romney has a problem with the truth. Throughout his campaign, he has openly lied about his previous positions, his beliefs, and the records of his opponents, Republican or otherwise. In a speech today on economic freedom at the University of Chicago, Romney continued the trend, building a mostly substanceless case against President Obama on the basis of half-truths and falsehoods. You can read the whole speech if you’d like. For now, I’d like to highlight a few passages that sum up Romney’s case against Obama in fact-free aplomb. First, there’s this:
For three years, President Obama has expanded government instead of empowering the American people. He’s put us deeper in debt. He’s slowed the recovery and harmed our economy.
There are a few things missing from this account. First is the fact that the Great Recession began in 2008 and was already on its way to reach its nadir by the time Obama took office. By the time the stimulus began to take effect, the economy was well on its way to the bottom, and independent analyses agree that the administration’s policies kept the country out of a depression, even if it wasn’t enough to juice the recovery.
What’s more, neither the stimulus nor the administration’s later policies were responsible for the deficit explosion of 2009 and 2010. The recession—and the drastically reduced tax revenues it produced—was responsible for a good portion of the deficit. The rest was the result of Bush-era policies like tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As economist Mark Thomas points out, government spending under Obama has increased at a lower rate than under Reagan, George H.W. Bush, or George W. Bush. The only president to have a lower rate of spending was, you guessed it, Bill Clinton.
On to the next passage, which is brazen in its disregard for the truth:
President Obama has proposed raising the marginal tax rate from 35% to 40%. He has proposed special breaks for his favorite industries, further increases for businesses he dislikes, and endless credits and subsidies intended to shape our behavior in this society. […]
If you invest your savings in a new business and are one of the fortunate few who see success – and make a profit – President Obama wants to take 40% of it.
President Obama wants to restore marginal tax rates on the rich to where they were before George W. Bush took office. While the American public might not understand marginal tax rates, it’s almost certainly true that Mitt Romney has a handle on the concept. Which means that the former Massachusetts governor is lying to his audience when he says that “President Obama wants to take 40 percent” of your income. An increase in marginal tax rates, or even a millionaire’s surtax, would only apply to income over a certain point. If the Bush tax cuts were repealed, and the top marginal rate went up to Clinton-era levels for income over $250,000, then it’s only the $250,001st dollar that would be affected.
Beyond that, the claim that Obama has proposed tax increases for “businesses he dislikes” only makes sense if you include policies designed to lower rates and broaden the tax base. “You could portray the president’s call to remove subsidies for oil and gas companies that way, and also his call to end the carried-interest loophole, which benefits hedge funds and investment companies,” says Michael Linden, director for tax and budget policy at the Center for American Progress. You might disagree with those policies, but Obama isn’t playing favoritism.
On that note, here is how Romney concludes his speech:
But, now, after spending three years attacking business, President Obama hopes to erase his record with a speech. In a recent address, he said that, “We are inventors. We are builders. We are makers of things. We are Thomas Edison. We are the Wright Brothers. We are Bill Gates. We are Steve Jobs.”
The only thing that’s true here are the quotes from Obama. The rest? False. Here are some excerpts from speeches the president has given over the last three years (all emphasis mine).
All across America, even today, on a Saturday, millions of Americans are hard at work. … They are the more than half of all Americans who work at a small business or own a small business. And they embody the spirit of possibility, the relentless work ethic, and the hope for something better that is at the heart of the American Dream.
Government can’t guarantee success, but it can knock down barriers that keep entrepreneurs from opening or expanding. […] This is as American as apple pie. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. They are central to our identity as a nation. They are going to lead this recovery. The folks standing beside me are going to lead this recovery.
As part of the bipartisan tax deal we negotiated, with the support of the Chamber, businesses can immediately expense 100 percent of their capital investments. And as all of you know, it’s investments made now that will pay off as the economy rebounds. And as you hire, you know that more Americans working will mean more sales for your companies. It will mean more demand for your products and services. It will mean higher profits for your companies. We can create a virtuous circle.
[I]f you’re an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. If you’re a high-tech manufacturer, we should double the tax deduction you get for making your products here. And if you want to relocate in a community that was hit hard when a factory left town, you should get help financing a new plant, equipment, or training for new workers.
The point is simply to say that the only Barack Obama who has spent his presidency criticizing business is the Barack Obama that exists in Mitt Romney’s head. Indeed, the same goes for this speech, and his entire campaign—Romney is running against policies that haven’t happened and an Obama that doesn’t exist. Exaggeration is normal in politics, but this goes beyond garden-variety embellishment—Romney’s speech, along with much of his rhetoric, is a remarkable work of staggering dishonesty. So far, he hasn’t really suffered for it.
By: Jamie Bouie, The American Prospect, March 19. 2012
Four Fiscal Phonies: GOP “Irresponsible Deficit Hysteria” Presidential Candidates
Mitt Romney is very concerned about budget deficits. Or at least that’s what he says; he likes to warn that President Obama’s deficits are leading us toward a “Greece-style collapse.”
So why is Mr. Romney offering a budget proposal that would lead to much larger debt and deficits than the corresponding proposal from the Obama administration?
Of course, Mr. Romney isn’t alone in his hypocrisy. In fact, all four significant Republican presidential candidates still standing are fiscal phonies. They issue apocalyptic warnings about the dangers of government debt and, in the name of deficit reduction, demand savage cuts in programs that protect the middle class and the poor. But then they propose squandering all the money thereby saved — and much, much more — on tax cuts for the rich.
And nobody should be surprised. It has been obvious all along, to anyone paying attention, that the politicians shouting loudest about deficits are actually using deficit hysteria as a cover story for their real agenda, which is top-down class warfare. To put it in Romneyesque terms, it’s all about finding an excuse to slash programs that help people who like to watch Nascar events, even while lavishing tax cuts on people who like to own Nascar teams.
O.K., let’s talk about the numbers.
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget recently published an overview of the budget proposals of the four “major” Republican candidates and, in a separate report, examined the latest Obama budget. I am not, by the way, a big fan of the committee’s general role in our policy discourse; I think it has been pushing premature deficit reduction and diverting attention from the more immediately urgent task of reducing unemployment. But the group is honest and technically competent, so its evaluation provides a very useful reference point.
And here’s what it tells us: According to an “intermediate debt scenario,” the budget proposals of Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney would all lead to much higher debt a decade from now than the proposals in the 2013 Obama budget. Ron Paul would do better, roughly matching Mr. Obama. But if you look at the details, it turns out that Mr. Paul is assuming trillions of dollars in unspecified and implausible spending cuts. So, in the end, he’s really a spendthrift, too.
Is there any way to make the G.O.P. proposals seem fiscally responsible? Well, no — not unless you believe in magic. Sure enough, voodoo economics is making a big comeback, with Mr. Romney, in particular, asserting that his tax cuts wouldn’t actually explode the deficit because they would promote faster economic growth and this would raise revenue.
And you might find this plausible if you spent the past two decades sleeping in a cave somewhere. If you didn’t, you probably remember that the same people now telling us what great things tax cuts would do for growth assured us that Bill Clinton’s tax increase in 1993 would lead to economic disaster, while George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 would create vast prosperity. Somehow, neither of those predictions worked out.
So the Republicans screaming about the evils of deficits would not, in fact, reduce the deficit — and, in fact, would do the opposite. What, then, would their policies accomplish? The answer is that they would achieve a major redistribution of income away from working-class Americans toward the very, very rich.
Another nonpartisan group, the Tax Policy Center, has analyzed Mr. Romney’s tax proposal. It found that, compared with current policy, the proposal would actually raise taxes on the poorest 20 percent of Americans, while imposing drastic cuts in programs like Medicaid that provide a safety net for the less fortunate. (Although right-wingers like to portray Medicaid as a giveaway to the lazy, the bulk of its money goes to children, disabled, and the elderly.)
But the richest 1 percent would receive large tax cuts — and the richest 0.1 percent would do even better, with the average member of this elite group paying $1.1 million a year less in taxes than he or she would if the high-end Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire.
There’s one more thing you should know about the Republican proposals: Not only are they fiscally irresponsible and tilted heavily against working Americans, they’re also terrible policy for a nation suffering from a depressed economy in the short run even as it faces long-run budget problems.
Put it this way: Are you worried about a “Greek-style collapse”? Well, these plans would slash spending in the near term, emulating Europe’s catastrophic austerity, even while locking in budget-busting tax cuts for the future.
The question now is whether someone offering this toxic combination of irresponsibility, class warfare, and hypocrisy can actually be elected president.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 1, 2012
“The Great Pretenders”: GOP Deficit Hypocrisy
Republicans love to harp on deficit reduction when a Democratic president releases a budget. But when they’re in power themselves, they couldn’t care less.
Now we are treated to the semiannual spectacle of watching Republicans pretend they care about the deficit. They will hammer at this repeatedly as discussion progresses on the president’s budget budget, which projects a deficit of more than $1 trillion for this year and $901 billion for next. Obama and the Democrats generally have a history of quaking when this deficit talk starts up. But the best thing they can do now is stick to their guns and quote Dick Cheney: “Deficits don’t matter.” Growth matters. And for growth, we need investment.
First, the Republican hypocrisy. I hope you are aware by now that they don’t actually care about deficits. They just care about money being spent on things they don’t like, which outside of overpriced ships the Navy probably doesn’t need and more reinforced steel for the border fence includes pretty much everything. If, say, instead of seeking to spend more money for transportation, Barack Obama had proposed cutting the top marginal tax rate down to 8 percent, well, that would have had a completely disastrous impact on future deficits. But you wouldn’t have seen Republicans complaining about that, because the rich deserve more of their money back.
You also didn’t see Republicans complaining about deficits when George W. Bush was running them up. Oh, a few did. But the protests were infrequent and mousy. By and large, Republicans shuffled along. It is astonishing, isn’t it, to think back on the prescription-drug benefit from 2003. An unfunded, roughly $500 billion expansion of socialized medicine (Medicare), and Tom DeLay kept the floor open for three extra hours so that the small number of Republicans who tried to take the Republican position on this could be browbeaten into voting with the White House. That episode, engineered by DeLay, was as close as we’ve come to legislative fascism in this country in a long, long time, both in the sense of the strong-arm tactics used and in the way it posited that day is night and black is white.
Of course, in 2003 the deficit was “just” $374 billion. This, remember, was only two years after Bush took office, met by a surplus of $237 billion. So he added $611 billion to the deficit in two short years, by diddling around with indefensible tax cuts for the wealthy (remember how they goosed the economy? Didn’t think so) and passing the aforementioned Medicare expansion to shore up the senior vote. Admittedly, Obama outpaced Bush. He added $1 trillion in a year. But we all know why. Well, some of us know why. The economy was going to die, and it needed money. Wall Street and the banks didn’t have it, so the government had to supply it.
The only problem with this was that it didn’t supply enough. I’ve started reading Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Arti$ts, his new book about the Obama economic team’s successes and failures. Scheiber writes that Christina Romer, the administration’s first chief economist, got all the numbers on the economy from the Fed and other reputable sources and set out to determine how much federal intervention, free of political considerations, would be appropriate to prop up the collapsing economy. The number she and her staff settled on—$1.8 trillion—was so high that she didn’t even dare mention it at meetings. Obama, of course, did less than half that, which was the maximum that was politically possible.
After the heavy artillery fire he took for that, Obama decided he had to placate the deficit hawks, at least rhetorically, and so he did that for a while. But that collapsed, partly because the Republicans wouldn’t consider tax increases as part of the mix, and partly because he and the White House eventually figured out that trying to be moderate on these issues was both bad substance and lousy politics. It’s bad substance because, as much as it infuriates some people, government spending helps keep us afloat in hard times. And cutting that spending causes harm. For example, we are down about 610,000 government employees from the day Obama took office. Most of those are at the state and local level, and while it’s hard to say how many are a result of the drastic cuts in federal aid to states, certainly many layoffs stem from budget cuts. Those cuts reduce the deficit, but they add directly to the jobless rolls. Is that what we’ve needed for these past two years? Obviously not.
And it’s bad politics because, as the White House now seems to grasp, it’s time to draw contrasts, and the public is largely on Obama’s side. People kinda-sorta say they care about the deficit, but they don’t, really, in large numbers. And to the extent that they do care, they’d rather raise taxes on the wealthy than cut programs.
When the economy gets better, the deficit will start to heal itself. If the economy is truly picking up in the way the January jobs numbers suggest—and if unemployment goes down to around 8 percent by the end of the year—we’ll be poised for a recovery that will add jobs and tax revenue. At least, that is, until the next Republican president comes along and slashes taxes on multimillionaires, blowing another huge hole in the deficit (Mitt Romney’s hole, for example, would be $600 billion in 2015 alone). If Romney is actually elected, the same Republicans who are going to spend the next few months nattering about Obama’s irresponsibility will be marveling at President Romney’s courage.
But Obama standing firm against the deficit hypocrites will render a Romney presidency even more unlikely than it already is. Republicans use deficit politics to scare Democrats, and Democrats often respond exactly as Republicans hope. It’s time they stopped being afraid.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 14, 2012
Three Reasons Why It’s Better For The Economy If The Super-Committee Fails To Get A Deal
Last Thursday’s Washington Postheadline blared: “Debt panel’s lack of progress raises alarm on Hill.”
In fact it is far better for everyday Americans if the so-called Super Committee fails entirely to get a deal.
The overarching reason is simple: any deal they are likely to strike will make life worse for everyday Americans — and worsen our prospects for long-term economic growth.
Of course that’s not the view of many denizens of the Capitol who are still obsessed by the notion that it is critical for the Congress to produce a “compromise” that raises revenue and cuts “entitlements.” There are three reasons why these people are wrong:
1). Any deal would likely slash the income of many everyday Americans. You could design a plan to substantially reduce the deficit without big cuts in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. My wife, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, who served on President Obama’s Fiscal Commission, designed just such a proposal last year. And, of course, Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit in the first place.
Unfortunately, however, in order to get Republican support any large-scale deal in the Super Committee would almost certainly require big cuts in either Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid — or all of them. Substantial cuts in any of these programs will make life harder for everyday Americans and reduce the likelihood of long-term economic growth.
Without a “deal” in the Super Committee, the current budget plan does not cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and that’s a good thing.
According to the Social Security Administration, the average monthly Social Security check now averages the princely sum of $1,082 — or about $13,000 per year. Next year, for the first time since 2009, payments will increase by $39 per month to offset inflation, but $18 a month of that increase will go right back out the door in the form of Medicare premium increases.
Already under current law, Medicare Part B premiums, that cover services like doctors, outpatient care and home health services, must be set annually to cover 25% of program costs. And remember that Medicare recipients aren’t getting an “entitlement” — they are getting an earned benefit that they paid for throughout their working lives. The same, of course, is true of Social Security.
Mean while, Medicaid is the principle means of assuring that America actually begins to provide health care for all — including nursing home and home care.
The problem with medical care costs isn’t that “greedy” seniors and others are gobbling up too much care. The problem is that the costs of providing care are going up too fast. In fact, the per capita costs of providing health care in America is 50% higher than anywhere else on earth, and the World Health Organization only ranks health care outcomes as 37th, in the world.
Medicare is actually the most efficient means in the American economy for providing health care. Any action by the “Super Committee” that reduces the percentage of Americans on Medicare — say, by raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67 — would cost the American economy.
- According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, if such a proposal were operational in 2014 it would raise total health care spending in America by $5.7 billion per year.
- This is so because, while it would save the Federal government a net of about $5.7 billion ($24 billion savings in Medicare payments largely offset by $18 billion of increased Medicaid payments and subsidies to low-income participants in exchanges), it would also generate an additional $11.4 billion in higher health care costs for individuals, employers and states — resulting in a net cost to the economy of $5.7 billion.
The one thing you could do to cut Medicare costs without hurting ordinary families or the economy as a whole is to require Medicare to negotiate with the drug companies for lower prices the same way the Veterans Administration does today. That would cut hundreds of billions in costs to the government over the next ten years, but don’t expect the Republicans to include that as an acceptable cut in “entitlements” as part of a Super Committee deal.
Of course, America has no business cutting the income of seniors who get $13,000 a year in Social Security payments regardless of anything else that is in a deal. The deficit problem should be fixed by asking millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share and by jobs plans that put America back on a path of sustained economic growth. And we have no business reducing access to health care for everyday people so that CEO’s can fly around in their corporate jets, oil companies can keep their tax breaks, or Wall Street hot shots — who we all bailed out just three years ago — can pack in their huge bonuses.
Even if a Super Committee proposal includes increases in revenue to the government from millionaires and billionaires, that is not reason that normal people — whose real incomes have dropped over the last decade — should also be called upon to “share in the sacrifice.”
The problem isn’t that everyday Americans are gorging themselves on excesses that “America can’t afford.” The problem is that Wall Street, the financial sector and the 1% have gobbled up all of the increases in economic growth that the country has produced over the last two decades.
That has meant that the standard of living for normal people has been stagnant. But just as problematic, it has lead to a stagnant economic growth. Since the incomes of everyday people haven’t increased at the same rate as increased worker productivity, there simply haven’t been enough new customers to buy the new products and services that American businesses produce. That is the formula for recession and depression. And that’s just what happened.
American corporations are sitting on two trillion dollars of cash. The reason they aren’t hiring has nothing to do with the need for more tax breaks. What stops them isn’t lack of “confidence,” it’s a lack of customers.
For decades the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has preached the need for fiscal constraint and austerity. According to the Washington Post, now even the IMF is warning that, “austerity may trigger a new recession, and is urging countries to look for ways to boost growth.
If you want to lay a foundation for long-term economic growth in America, the last thing you would do is reduce the income going to ordinary Americans — even over the long run. That’s not the problem — just the opposite. We do not need ordinary people to “share in the sacrifice.” We need policies that will increase the share of income going to ordinary people and reduce the exploding inequality between the 99% and the 1%.
Any deal in the Super Committee will almost certainly do just the opposite.
2.). The worst effects of sequestration could be solved without a “grand bargain”. The one big downside of a failure of the Super-Committee to act would be the level of discretionary spending cuts that would be required through the resulting sequestration. This is particularly true of cuts in education funding.
The budget deal that was struck in order to prevent Republicans from plunging America into default last summer requires an additional $1.2 trillion reduction in the deficit over the next ten years. If the Super Committee fails to agree on the distribution of these cuts, they will automatically be spread over defense and non-defense segments of the budget beginning in 2013. But there would be no cuts in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.
Congress would have the ability to adjust these sequestration requirements between now and 2013, regardless. But the “fast track” authority that would require up or down votes on a proposal from the “Super Committee” would expire if the Committee cannot reach agreement by November 23rd.
The best solution to the problem of big cuts in discretionary spending would be to put together a smaller deal to raise some revenue and reduce cuts in discretionary and – if necessary — military spending — after the mandate of the Super Committee has expired.
The Congress will have a year to help solve this problem, and the pressure to ameliorate some of the cuts in military spending that have so far proved ineffective at forcing Republicans to consider big revenue increase, may be more persuasive when it comes to smaller increases as the actual date of sequestration (2013) draws near.
Of course it’s possible that the Super Committee itself could come with a small-bore deal of this sort, simply to avoid the full force of sequestration. But that would be very different than a $1.2 trillion dollar package that includes cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Progressives should avoid cuts to these programs at all costs, because any cuts that sliced Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits would require changes in the structure of the programs themselves that would last forever. Cuts in discretionary spending — as bad as they might be — are one-time events and do not fundamentally change the structure of the American social contract.
3). There is no reason for Congress to fear that its failure to act on a “Super Committee” agreement will have massive adverse consequences on “market confidence,” since the level of the deficit will not be affected. That has already been set — with a mandate for a $1.2 trillion cut. The Wall Street gang and the ratings agencies might sputter something about government dysfunction for a day or two. But the fundamentals will not be affected, since the level of government borrowing won’t be affected by whether or not there is a deal.
It’s also worth noting that even after Standard and Poor’s downgraded the U.S. debt because of the process leading up to the debt ceiling deal, it had no effect on the interest rates the government is paying for bonds. In fact those interest rates dropped to record lows. U.S. government debt remains the safest investment in the world, no matter what S&P did, and the market reflected that indisputable fact.
In other words then, Congress does not have its back against the wall like it did during the debt ceiling “hostage” crisis. When it came to the debt-ceiling deadline, failure was not an option. In the case of the “Super Committee” failure to come to an agreement is a very real option — in fact, it’s the best option.
There are some in Congress — most notably in the Senate — who truly believe that what the country needs is a “grand bargain” that cuts the deficit by making ordinary people “share in the sacrifice” even if millionaires and billionaires are asked to share some as well.
Hopefully those who are working for such bargain will be thwarted by two important political realities.
First, that cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are politically toxic. People get really angry when you take away something they have earned.
Second, the Republican’s stubborn unwillingness to give an ounce of new revenue from the pockets of millionaires and billionaires – who, after all, are the true core constituency of the Republican Party.
This time a little “gridlock” may be a good thing.
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