“No More Tax Cuts For The Wealthy”: As Debt Battle Looms, No Option But To Raise Taxes
President Obama and Republican leaders in Congress made history of sorts last year when they agreed to a 10-year plan to reduce annual deficits with spending cuts and no tax increases. Mr. Obama vows not to let it happen again.
Both he and Speaker John A. Boehner put down their respective markers this week, suggesting a potential replay of their damaging showdown over the debt ceiling last summer. On Tuesday, the speaker reiterated what has become known as the Boehner Rule: House Republicans will not increase the debt ceiling again without spending cuts of a greater amount. Mr. Obama, on Wednesday, told him Congress must pass a “clean” debt-limit increase to cover the nation’s obligations; there will be no more deficit deals, he said, without higher tax revenues from the wealthiest Americans.
While the Republicans largely prevailed last year, this time the Obama administration believes it has the greater leverage. The pain of the reductions is being felt as House Republicans advance the annual spending bills; already they have proposed to raise the spending caps for the military, and they are squabbling over domestic programs.
“It’s not reasonable or right for there to be another discussion of a spending-only package” for reducing deficits, said Jacob J. Lew, the White House chief of staff and former budget director. “When you look at how we got into the hole we’re in, it’s very clear that tax cuts for the wealthy were part of contributing to the deficits we’re now trying to close.”
Mr. Obama’s position leaves open the question of whether election-year politics will play to his advantage among voters who do not like deficits or the measures needed to reduce them. Neither party expects the fight to be resolved until after the election, the results of which will determine who actually has the upper hand in a lame-duck Congress. The debt limit must be raised by early 2013, Treasury has said.
The two budget deals last year — the deficit-reduction compromise in August and a smaller agreement before that — called for cutting $1.7 trillion from so-called discretionary spending, which covers the bulk of federal programs whose budgets Congress controls annually, including air-traffic control, the military, education, research and much more.
Those deals left unscathed the entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which, given the growing aging population, are driving projections of unsustainable deficits.
And those deals, because of Republicans’ resistance, did not raise taxes, unlike the deficit measures of the 1980s and 1990s.
“Tax hikes destroy jobs,” Mr. Boehner said in his speech on Tuesday.
But veterans of past budget wars say that discretionary spending for domestic programs, which make up just 15 percent of the federal budget, cannot continue to bear the brunt without significant implications for government services. “They’ve gone way past fat and are cutting into muscle,” said Bruce R. Bartlett, who was a Treasury official in the Reagan administration.
Nor, these people say, would the public support the deeper reductions that would have to be made in programs like Medicare if taxes are not part of the mix.
“That’s basically why I, and a very large number of other people, conclude that you do need some additional revenues,” said Rudolph G. Penner, a Republican who headed the Congressional Budget Office in the 1980s and was co-chairman in 2010 of a blue-ribbon panel that proposed a debt-reduction plan.
“I’ve been kind of surprised at these recent agreements, where almost all of the reduction comes from discretionary programs over 10 years,” he said. “What you’re talking about is a very large number of years of austerity — through various Congresses, elections and possible natural disasters and terrorist attacks and on and on, which is just not plausible to me.”
Barry Anderson, a former deputy director of the White House and Congressional budget offices, said, “Eventually you’re going to have to increase taxes across the board” — not just for the wealthy — “by at least a third.”
Former Senator Pete V. Domenici, who was the chairman or senior Republican leader on the Senate Budget Committee from 1981 to 2007, said in an interview, “Adequate projections of revenues and expenditures have to be put on the table. Everything has to be on the table.”
Senator Domenici, with Alice Rivlin, a former budget director for Congress and the Clinton administration, was chairman of a panel in 2010 of former lawmakers, administration officials, academics and executives, that produced a blueprint for debt reduction. It came just before a roughly similar plan from a majority on Mr. Obama’s fiscal commission, which was led by Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader, and Erskine B. Bowles, a businessman and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.
All three recent debt proposals — Bowles-Simpson, Domenici-Rivlin and that of Mr. Penner’s group, sponsored by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration — recommended trillions of dollars in savings, both from higher taxes and reduced entitlement spending. Yet it is those two sources that the White House and Congress have avoided, given Republicans’ opposition to tax increases and Democrats’ to cutting Medicare unless taxes are raised.
Tax increases were part of nearly every significant deficit-reduction measure of the 1980s and 1990s, including the 1982, 1984 and 1987 packages signed by Ronald Reagan, the 1990 accord under George H.W. Bush and Mr. Clinton’s 1993 measure. The exception was a deal in 1997, though by that agreement Congressional Republicans ratified Mr. Clinton’s 1993 tax increases that they had vowed to repeal.
Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, Mr. Lew, participated in most of those deals, as an aide to House Democratic leaders and then as Mr. Clinton’s budget director.
“The history of dealing with big problems like this is, almost in every case, it’s been a balanced package” of taxes and cuts in both discretionary and entitlement spending, Mr. Lew said. “So it’s not like it is some radical Democratic position.”
By: Jackie Calmes, The New York Times, May 18, 2012
“Still Separate And Unequal”: Mitt Romney Fails To See America
After a third reading of Mitt Romney’s Liberty University commencement speech, I still fail to see how my Post colleague Michael Gerson could have described it as “more than good.”
Romney’s address struck me as standard fare for a college graduation. He hit all the familiar notes: gratitude to school and a nod to parents for sacrifices made; celebration of the virtues of hard work, devotion to principles, individualism, service, family. There was even a little shameless politicking, with Romney telling the audience “what the next four years might hold for me is yet to be determined. But . . . things are looking up, and I take your kind hospitality today as a sign of good things to come.”
It was the kind of speech that could have been delivered — sans the pandering and the references to more-contemporary figures (the late Chuck Colson; the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, who founded Liberty University; and the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) — to college graduating classes in the 1950s or even in 1900.
The Liberty remarks, as seems to be true of many Romney speeches, reflected a rather constricted view of the country. Perhaps it’s because Romney chooses to deliver most of his lines to narrow audiences.
Missing in his Liberty offering, as with some other Romney speeches, is any recognition — not praises, mind you, but simple acknowledgment — that 21st-century America is more than a white, middle-class country.
He revealed no sense whatsoever of knowing that the overwhelming majority of Liberty grads will, in their adult lives, inhabit an America in which they will be the minority.
Romney’s speeches seem tailor-made for audiences that look pretty much like him.
At least that is what one is led to believe after observing where Romney chooses to go and what he has to say.
I tried to imagine Romney’s Liberty address being delivered to the graduates and their families at the 2012 commencement exercises I attended a week ago at historically black Howard University in Washington.
I cannot believe, however, that the Romney campaign apparatus would have allowed the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to tell an African American audience numbering in the thousands that Falwell was “a gracious Christian example” and a “courageous and big-hearted minister of the Gospel who . . . never hated an adversary.”
Indeed, Romney lauded Falwell, who famously said: “I do question the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations.”
Romney spoke glowingly of the same Falwell who said of the landmark Supreme Court school desegregation decision: “If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never had been made. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”
The same Falwell who disparaged Nobel Peace Prize winner and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a phony. (Falwell later apologized for that remark and claimed that he had misspoken.)
And who can forget Falwell’s finger-pointing after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks? He declared on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” show: “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’ ”
I suspect if Romney spoke at Howard, he would have skipped that part about Falwell.
But what does the man who seeks to lead this country have to say about, and to, this rapidly changing nation of diverse people with diverse interests and needs?
Thus far, Romney’s thoughts and policy prescriptions seem focused on America’s largest — and slowest-growing — racial group: his own.
Democratic critics accuse Romney of having values that skew to the rich at the expense of the poor. They say he’s disconnected from the problems of average Americans; that he’s out of touch and just doesn’t get it.
Would that it were only a matter of determining whether Romney is on the side of the rich or middle class.
The question is much broader and more significant: When Mitt Romney thinks and speaks of Americans, do those who don’t look like him even come to mind?
Since he launched his presidential campaign, it’s been hard to tell. And Romney’s Liberty University speech was no help.
By: Colbert King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 18, 2012
“Things That Make You Go Uhm”: Why Does Romney Get A Pass?
Greg Sargent highlights this portion from an interview Mitt Romney did with Town Hall this morning:
“I think it’s very hard to tell exactly what the president would do, other than by looking at his record in his first three and a half or four years. And we can see where he took the nation in these years. It’s a massive expansion of federal spending, an expansion of the reach of the federal government, and there’s no question in my mind but that his Supreme Court nominees and his policies would be designed toward expanding the role of government in our lives. And frankly, America’s economy runs on freedom. And he has been attacking economic freedom from the first day he came into office.”
Sargent sees this as an attempt to downplay the severity of the economic crisis, and pin the blame for economic stagnation on Obama’s policies. That sounds right, given the extent to which Romney’s general election strategy is predicated on inducing amnesia in the voting public.
This also serves to highlight a point I’ve made over the last week; there’s almost nothing Romney can say that can tarnish his aura of skill and competence. On Tuesday, Romney gave a speech decrying debt, despite the fact that his economic plan would add an additional $6 trillion in debt, on top of what’s projected under current policies. Today, he decries the stimulus—without giving a single idea of what he would have done—and declares that the economy runs on freedom.
Even the most charitable interpretation—that Romney is making a case for free-enterprise—falls apart when you recognize the degree to which government has been an important part of shaping our economy from the beginning. It’s the kind of rhetoric that would have been (rightfully) mocked if uttered by someone like Michele Bachmann, but goes unremarked on when adopted by Romney.
Why? It’s an honest question, because I’m at a loss.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, May 18, 2012
“Fighting The Last War”: The Right’s Peculiar Obsession With Jeremiah Wright
It’s often said that generals have an unfortunate tendency to fight the last war. Judging by a leaked “super PAC” ad campaign apparently being contemplated against President Obama, some Republican political strategists have the same problem. After nearly four years of an Obama presidency, they’re still fixated on Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
According to a report in Thursday morning’s New York Times, a super PAC called the Ending Spending Action Fund was contemplating a proposal for an ad campaign timed to hit during the Democratic National Convention which would focus on Wright. (In light of the publicity around the proposal, the group has reportedly decided against the ad campaign.)
According to the Times‘s Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg:
The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.
“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.
Even if the ads will never run, the proposal reflects a fantasy that has been nurtured in some more fervent conservative circles—that Wright was the ace never played against Obama, that if only Sen. John McCain had run a Wright-centric campaign four years ago, we’d be enduring, err, enjoying a McCain-Palin administration right now. Given both the broader 2008 context (a crashing economy) and the nature of Obama’s appeal (post-partisan and optimistic), it’s dubious whether a fear-mongering, arguably race-baiting ad campaign that painted issue No. 1 as something other than the economy would have gotten any traction.
This is reinforced by the fact that Wright was not the invisible man that rabid conservatives seem to think he was. Neither his rhetoric nor his relationship with Obama was a particular secret. He got wall-to-wall media coverage to the point where Obama gave a high profile speech addressing his inflammatory, unacceptable rhetoric. Within two days the speech had been clicked on 1.6 million times on YouTube, making it the most popular video on the site. And in late October an independent GOP group spent millions running Wright-centric ads in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, all states which Obama ended up winning. To suggest that the American people didn’t know about Wright is to suggest that the American people are fools.
But really that’s what the really obsessive Obama-haters seem to think: The American people aren’t smart enough to see Obama for what he is. They seem to view Wright as the magical prism which will finally allow the main stream of American voters to see Obama the same way they do—as, in the words of Colorado GOP Rep. Mike Coffman, “in his heart … not an American.” (Coffman, who made the comment in the context of avowing ignorance of whether the president was actually born here, was later forced to retract his statement.)
Of course we’re not discussing whether the McCain campaign should have focused on Wright four years ago. The question today is whether the running of a flight of Wright-focused ads would help Mitt Romney in November or merely scratch an itch peculiar to an especially obsessive subsection of the conservative coalition.
The Romney campaign came up with their answer to that question, issuing a statement today saying that they “repudiate any efforts” at character assassination. Team Romney understands something that Wright-aholics seem blinded to: If there was ever a time to play the Jeremiah Wright card it was in 2008. Obama’s no longer an ill-defined figure in the eyes of the American public—we’ve lived with the man for four years now. People will vote for him based on his policies and how he’s handled the office, not on some wild-eyed conspiracy theory about his secret un-American-ness.
And to the extent the proposed ad tries to connect the dots that the histrionic reverend is responsible for a radical president with a fundamentally different view of America, it stretches credulity. As MSNBC’s “First Read” noted this morning, “While we know that there are conservatives who want to portray Obama as a socialist tied to people who hate America, his actual record over the past four years—championing legislation that once had GOP support (stimulus, health-care reform, even cap-and-trade) and killing Osama bin Laden—doesn’t back-up the conspiratorial narrative portrayed in this plan.” (Indeed the surest way to bring an end to the free market system as America knows it would have been to let matters run their course: No TARP so the financial system would collapse; no bailout for the auto industry; no oversight of Wall Street, ensuring that self-absorbed barons of finance would rinse and repeat.)
The proposed ads will not air, cooler heads apparently having prevailed. If Ricketts had pulled the trigger on this plan, he would ironically be playing out one conservative talking point scenario: What is bad for America (specifically in regard to degradation of political discourse) would have proved to be good for Obama (as swing voters roll their eyes at the GOP’s apparent over-the-top obsession with irrelevancies).
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, May 17, 2012
“The Many Faces Of Evil”: In The GOP, Personality Is Not Policy
As we know, Mitt Romney is not all that likeable. Now Mike Huckabee, there’s a likeable guy. He used to say (and maybe still does) that he’s a conservative, but he’s not angry about it. It was a clever line, positing himself as the happy warrior and other Republicans as needlessly unpleasant. Huckabee has an easy smile and a friendly laugh. He plays bass. He invites liberals on his television and radio shows to have respectful discussions about issues. So how do we interpret it when Huckabee allows fundraising letters to be sent out under his name that say things like this:
“Listen, you’re a person of faith and so am I. In his administration and now on his re-election campaign, President Obama has surrounded himself with morally repugnant political whores with misshapen values and gutter-level ethics.”
Yeesh. Should this lead us to change our opinion of Huckabee? Or can you be a likeable guy and a vicious partisan at the same time? Now maybe Huckabee never saw the letter, but I doubt it. It’s not like he’s running a corporation with 50,000 employees that puts out hundreds of documents every day. And honestly, I always found Huckabee to be a contradiction, someone with a pleasant persona and some decidedly unpleasant views. But this is a good reminder that we shouldn’t substitute our impressions of someone’s manner for a judgment about how they’ll perform in their public duties.
This works in the opposite direction, too. Let’s take Rick Santorum. His views on just about everything are pretty much what Mike Huckabee’s are. He got a lot of attention for his harshly judgmental opinions about gay people, but I can’t remember Huckabee ever saying anything substantively different. The reason Santorum stands out is that he is a deeply unpleasant person. He always looks like he just stepped in dog poop, the dog poop being the moral sewer that is American culture. You can see him tense up when he’s confronted by people who disagrees with him, while Huckabee smiles and laughs, disarming people with his affability. But they both believe the same things. I doubt a Huckabee presidency would have been much different from a Santorum presidency.
It’s easy to get this kind of misleading impression about someone, particularly because figuring out the substance of what someone believes can be a lengthy and tedious process, but we’re all very good at making quick judgments about whether or not we like a person. And the consequences can be serious. You might remember that when John Roberts got nominated to the Supreme Court, he was roundly praised for being so personable and reasonable. He smiled and spoke slowly and carefully. He talked in baseball metaphors. Everything about his manner made him seem moderate and thoughtful. And in the end, he turned out to be the very definition of a radical conservative judicial activist.
BY: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, May 16, 2012
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