“The Big Budget Mumble”: Republicans Can’t Play Their Usual Con Game Of Just Saying No
In the ongoing battle of the budget, President Obama has done something very cruel. Declaring that this time he won’t negotiate with himself, he has refused to lay out a proposal reflecting what he thinks Republicans want. Instead, he has demanded that Republicans themselves say, explicitly, what they want. And guess what: They can’t or won’t do it.
No, really. While there has been a lot of bluster from the G.O.P. about how we should reduce the deficit with spending cuts, not tax increases, no leading figures on the Republican side have been able or willing to specify what, exactly, they want to cut.
And there’s a reason for this reticence. The fact is that Republican posturing on the deficit has always been a con game, a play on the innumeracy of voters and reporters. Now Mr. Obama has demanded that the G.O.P. put up or shut up — and the response is an aggrieved mumble.
Here’s where we are right now: As his opening bid in negotiations, Mr. Obama has proposed raising about $1.6 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade, with the majority coming from letting the high-end Bush tax cuts expire and the rest from measures to limit tax deductions. He would also cut spending by about $400 billion, through such measures as giving Medicare the ability to bargain for lower drug prices.
Republicans have howled in outrage. Senator Orrin Hatch, delivering the G.O.P. reply to the president’s weekly address, denounced the offer as a case of “bait and switch,” bearing no relationship to what Mr. Obama ran on in the election. In fact, however, the offer is more or less the same as Mr. Obama’s original 2013 budget proposal and also closely tracks his campaign literature.
So what are Republicans offering as an alternative? They say they want to rely mainly on spending cuts instead. Which spending cuts? Ah, that’s a mystery. In fact, until late last week, as far as I can tell, no leading Republican had been willing to say anything specific at all about how spending should be cut.
The veil lifted a bit when Senator Mitch McConnell, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, finally mentioned a few things — raising the Medicare eligibility age, increasing Medicare premiums for high-income beneficiaries and changing the inflation adjustment for Social Security. But it’s not clear whether these represent an official negotiating position — and in any case, the arithmetic just doesn’t work.
Start with raising the Medicare age. This is, as I’ve argued in the past, a terrible policy idea. But even aside from that, it’s just not a big money saver, largely because 65- and 66-year-olds have much lower health costs than the average Medicare recipient. When the Congressional Budget Office analyzed the likely fiscal effects of a rise in the eligibility age, it found that it would save only $113 billion over the next decade and have little effect on the longer-run trajectory of Medicare costs.
Increasing premiums for the affluent would yield even less; a 2010 study by the budget office put the 10-year savings at only about $20 billion.
Changing the inflation adjustment for Social Security would save a bit more — by my estimate, about $185 billion over the next decade. But put it all together, and the things Mr. McConnell was talking about would amount to only a bit over $300 billion in budget savings — a fifth of what Mr. Obama proposes in revenue gains.
The point is that when you put Republicans on the spot and demand specifics about how they’re going to make good on their posturing about spending and deficits, they come up empty. There’s no there there.
And there never was. Republicans claim to be for much smaller government, but as a political matter they have always attacked government spending in the abstract, never coming clean with voters about the reality that big cuts in government spending can happen only if we sharply curtail very popular programs. In fact, less than a month ago the Romney/Ryan campaign was attacking Mr. Obama for, yes, cutting Medicare.
Now Republicans find themselves boxed in. With taxes scheduled to rise on Jan. 1 in the absence of an agreement, they can’t play their usual game of just saying no to tax increases and pretending that they have a deficit reduction plan. And the president, by refusing to help them out by proposing G.O.P.-friendly spending cuts, has deprived them of political cover. If Republicans really want to slash popular programs, they will have to propose those cuts themselves.
So while the fiscal cliff — still a bad name for the looming austerity bomb, but I guess we’re stuck with it — is a bad thing from an economic point of view, it has had at least one salutary political effect. For it has finally laid bare the con that has always been at the core of the G.O.P.’s political strategy.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 2, 2012
“Seriously?”: Mitch McConnell’s Vision Of A Compromise
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), not surprisingly, has no use for President Obama’s $4 trillion reduction/economic stimulus plan. Greg Sargent, however, flags the Republican’s vision of what a bipartisan agreement would look like.
In an interview in his Capitol Hill office, Mr. McConnell said if the White House agrees to changes such as higher Medicare premiums for the wealthy, an increase in the Medicare eligibility age and a slowing of cost-of-living increases for programs like Social Security, Republicans would agree to include more tax revenue in the deal, though not from higher tax rates. […]
Mr. McConnell offered his ideas as examples of the structural changes Republicans are looking for. “The nexus for us is: revenue equals genuine entitlement eligibility changes,” Mr. McConnell said.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, there’s a good reason: it’s the blueprint of the plan Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Sunday he could support.
What I hope the political world — policymakers, Sunday show participants, etc. — will consider as we go into the weekend is how truly baffling McConnell’s concept of a “compromise” really is.
Despite an election cycle in which Democrats did very well up and down the ballot, the Senate GOP leader envisions an agreement in which Republicans get the Medicare cuts they want, Republicans get the Social Security cuts they want, and Republicans get the tax rates they want. In exchange, McConnell would give Democrats Mitt Romney’s revenue plan.
Seriously.
Sure, President Obama’s plan isn’t exactly an olive branch, but at least it’s a serious effort to reach the goal Republicans established, and it includes policies the White House would not otherwise seek on their own. McConnell’s approach is based on a model in which Obama was the one who ended up with 206 electoral votes, instead of 332.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said today the talks are at a “stalemate.” I wonder why that is.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 30, 2012
“Revenge Of The Nuts”: Republicans Threaten To “Shut Down The Senate” Over Filibuster Reform
In response to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plan to reform the rules governing filibusters, Senate Republicans are threatening the highly ironic revenge of “[shutting] down the Senate.”
Manu Raju reports in Politico that Reid is considering a ban on the use of filibusters on “motions to proceed,” the process through which debate begins in the Senate. Reid also may reinstitute rules requiring filibustering senators to take the Senate floor and carry out a nonstop talking session (as in the famous movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.)
In order to change these rules, Raju reports that Reid may invoke the so-called “nuclear option,” using an obscure rule to change the Senate rules with just a 51-vote majority instead of the usual two-thirds. The Republican response has been furious:
Republicans are threatening even greater retaliation if Reid uses a move rarely used by Senate majorities: changing the chamber’s precedent by 51 votes, rather than the usual 67 votes it takes to overhaul the rules.
“I think the backlash will be severe,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), the conservative firebrand, said sternly. “If you take away minority rights, which is what you’re doing because you’re an ineffective leader, you’ll destroy the place. And if you destroy the place, we’ll do what we have to do to fight back.”
“It will shut down the Senate,” the incoming Senate GOP whip, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, told POLITICO. “It’s such an abuse of power.”
There are two major problems with the Republican response: first, Reid’s proposal would not threaten “minority rights” as Coburn asserts. Senators would still be allowed to filibuster after the debate begins, and — as long as they’re willing to stay on the floor and keep talking — they would still be allowed to indefinitely delay a vote unless stopped by a 60-vote majority.
Second, threatening to “shut down the Senate” is a perfect example of why filibuster reform is needed in the first place. Since Democrats claimed their Senate majority in 2007, they have had to overcome over 380 filibusters, more than at any other point in history. As Minority Leader Mitch McConnell famously explained, Senate Republicans’ only goal over the past four years has been blocking President Obama’s agenda, and to do so they have brought the Senate to a near-complete standstill by requiring a 60-vote supermajority to pass any legislation.
So John Cornyn’s threat that Senate Republicans will suddenly stop cooperating with Democrats and block any progress in the Senate shouldn’t concern Reid very much. After all, it would be nothing he hasn’t seen before.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, November 26, 2012
“Politics Never Disappears”: With A Recalcitrant Congress, President Obama Shouldn’t Back Down
It is said after every election that the victors should put politics aside and work for the good of the country.
If President Obama believed this pious nonsense, he would put his second term in jeopardy. Asking politicians to ignore politics is like insisting that professional hockey players switch to basketball. In a system with national elections every two years — and in which the two parties are in relatively close balance — politics never disappears.
Fortunately, the president knows foolishness when he sees it. He has been toughened by four years of unremitting Republican opposition and has behind him both a large electoral college victory and an advantage of about 3 million popular votes. The word “mandate” is overused — just ask George W. Bush. But Obama was absolutely clear during the campaign about his insistence that taxes on better-off Americans need to rise as part of any deal on the budget deficit and “fiscal cliff.”
And so did Obama gracefully but firmly challenge Republicans on Friday to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class immediately and then begin negotiations on how to raise taxes on the well-to-do. He was asking them to give up their leverage because he knows they don’t have much leverage to begin with. Meet the newly empowered Obama.
The voters clearly heard what Obama was saying during the campaign. According to the media exit poll, only 35 percent of voters said taxes should not be increased. Fully 47 percent of all voters supported raising taxes on Americans earning $250,000 or more, including 66 percent of Obama’s voters. An additional 13 percent, of all voters and Obama’s, said taxes should go up for everyone.
If Republican leaders in Congress want to pretend that Obama’s reelection means absolutely nothing, the president seems willing to let all the Bush tax cuts expire. This is the only way to deal with recalcitrance, reflected in the fact that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t even let the president make his case on Friday before issuing a flat statement rejecting any tax increases. Obama can only hope that he can break more reasonable Senate Republicans away from their hard-line leadership.
House Speaker John Boehner has tried to sound more reasonable, and Obama took him at his word. Graciousness comes easily when you are operating from a position of strength.
Still, even in his conciliatory mode, Boehner made clear that preserving low tax rates for the rich remains the GOP’s single highest priority. The speaker said he might support new revenue but only through some vague “tax reform.” But that’s what Mitt Romney offered during the campaign. Boehner is saying he will make a deal with the victorious candidate only on the basis of the program of the defeated candidate. Here’s hoping this is just a bargaining position.
By emphasizing Obama’s victory as a demographic and organizational triumph, conservatives have been laying the groundwork for renewing their sotto voce campaign suggesting that Obama is somehow “illegitimate” or not “one of us.”
Yet the exit poll found that those who rallied to Obama represent a broad coalition of all of us. Yes, he won African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans overwhelmingly. But the exit poll also shows that 32 percent of Obama’s voters were white women and 24 percent of them were white men, while 23 percent were African-American men and women, and 14 percent were Latinos. This is a genuinely diverse alliance.
Obama’s victory was also plainly a triumph for the center-left: 46 percent of Obama’s voters called themselves moderates, 42 percent called themselves liberals and 12 percent said they were conservatives. Judging by its attitudes toward unfairness in the economy, this is far more a populist coalition than an establishment center. Obama’s voters are invested in growth, raising incomes and reducing unemployment, not austerity and budget balancing.
And this may have been the most important aspect of Obama’s first post-election policy statement. He did not lead with balancing the budget. “Our top priority,” he said right at the start, “has to be jobs and growth,” and then listed his proposals to expand opportunities.
Obama seems to understand that the interests of the coalition that elected him overlap with the national interest. And the politics of the moment reinforce the balanced approach he is advancing now. You get the sense that Republicans understand this and will eventually act accordingly.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 11, @012
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