“GOP Struggles With Phony Deficit Pretense”: Literally The Same People Who Ignored The Deficit In The Previous Decade
The perception of the Republican Party as the anti-deficit party used to be 100% true. A couple of generations ago, the GOP actually saw the deficit as a legitimate concern, and shaped their policy agenda accordingly. During the Eisenhower era, Republicans kept very high tax rates in place, first approved to pay for WWII, in the name of fiscal conservativism. Many Republicans balked at JFK’s tax breaks out of fear of higher deficits.
Obviously, those eras are long gone. The GOP’s shift began in earnest under Reagan, but became almost ridiculous under George W. Bush – an era in which Republicans put the cost of two wars, a Wall Street bailout, massive tax cuts, and Medicare expansion on the national charge card for some future generation to worry about.
But once the Obama era began, GOP leaders decided they cared about the deficit again. It was impossible to take seriously – we’re talking about literally the same people who ignored the deficit in the previous decade – but Republicans actively pretended they had both credibility and genuine concerns about budget shortfalls.
It’s hard not to notice, however, that much of the new congressional Republican agenda has a common thread. See if you notice what these measures have in common. On health care:
A Republican bill to change how Obamacare defines a full work-week would raise the deficit by $53.2 billion over the next decade.
And abortion:
The official budget scorekeeper of Congress says the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would ban abortions after 20 weeks, would increase Medicaid costs by as much as $400 million…. CBO officially estimates that the bill increases federal deficits by $75 million between 2014 and 2018, and $225 million between 2014 and 2023.
And immigration:
Senate Democrats threatened Thursday to block action on legislation funding the Homeland Security Department until Republicans jettison House-passed provisions that reverse President Barack Obama’s key immigration policies…. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the measure would increase the federal deficit by $7.5 billion over a decade.
How would Republicans prevent these proposals from increasing the deficit? With offsetting cuts? Higher taxes? Neither, actually – GOP lawmakers are content to approve their priorities regardless of the impact on the budget shortfall.
It seems about once a week or so, GOP lawmakers unveil some new priority, they learn their idea would make the deficit worse, and they quietly make clear they couldn’t care less.
All of which made it quite amusing to see Republicans complaining about President Obama’s upcoming budget plan, claiming that it – you guessed it – doesn’t go far enough to reduce the deficit that Republicans created in the Bush/Cheney era.
Danny Vinik is absolutely right:
Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this two-faced policymaking. If they care about the deficit, they have to care about it in all contexts. If not, then they shouldn’t justify their opposition to Obama’s policies on grounds that they increase the deficit. When Republican congressmen react to Obama’s budget and undoubtedly invoke the deficit, the media should ask them why they didn’t care about the deficit last year. Maybe there will be some accountability for a change.
Well, there certainly should be some accountability for a change, but Republicans seem awfully confident that that they’ll face no consequences whatsoever for their incoherent whining about the deficit. Given recent history and misplaced public perceptions, I suspect their expectations are probably correct.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 29, 2015
“Romney Is The Only One Who Thinks He’s Reagan”: Mitt Has Done Exactly Zero To Enhance His Credentials
Yeah, this one isn’t gonna fly.
Mitt Romney’s third campaign for the White House got off to a good start … for about three days. The backlash this week came not just from core conservatives, who have never been enthusiastic about the ideological chameleon, but also from just about everyone who isn’t a die-hard Romney supporter. This group includes quite a few mainstream conservatives, according to Washington Post and New York Times reporting.
What is Team Romney’s answer to those who say he’s had his chance?
“If that’s the case, then Ronald Reagan never would have become president,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s longtime spokesman. “Reagan ran three times. Mitt learns from experience. If he does run, he will run his strongest campaign yet.”
Yeesh. I can just imagine all the Republican contenders and conservative leaders going all Bentsen on the Mittster, as the Wall Street Journal did Wednesday.
Does Romney really want to die on this hill?
Between Reagan’s first (1968) and second (1976) presidential runs, he went from being an inexperienced governor who had given an impressive speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964 to being a successful two-term governor who continued to consolidate his position as leader of the conservative movement. Then, in the run-up to his third try in 1980, Reagan remained the clear conservative leader. A real, influential leader: His attack on the Panama Canal treaties, for example, made opposition to them the standard conservative position.
In other words, Reagan didn’t just get better at running for president. He was a much more impressive politician with far more accomplishments by 1980 than he had been in 1968.
Romney? Not so much.
He first ran for president as a successful one-term governor, although he had to repudiate much of what he had done when he moved to the national stage. He ran for president a second time as a successful one-term governor. He is now running for president yet again as … a successful one-term governor.
As far as I can see, he has done exactly zero to enhance his credentials apart from having now developed extensive experience in running for president. If he has ever been an influential leader among Republicans on any policy position, I’ve clean forgotten about it.
More to the point, no one has rallied to Romney’s side other than his core supporters, and reporters are having no trouble finding 2012 supporters who are willing to distance themselves publicly from his third effort. And not only has no one dropped out of the race in the last week since Romney and Jeb Bush stepped up their efforts, other than the already bearded Paul Ryan, but Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Scott Walker and others are ramping up their own campaigns.
Right now, the odds of Romney’s campaign fizzling out before summer appear to be higher than the odds of his making it to New Hampshire, let alone repeating as the Republican’s presidential nominee.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist, Bloomberg View; The National Memo, January 15, 2014
“Presidents And The Economy”: Serious Analyses Of The Reagan-Era Business Cycle Place Very Little Weight On Reagan
Suddenly, or so it seems, the U.S. economy is looking better. Things have been looking up for a while, but at this point the signs of improvement — job gains, rapidly growing G.D.P., rising public confidence — are unmistakable.
The improving economy is surely one factor in President Obama’s rising approval rating. And there’s a palpable sense of panic among Republicans, despite their victory in the midterms. They expected to run in 2016 against a record of failure; what do they do if the economy is looking pretty good?
Well, that’s their problem. What I want to ask instead is whether any of this makes sense. How much influence does the occupant of the White House have on the economy, anyway? The standard answer among economists, at least when they aren’t being political hacks, is: not much. But is this time different?
To understand why economists usually downplay the economic role of presidents, let’s revisit a much-mythologized episode in U.S. economic history: the recession and recovery of the 1980s.
On the right, of course, the 1980s are remembered as an age of miracles wrought by the blessed Reagan, who cut taxes, conjured up the magic of the marketplace and led the nation to job gains never matched before or since. In reality, the 16 million jobs America added during the Reagan years were only slightly more than the 14 million added over the previous eight years. And a later president — Bill something-or-other — presided over the creation of 22 million jobs. But who’s counting?
In any case, however, serious analyses of the Reagan-era business cycle place very little weight on Reagan, and emphasize instead the role of the Federal Reserve, which sets monetary policy and is largely independent of the political process. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Fed, under the leadership of Paul Volcker, was determined to bring inflation down, even at a heavy price; it tightened policy, sending interest rates sky high, with mortgage rates going above 18 percent. What followed was a severe recession that drove unemployment to double digits but also broke the wage-price spiral.
Then the Fed decided that America had suffered enough. It loosened the reins, sending interest rates plummeting and housing starts soaring. And the economy bounced back. Reagan got the political credit for “morning in America,” but Mr. Volcker was actually responsible for both the slump and the boom.
The point is that normally the Fed, not the White House, rules the economy. Should we apply the same rule to the Obama years?
Not quite.
For one thing, the Fed has had a hard time gaining traction in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, because the aftermath of a huge housing and mortgage bubble has left private spending relatively unresponsive to interest rates. This time around, monetary policy really needed help from a temporary increase in government spending, which meant that the president could have made a big difference. And he did, for a while; politically, the Obama stimulus may have been a failure, but an overwhelming majority of economists believe that it helped mitigate the slump.
Since then, however, scorched-earth Republican opposition has more than reversed that initial effort. In fact, federal spending adjusted for inflation and population growth is lower now than it was when Mr. Obama took office; at the same point in the Reagan years, it was up more than 20 percent. So much, then, for fiscal policy.
There is, however, another sense in which Mr. Obama has arguably made a big difference. The Fed has had a hard time getting traction, but it has at least made an effort to boost the economy — and it has done so despite ferocious attacks from conservatives, who have accused it again and again of “debasing the dollar” and setting the stage for runaway inflation. Without Mr. Obama to shield its independence, the Fed might well have been bullied into raising interest rates, which would have been disastrous. So the president has indirectly aided the economy by helping to fend off the hard-money mob.
Last but not least, even if you think Mr. Obama deserves little or no credit for good economic news, the fact is his opponents have spent years claiming that his bad attitude — he has been known to suggest, now and then, that some bankers have behaved badly — is somehow responsible for the economy’s weakness. Now that he’s presiding over unexpected economic strength, they can’t just turn around and assert his irrelevance.
So is the president responsible for the accelerating recovery? No. Can we nonetheless say that we’re doing better than we would be if the other party held the White House? Yes. Do those who were blaming Mr. Obama for all our economic ills now look like knaves and fools? Yes, they do. And that’s because they are.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 4, 2015
“The ‘Wayback’ Machine”: Republicans And The Siren Song Of The Past
President Obama’s dramatic move to reopen relations with Cuba crystalizes the larger story of his presidency: In many significant ways, he has dragged America into the 21st century. But how long will we stay here? I ask because so many Republicans seem nostalgic for the golden era of Chubby Checker, Elvis Presley and The Shirelles, or the slightly more recent decade when Lionel Richie and Olivia Newton-John topped the charts.
For now, Republicans are sitting in the metaphorical green room of history, waiting for their onstage close-up. They’re free to rail against anything and everything Obama does, knowing that his core achievements will be protected for two more years by Senate Democrats and Obama himself. Even the new Republican-controlled Congress can expect filibusters and vetoes if it goes too far in trying to obliterate the Obama era.
The real test will be what the GOP does if and when it has the relatively unfettered capacity to work its will — for instance, if it elects a president in 2016. That person would have to decide whether to roll back the many Obama policies achieved through executive action, regulations and a handful of major laws. Would he or she revive a Cold War with Cuba, stop nuclear talks with Iran, break a climate agreement with China? Revoke temporary legal residency for millions of immigrants? Take away health coverage from millions who are newly insured? Lower the minimum wage for federal contractors? Weaken consumer protections against banks? Reduce tax rates on the rich?
At least a few GOP lawmakers and 2016 prospects must be secretly relieved that Obama is taking the heat for some decisions that were necessary and/or inevitable. We have thriving automobile and renewable energy industries, even as Republicans have been able to rail against government “bailouts” and “picking winners.” We aren’t sending combat troops into quagmires, prolonging a long-failed isolation policy toward Cuba or courting confrontation with Iran, and the GOP can still hammer Obama as weak, indecisive and naive. America has finally joined the rest of the developed world in offering broad access to health insurance — and Republicans, in an act of political jiu-jitsu for the record books, have ridden the new law to two midterm routs.
The positioning so far in the 2016 presidential race is revealing. Most of the hot GOP prospects have a foot in the 1980s, the 1960s or both. The field is crowded with aggressive interventionists, supply-side tax cutters and climate-change skeptics. Some seem to want to prolong the Cold War. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, whose parents left Cuba well before Fidel Castro’s revolution and takeover, has been so emotional and militant in opposing Obama’s Cuba shift that The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz wrote a parody called “Rubio Vows to Block Twenty-First Century.” (“We cannot stop time, perhaps, but we can defund it”). What’s most striking about Rubio’s old-school views is his age. He’s just 43.
To give them their due, several future contenders are trying to formulate plans for a 21st-century Republican Party. Rubio and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan are looking at alternative ways to fight poverty, while Rubio and former Florida governor Jeb Bush support comprehensive immigration reform that deals with the millions of illegal immigrants already in America. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is a warrior for privacy rights and criminal justice reform, he backs Obama on Cuba, and he’s against what the libertarian Cato Institute’s David Boaz calls “promiscuous interventionism” abroad.
Yet in crucial areas, they and many other GOP prospects are still modeling themselves on an illusory Ronald Reagan. The actual Reagan raised as well as cut taxes, grew the government, terminated a U.S. mission in Lebanon — that is, cut and ran — after 241 military personnel were killed in a bombing, and negotiated with “evil empire” leader Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce nuclear weapons. But who in the Republican field will emulate the practical, flexible Reagan who was open to discussion and compromise?
Paul stands out at this point for rejecting the Reaganesque Republican ideal of America as global supercop with its nose — not to mention its bombs and troops — in everyone’s business. He’s on the same page as his colleagues, however, when it comes to tax cuts as an economic cure-all. His draconian proposals to cut taxes, slash spending and balance the budget in five years are about as newfangled as Hall and Oates.
Given his name and his race, Obama’s two election victories were potent symbols of a new century and the promise of an increasingly diverse nation. Yet the real 21st-century pillars of his presidency are his policies, from energy and health care to immigration and diplomatic engagement. My fingers are crossed that in their rush to reject all things Obama, Republicans won’t reflexively climb into the wayback machine and embrace the ideas of the past.
By: Jill Lawrence, The National Memo, January 1, 2015
“Nostalgia And The Good Old Days”: Only In The GOP; So Much For Forward Looking And Relevance
It seems a little harsh to say the Republican National Committee is living in the past, but when the shirt fits….
Republicans have been boasting of their new digital campaign toolbox, but as the 2016 presidential race kicks into gear, they have gone retro by using vintage T-shirts as a fund-raising device.
The Republican National Committee is making a year-end push to peddle red and blue “Reagan/Bush ‘84” shirts for $27. The shirts are a “throwback to the days of strong, principled leadership in the White House,” the committee says. (They are also a throwback to a very good year for Republican presidential politics: President Ronald Reagan carried 49 states.)
Just a few months after President Obama’s first inaugural, Jeb Bush appeared at a Republican event and urged his GOP allies to move past “nostalgia.”
“You can’t beat something with nothing, and the other side has something,” the former Florida governor said at the time. ‘I don’t like it, but they have it, and we have to be respectful and mindful of that.”
Bush added, “So our ideas need to be forward looking and relevant. I felt like there was a lot of nostalgia and the good old days in the [Republican] messaging. I mean, it’s great, but it doesn’t draw people toward your cause.”
That was over five years ago. As of this week, the RNC is still counting on shirts promoting their presidential ticket from 30 years ago to boost a year-end fundraising pitch.
So much for “forward looking.”
Indeed, it’s a curious message from the RNC. The party longs for “the days of strong, principled leadership in the White House”? Even if we assume they hold Clinton and Obama in contempt, doesn’t this RNC message seem a little insulting to the Bush/Cheney and Bush/Quayle eras?
Sure, Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six national elections, but does the RNC really have to go back three decades to find a presidential election cycle the party is excited about?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 29, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 