Meanwhile…Washington’s Budget Folly
The Senate on Wednesday voted down the House budget bill, with its string of $61 billion in mostly political cuts through Sept. 30. That formally puts an end to the House’s grandstand play. But the Senate also rejected its Democratic leaders’ own plan to cut $6.5 billion. The government’s financing is due to run out in eight days. To prevent a shutdown, the two chambers will probably have to agree to yet another short-term financing bill.
That would be politically and fiscally irresponsible. But the House Republicans will be happy to agree, as long as Democrats agree to a vigorish of $2 billion a week in cuts to vital government programs.
Unless the White House and Democratic lawmakers start pushing back a lot harder — and do a better job of explaining the disastrous effects on the economy and everyday life — the Republicans will win the argument. If it keeps going on this way, they will get the $61 billion they demanded.
The White House again threatened on Wednesday to veto the House bill, and said it supported the Democratic bill that did not even draw a simple majority. It has been hosting what appear to be unproductive talks among legislative leaders; Vice President Joseph Biden Jr., who is nominally in charge of the talks, is now visiting Eastern Europe and tried to mediate by telephone.
President Obama has yet to take a firm public stand and make clear his bargaining limits and priorities. Understandably, he does not want the government to shut down and is hoping that quiet negotiations will produce better results than loud declarations of principle. But there is no sign that the House freshmen have an interest in compromise, or that Representative John Boehner, the House speaker, has any control of his caucus.
A brief shutdown, painful as it would be, would be far less damaging than a sudden withdrawal of tens of billions in government spending from the economy, which would lead to widespread layoffs.
Mr. Obama could well follow the example of Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, who on Wednesday called for a “re-set” of the negotiating process. The only way to have a meaningful discussion of the budget, he said in a speech, is to consider all of its parts at once over the long term, not for a few weeks or months at a time. That includes all the issues the Republicans wouldn’t deal with in their bill: cuts to the entitlement programs and to the Pentagon budget and ways to raise revenues at the same time.
The Republicans, as Mr. Schumer noted, aren’t really interested in lowering the deficit. If they were, they would never have insisted on $800 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy without paying for them, or on repealing the health care law, which saves $230 billion over a decade.
They are only interested in slashing government, no matter the cost to the country. It is time for the president — and responsible Congressional leaders of both parties — to reject their tactics and their goal.
By: Editorial, The New York Times, March 9, 2011
The Games People Play: How Boehner Is Playing The Democrats
Richard Nixon espoused what he called “the madman theory.” It’s a negotiating approach that induces the other side to believe you are capable of dangerously irrational actions and leads it to back down to avoid the wreckage your rage might let loose.
House Republicans are pursuing their own madman theory in budget negotiations, with a clever twist: Speaker John Boehner is casting himself as the reasonable man fully prepared to reach a deal to avoid a government shutdown. But he also has to satisfy a band of “wild-eyed bomb-throwing freshmen,” as he characterized new House members in a Wall Street Journal interview last week by way of comparing them fondly to his younger self.
Thus are negotiators for President Obama and Senate Democrats forced to deal not only with Republican leaders in the room but also with a menacing specter outside its confines. As “responsible” public officials, Democrats are asked to make additional concessions just to keep the bomb-throwers at bay.
This is the perverse genius of what the House Republicans are up to: Nobody really thinks that anything like their $57 billion in remaining proposed budget cuts can pass. It’s unlikely that all of their own members are confident about all of the cuts they have voted for. But by taking such a large collection of programs hostage, the GOP can be quite certain to win many more fights than it would if each reduction were considered separately.
Begin with the outrageous $1.1 billion, 15 percent cut from Head Start, a program that offers preschool education to roughly 965,000 poor children. According to the Center for Law and Social Policy, this would knock 218,000 kids out of Head Start and force 16,000 classrooms to close.
That is an excellent way to lose the future, as Obama ought to be saying. What could be a better use of public money than helping our poorest children early in life so they might achieve more in school, and later?
And for those who say that Head Start is not as good as it should be, the administration announced plans in September to require lower-performing Head Start programs to compete against other entities for continued funding. Isn’t this the sort of competition conservatives say they’re for?
Given what science has shown about the importance of a child’s first years, we need better and broader early childhood programs. Slashing them can only cause harm – to parents, to children and to the country.
Then there are the cuts at the other end of the education continuum. The House budget would reduce the maximum Pell Grant, which helps needy kids go to college, by $845, from $5,550 available now. According to Mark Kantrowitz, who publishes the FinAid Web site that gives financial-aid advice, 1.7 million low-income students would lose eligibility for Pell Grants, almost a fifth of current recipients. Is that what Americans voted for last November?
But here is where the Republicans’ strategy works so brilliantly. Let’s assume that neither the administration nor Senate Democrats – even the most timid among them – can allow the Head Start or Pell Grant cuts to go through. That still leaves a lot of other truly worthy programs to be defended. By heaping cut upon cut, Republicans get advocates of each particular cause fighting among themselves.
And with so many reductions on the table, voters who would actually oppose most of them if they knew the details don’t get to hear much about any individual item because the media concentrate almost entirely on the partisan drama of the shutdown fight, not the particulars.
You can also imagine the argument from those Democrats petrified of their own shadows. “Well,” say the scaredy-cats, “we have to save Pell Grants and Head Start, so why don’t we give House Republicans what they want on the National Endowment for the Arts – or their cuts in foreign aid, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, medical research, the Women Infants and Children program, meals-on-wheels or mine safety inspections? I mean, we have to give them something, or those crazies will shut down the government, and we might get blamed.”
Boehner can just sit back and smile benignly as Democrats battle over which concessions they should give him. When the negotiating gets tough, he can sadly warn that his freshmen need more because he can’t guarantee what they’ll do. The perpetually tanned one is a shrewd dude. Democrats who underestimate him will be playing into his hands.
By: E. J. Dionne, Op-Ed Columnist, The Washington Post, March 7, 2011
How A Birther Thinks: A Demonstration
Mike Huckabee’s defenders have made much of the fact that he’s never endorsed the idea that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Therefore, he’s not a “birther” and his comments on a conservative radio show earlier this week are those of a man who either “didn’t mean it” and “clearly misspoke” or who is guilty of an “odd” but relatively benign ignorance about Obama’s biography.
As I’ve noted, these defenses fall flat on several levels. Even if you put the birther issue aside, It should be obvious that Huckabee didn’t just misspeak when he claimed that Obama grew up in Kenya; after all, he went into detail about the effect that a Kenyan upbringing filled with stories from relatives about the horrors of British colonial rule and the glory of the Mau Mau uprising would have had on Obama’s worldview and his actions as president today. Nor is this benign ignorance akin to (as Dave Weigel suggested) Obama being fuzzy on the details of Huckabee’s life story. Obama, to my knowledge, is not promoting an inflammatory indictment of Huckabee’s basic worldview and policy instincts that is based on an entirely and laughably false understanding of the circumstances of his upbringing.
Then there’s the matter of birtherism. Yes, it’s true, Huckabee is not claiming that Obama was born in Kenya — or in Indonesia or in any country other than the United States. But, as Jonathan Bernstein pointed out earlier this week:
This is where birtherism gets tricky. In its wildest forms, birtherism is about a massive conspiracy to install a conscious, deliberate enemy of the United States in the White House. It’s nice that Mike Huckabee doesn’t subscribe to that. But in its more plausible, and presumably more popular forms, it’s really just a way of saying that Barack Obama isn’t a “real” American.
Which brings me to the e-mails we’ve been receiving in response to our coverage of Huckabee, which (as you might have noticed) has been on the critical side. Plenty of readers are upset with Huckabee’s comments, to be sure, but I’ve also noticed an unusually large number of virulently anti-Obama e-mails written in Huckabee’s defense. I’ll readily admit that I don’t know any of the people who are sending these individually; for all I know, some or all of them are fake. But I’ve gotten so many expressing the same basic sentiments that I think it’s worth running one in its entirety:
Steve,
Where were you when Obama had to think so hard that it hurt-his-brain when he stated he went to 57 states in his campaign?
You continued supporting Obama and covering up his mistakes because of his skin color.
Because you are white, You are So Racist and bigoted and can’t help it.
So why should you worry when someone thinks Obama was born in Kenya—especially when the Kenyan official government states he was born there.
Instead, Obama claims to be born in the last state to enter the Union, so how could Obama claim 57 states?
Is it because he is stupid?
Since you never brought it up, you must agree with someone that ignorant and stupid.
And why does Indonesia have a school enrollment certificate that categorically states Obama is a Muslim? And why can Obama recite the muslim evening call to prayer from memory if he is a Christian, but he is a member of the “God Damn America” church of the most reverend Wright.
You can deny facts all you want, just like the hide the decline global warmest conspirators but that does not make you right.
Smug maybe, because you like attacking selected people because you are bigoted and racist.
Again, I don’t know the person who sent this to me. Who knows — it could be a mischievous liberal having some fun by assuming the voice of a right-winger. But the points this e-mailer makes are representative of the points that many, many others have expressed to me this week. In that sense, I think this e-mail demonstrates how Huckabee’s comments — even though they didn’t endorse birtherism in any literal sense — encourage the exact kind of attitude that has led a majority of Republicans likely to participate in next year’s primaries to express doubt over whether their president was even born in this country.
Note that the e-mailer didn’t get the part where Huckabee resisted endorsing full-on birtherism. “[W]hy should you worry when someone thinks Obama was born in Kenya?” he/she asks. And note how quick the e-mailer is to latch onto the false equivalency that Huckabee has been promoting since the interview blew up — that he committed a “slip of the tongue” no different from the slip of the tongue Obama committed as a candidate in 2008 when he said he’d visited 57 states. The difference between these episodes, as I noted yesterday, ought to be blindingly obvious.
Not all of the anti-Obama e-mails I received this week were as specific and detailed as this one. But almost all of them seemed to be written with the conviction that the president of the United States is a fundamentally un-/anti-American figure. Yes, the slice of the Republican Party base that actually bothers to send e-mails to Salon writers is very, very small. But the basic feelings expressed to me this week are more widespread. What Huckabee has done is to reinforce those feelings.
By: Steve Kornacki-News Editor, Salon, March 3, 2011
Can Seven Reports Be Wrong About The Risks of Spending Cuts? GOP Says Yes
Could two independent economic reports, a liberal think tank and four bipartisan reports on debt reduction be wrong? They all conclude that slashing federal spending this year could cause job losses and threaten the economic recovery.
The latest report, from Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, says 700,000 jobs could be lost by the end of 2012 if Republicans succeed in their quest to cut $60 billion from domestic programs this year. Cuts and tax increases are necessary to address the nation’s long-term fiscal problems, Zandi said, but “cutting too deeply before the economy is in full expansion would add unnecessary risk.” The report largely echoes earlier analyses by Alec Phillips of Goldman Sachs and the Center for American Progress.
House Speaker John Boehner famously responded, when asked about potential job losses earlier this month, “so be it.” On Monday his office pointed to a new counter argument offered by Stanford economist John Taylor – that “a credible plan to reduce the deficit” will help the economy, not hurt it, and that $60 billion – the amount the other analyses assume will be cut this year – is an inaccurate, inflated figure.
Taylor is a former Bush administration official based at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford; last year he received an award from the conservative Bradley Foundation. Zandi, founder and chief economist at Moody’s, was an adviser to Republican presidential nominee John McCain in 2008. However, he is a registered Democrat. (Update: Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, named by Republican George W. Bush and re-appointed by President Barack Obama, also disputes the Zandi and Phillips reports).
Boehner spokesman Michael Steel called Zandi “a relentless cheerleader for the failed ‘stimulus,'” who “refuses to understand that ending the spending binge will help the private sector.” That led the Chicago Tribune’s Mike Memoli to tweet, “Today, GOP discredits Mark Zandi. Last fall, cited his analysis in arguing against tax hikes.”
It is an article of faith among Republicans that 2009 stimulus package has “failed.” But the Obama administration, Zandi and many others disagree with that assessment. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the stimulus created or saved up to 3.5 million jobs, raised the GDP and stabilized an economy that had been in free-fall.
There is no sign the stimulus will ever be anything but a partisan flashpoint. Yet there is bipartisan consensus to be found in the reports from various deficit and debt commissions. They are unanimous in suggesting either increased stimulus or steady government spending in 2011.
“Don’t disrupt the fragile recovery,” the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform warned in December. Its plan – adopted by 11 of the 18 panel members – calls for “serious belt-tightening” to begin in 2012. A report from the Bipartisan Policy Center suggested gradually phasing in steps to reduce deficits and debt “beginning in 2012, so the economy will be strong enough to absorb them.” The 2009 Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform put off cuts to the same year, as did a recent proposal from Brookings fellow Bill Galston and Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
MacGuineas has mixed feelings about the GOP drive to slash spending and slash it now. “It’s good that we’re actually talking about spending reductions” instead of putting it off, she said in an interview. “On the one hand, that’s helpful. On the other hand, they are focusing on the wrong time frame — this year instead of this decade, and focusing on the wrong part of the budget — a very thin slice instead of the real problem areas” such as Medicare and Medicaid.
The ideal scenario in the view of MacGuineas and the bipartisan commissions would be for politicians serious about debt reduction to spend 2011 on a long-term plan to reduce domestic and defense spending, raise taxes, ensure long-term health for Social Security and solve the riddle of controlling Medicare and Medicaid costs. “The right model is to put in place this year a multiyear plan to get there,” MacGuineas said, adding she has high hopes for a bipartisan group of senators led by Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia and Republican Saxby Chambliss of Georgia.
The skirmishes over spending – destined to repeat themselves constantly this year as Congress confronts potential government shutdowns and loan defaults – have provided political fodder for all sides. Democrats seized on Boehner’s initial response to the prospect of job losses and now refer often to the GOP’s “so be it” jobs policy. Republicans, though they only control half of Congress, are making good on promises to the tea party movement and other voters who put a premium on cutting government spending.
If Republicans can’t secure Senate passage and Obama’s signature for their spending cuts, they will have at least made clear to their base that they tried. If by some political miracle they win the $60 billion in cuts they are seeking, and the recovery picks up, they can take credit. If the economy dips back into crisis, or even if the jobless rate is flat, they can blame Obama and bolster their case to take back the White House.
Unless of course Obama and the Democrats, equipped with who knows how many reports by then, figure out a way to blame them first.
By: Jill Lawrence, Senior Correspondent-Politics Daily, March 1, 2011
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