“Ryan’s Blurred Vision”: What The New Republican Budget Reveals And Conceals
Someone needs to tell Paul Ryan that his party – and the economic platform of austerity and plutocracy he crafted for it – lost a national election last year. Someone also needs to tell the Wisconsin Republican that he still chairs the House Budget Committee mainly thanks to gerrymandered redistricting.
Someone clearly needs to remind him of those realities because the “vision document” he proposed on Tuesday as the Republican federal budget is only a still more extreme version of the same notions (and the same evasions) that he and Mitt Romney tried to sell without success last fall.
Voters decisively rejected that version of Ryan’s “path to prosperity,” with its gutting of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, its additional tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and its destructive cutbacks in education, infrastructure, scientific research, national security, and a hundred other essential elements of modern American life – and a decent future – that require effective government.
Indeed, the astonishing initial assessment of the new Republican budget by experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is that Ryan wants even deeper cuts and even more lavish tax cuts than he and Romney touted in 2012. The CBPP estimates that the new Ryan plan would cut $800 billion over the coming decade from an assortment of vital programs, including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP, or food stamps); Supplemental Security Income (SSI) that supports the elderly poor; Pell grants for higher education; and federal school lunches, among others, along with the Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC) and Child Tax Credits that have historically improved standards of living for millions of impoverished working families.
Ryan pretends to admire Ronald Reagan, but the late president — who proudly extended and expanded the EITC — was far too liberal for the likes of him and Romney. Unlike the sunny Gipper, these sulking millionaires resent the working poor – the “47 percent” – who aren’t paying high enough taxes.
But everyone ought to know Ryan well enough by now to anticipate these cruel proposals. They ought to know, too, that Ryan would allow the entire edifice handed down to us by previous generations – highways, bridges, airports, canals, reservoirs, schools, parks, and much more – to crumble into oblivion, rather than increase taxes on the Republican donors whose wealth has multiplied so astronomically in recent years. His voice is the high-pitched drone of a generation of termites, voraciously consuming the nation’s foundations.
What everyone may not know is that Ryan’s vision of the future is quite blurry, since he again refuses to specify exactly how his budget allegedly achieves balance. It says (again) that the severest cuts will be made in domestic non-discretionary spending, but never details how much will be cut from which programs or even categories. It says (again) that tax expenditures will be reduced to balance those tax cuts for the rich, but never details those either. It says (again) that the Affordable Care Act will be repealed, although there is no chance of that happening now. And it says that defense spending – including untold billions in well-known waste – will simply be restored to pre-sequestration levels, while everything else will be cut again, starting at the post-sequestration baseline, much as Romney promised last year.
It says the federal budget will achieve balance within 10 years, but (again) there is no reason to believe its unfounded promises.
This old “new” budget demonstrates that no change is taking hold among the Republicans, except that they seem even more rigid in their ideological obsessions. No basis exists for bipartisan negotiation toward a budget compromise.
Without a massive public reaction to the Ryan proposals, the likelihood is that sequestration will continue and the Republicans will again seek to hold government hostage, as they have done repeatedly since 2009. And the nation will continue to suffer until voters finally decide, in their wisdom, to curtail the power of this truculent and implacable faction.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, March 13, 2013
“No Naivete”: Negotiating With The GOP Is A Dead End
The framing of this question may well reveal more about the state of American politics and media commentary on dysfunctional government than the responses. The implicit assumption is that President Obama’s personal relationships with individual Republicans (or the presumed lack thereof) and his supposed reticence in tabling bold proposals for resolving the nation’s fiscal problems is a (if not the) major reason so little progress has been made in reaching a bipartisan consensus. I believe that assumption is greatly at odds with reality and distracts readers from the core governing problems confronting the country today.
Presidential leadership is contextual—shaped by our unique constitutional arrangements and the electoral, partisan, and institutional constraints that flow from them. Under present conditions of deep ideological polarization of the parties, rough parity between the parties that fuels a strategic hyperpartisanship, and divided party government, opportunities for cross-party coalitions on controversial policies are severely limited. Constraints on presidential leadership today are exacerbated by the relentlessly oppositional stand taken by the Republicans since Obama’s election, their continuing embrace of Grover Norquist’s “no new tax” pledge, and their willingness since gaining the House majority in 2011 to use a series of manufactured crises to impose their policy preferences on the Democrats with whom they share power.
Ironically, Obama tried harder and longer than the results merited to work cooperatively with Republicans in Congress. He has learned painfully that his public embrace of a policy virtually ensures Republican opposition and that intensive negotiations with Republican leaders are likely to lead to a dead end. No bourbon and branch-water laced meetings with Republicans in Congress or pre-emptive compromises with them will induce cooperative behavior.
Obama has now set out on the right course in his dealings with Republicans in Congress. No naiveté about the opposition he faces but a determination to make some cooperation in the electoral interests of enough Republicans to break the “taxes are off the table” logjam and move forward with an economic agenda that makes sense to most nonpartisan analysts and most Americans.
By: Thomas Mann, Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, U. S. News and World Report, March 6, 2013
“Congress Lacks Courage And Vision”: FDR Put Humanity First, The Sequester Puts It Last
FDR placed the needs of the American people above petty budgetary concerns, but today’s leaders lack his courage and vision.
In 1933 we reversed the policy of the previous Administration. For the first time since the depression you had a Congress and an Administration in Washington which had the courage to provide the necessary resources which private interests no longer had or no longer dared to risk.
This cost money. We knew, and you knew, in March, 1933, that it would cost money. We knew, and you knew, that it would cost money for several years to come. The people understood that in 1933. They understood it in 1934, when they gave the Administration a full endorsement of its policy. They knew in 1935, and they know in 1936, that the plan is working.—FDR, 1936
Eighty years ago this month, at the height of the worst economic crisis in our nation’s history, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered on his promise to launch a New Deal for the American people. Not wedded to any one program, idea, or ideology, the New Deal was founded on the very simple premise that when the free market failed to provide basic economic security for the average American, government had a responsibility to provide that security. In Roosevelt’s day, this meant imposing the first-ever meaningful regulation of the stock market, shoring up the nation’s financial system by guaranteeing private deposits and separating commercial from investment banking, and providing jobs to the millions of unemployed through government expenditures on infrastructure. The Roosevelt administration also launched the country’s first nationwide program of unemployment insurance to help the unemployed bridge the gap between jobs as well as Social Security to ensure that the elderly, after years of work and toil, would not suddenly find themselves utterly destitute.
Conservative critics of FDR’s polices say that these programs did not work—that unemployment remained high throughout the 1930s and that it was only World War II that brought us out of the Great Depression. As such, these same critics continually argue that the deficit spending that fueled the New Deal was the root cause of its inability to bring the unemployment rate down to acceptable levels. In short, they argue that government spending and government programs do not work, and that only the free market can provide the economic stimulus necessary to get the economy back on its feet again.
But as is the case today with the naysayers on climate change, the empirical evidence suggests that nothing could be further from the truth. During FDR’s first term, for example, the average annual growth rate for the U.S. economy was 11 percent. Compare that to the paltry 0.8 percent we witnessed in the first term of the Obama administration. The nationwide unemployment rate also fell, from its all-time high of 25 percent in 1933 to 14 percent by 1935, which at the time represented the largest and fastest drop in unemployment in our nation’s history.
But far more damning to the conservative critique is the argument that tries to invalidate the New Deal by positing that it was World War II and not the relief programs of the 1930s that brought us out of the Great Depression. Conservatives love to trumpet this fact and often use it as part of their argument against deficit spending, never stopping for a moment to consider that government expenditures—and deficits—in World War II made the New Deal look like small potatoes. In fact, deficit spending in the New Deal never topped 6 percent of GNP, while in World War II it ran as high as 28 percent. In other words, World War II was the New Deal on steroids. Viewed from this perspective, it is FDR’s critics on the left—not the right—who possess the stronger argument. The problem with the New Deal was that it did not go far enough. In other words, the government should have spent more money, not less, if it was going to be successful in bringing the economic crisis to an end.
All this is not to say that free enterprise is incapable of producing economic growth—it most certainly is. But there are times when capitalism, left to its own devices, can fail. Franklin Roosevelt was willing to acknowledge this, and he spent the better part of his tenure in office trying to put in place programs that would make capitalism work for the average American, not just those at the top. Hence, his agenda was not to subvert or destroy the free market system, but rather to save it.
It took vision and courage to launch the New Deal—the vision to understand that when the free market systems falls short or fails, government has a responsibility to take direct measures to get the economy moving again, and the courage to engage in deficit spending at a time when orthodox economic theory argued that the only proper response to an economic recession or depression was to slash government spending and balance the budget.
Unfortunately, the leadership we possess in Washington today lacks the vision and the courage to follow FDR’s example and put in place the sort of common-sense programs that would stimulate the economy and put people back to work. Instead of providing jobs for millions by spending money on our failing infrastructure—now ranked 24th in the world—or investing in programs that would reverse the falling education rates of our children, or providing greater federal support for the basic scientific research that may unlock untold benefits for future generations, we instead speak of nothing but the deficit and the sequester, as if cutting spending in the midst of recession is the magic bullet that will lead us out of our economic malaise.
Franklin Roosevelt faced similar critics, who, much like today’s deficit hawks, insisted that he must cut spending and balance the budget no matter what the consequences for the average American. But FDR would have none of this. “To balance our budget in 1933 or 1934 or 1935,” he said,
would have been a crime against the American people. To do so we should either have had to make a capital levy that would have been confiscatory, or we should have had to set our face against human suffering with callous indifference. When Americans suffered, we refused to pass by on the other side. Humanity came first.
As it turns out, FDR’s decision to put “humanity first” was not only the right moral decision, it was also the right economic decision. For the deficit spending that he finally unleashed in World War II, coupled with the social and economic reforms put in place during the New Deal, led to one of the longest periods of economic prosperity in America’s history and the birth of the modern American middle class.
Sadly, all of the evidence to date suggests that our leaders in Washington are quite happy “to pass by on the other side” and let the sequester proceed without so much as a fight. With roughly 16 million people across the country still unemployed, this is surely “a crime against the American people.”
By: David Woolner, The National Memo, March 3, 2013
“When Used For The Right Purpose”: Was Cheney Right That “Deficits Don’t Matter”?
After the Republicans gained control of the US Senate in the 2002 election, giving them across-the-board dominance of the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, the key players in the administration of President George W. Bush gathered to discuss fiscal policy.
Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to cut taxes for the rich.
Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was skeptical. According to his recounting of the incident in Ron Suskind’s brilliant book, The Price of Loyalty, O’Neill expressed concern that a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts had already been enacted. O’Neill was no liberal. He liked tax cuts. But with the country rebuilding from the economic slowdown after the 9/11 attacks, and with a war being fought in Afghanistan and another on the horizon in Iraq, O’Neill noted that the budget deficit was increasing. And he argued against Cheney’s position, suggesting that another tax cut was unnecessary and unwise.
“You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,” said the vice president. “We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.”
O’Neill was, according to Suskind, left speechless.
But Cheney wasn’t done. He and the Bush-Cheney administration that he served as CEO piled up deficits and debts. Indeed, as The New York Times has well noted, “Under Mr. Bush, tax cuts and war spending were the biggest policy drivers of the swing from projected surpluses to deficits from 2002 to 2009. Budget estimates that didn’t foresee the recessions in 2001 and in 2008 and 2009 also contributed to deficits. Mr. Obama’s policies, taken out to 2017, add to deficits, but not by nearly as much.”
Now, a decade later, Cheney’s party is arguing that deficits matter. A lot. House Republicans are so fretful that they are willing to steer the country toward chaos by refusing the compromises that would avert across-the-board sequester cuts. Other Republicans uncomfortable with sequestration are pushing an austerity agenda that’s better organized than the sequester, but potentially even more painful.
So was Cheney right in 2002? Or is he right, now, when he cheers on Republican attacks on Obama’s spending and says, “I worship the ground Paul Ryan walks on”?
The fact is that deficits are relevant.
So are debts.
Nations must treat them seriously.
But nations do not have to fear deficits, any more than Dick Cheney did on that day in the fall of 2002. And in that sense Cheney was right: deficits don’t matter if they are employed for a purpose. Cheney’s purpose—cutting taxes for the rich—was dubious. But stimulating the economy, expanding access to healthcare, funding state and local governments and protecting seniors on Social Security… these are good, and necessary, purposes.
Spending has value, especially when it is needed. As Bob Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future reminds us: “The U.S. has witnessed slow growth since coming out of the Great Recession in 2009. The result has been a deficit that has come down from over 10 percent of gross domestic product to a projected 5.3 percent of GDP this year (slightly higher if Congress is sensible enough to repeal the sequester) and a projected 2.4 percent in 2015 (if congressional austerity bombs don’t blow up the weak recovery).”
For Cheney’s political heirs to claim now that the United States is in crisis, or at a “tipping point,” is absurd. For them to refuse to govern until they get their way, throwing one tantrum after another, is irresponsible. For them to see value in sequester cuts that impose real pain on real people is not just crude, it’s economically senseless—and dangerous to the long-term prospects for economic renewal and growth.
President Obama needs to push back against the deficit fabulists. He does not have to echo Cheney’s glib “deficits don’t matter” talk. But he should explain, as economist Dean Baker does, that the ranting and raving about deficits and debts by groups such as Pete Peterson’s Fix the Debt campaign and its co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is “the great distraction.”
America should be focused on the economic challenges that have slowed our economy, and that have caused our government to run up deficits and debts. We need to be focused on putting people to work and growing the economy, not playing sequester games that result in real job losses and create an equally real threat of recession.
When the Fix the Debt crew gather, as Baker has noted, “many of the people most responsible for the current downturn come together to tell us why we should be worried about the deficit at a time when 25 million people are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work altogether and millions face the prospect of losing their homes.”
Our concern as a country should be with shaping the policies and making the investments that find work for the jobless and create the robust economic growth that creates surpluses. That’s far more vital than the focus on fiscal issues and the deficits that Dick Cheney explained—back when he was in power—“don’t matter.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, March 1, 2013
“Portrait Of A Powerless Man”: The Tracks Of John Boehner’s Tears
Why does John Boehner subject himself to this?
Not for the first time this year, and probably not for the last, the speaker allowed to the floor on Thursday a major piece of legislation that a solid majority of the Republican Conference voted against, that passed mainly on the strength of Democratic votes, and that the Obama White House will now trumpet as a major achievement. The bill at hand was the Violence Against Women Act, which had easily passed the Senate only to meet with fierce resistance from conservatives in the House. In the end, 138 House Republicans went on the record against it, while 87 backed it. Among Democrats, meanwhile, there wasn’t a single “no” vote.
We saw this same dynamic at the start of the year, when the fiscal cliff deal passed with just 85 Republicans voting “yes” – and 151 voting “no.” And we saw it a few weeks after that, when a $50.5 billion Sandy aid package cleared the chamber with only 49 Republicans supporting it, and 179 opposing it.
The common thread in all of these instances is that true-believer conservatives imposed politically toxic positions on the GOP conference and Boehner had embarrassingly little ability to put a stop to the madness. It was only when the power of public outrage, poll numbers and pressure from members in marginal districts grew just strong enough that Boehner had the ability to allow floor votes and resolve the issues without losing his speakership to a coup of angry conservatives.
Really, this has been the story of Boehner’s entire tenure as speaker. In the 112thCongress, Boehner famously negotiated to the brink of a deficit reduction “grand bargain” with President Obama, one that would have exchanged modest revenue increases for serious cuts to safety net programs. But even that was giving away too much in the eyes of the Tea Party crowd, forcing Boehner to walk away from the table. Back then, Boehner could mostly settle for not striking deals with the administration and leaving most issues to fester. In the minds of most Republicans, the lousy economy would knock Obama out of office in 2012 and deliver the Senate to the GOP too, empowering the party to impose a true-believer agenda in 2013.
But then Obama won a resounding reelection victory, Democrats added to their Senate majority, and the GOP lost seats in the House. This has created a new dynamic in the 113thCongress, with an emboldened second-term president more confidently pushing his agenda and ratcheting up public pressure on Republicans to meet him halfway. It’s also helped that Obama has had public opinion on his side, and that in the case of the fiscal cliff, Republicans were facing the prospect of being blamed for automatic across-the-board tax hikes if they failed to compromise. So in this Congress, unlike the last one, there is serious pressure on Boehner, for the overall good of his party, to make some deals.
But he’s hamstrung by the fact that what’s good for the GOP’s overall image isn’t necessarily good politics for individual Republican members. Many of them represent deeply Republican districts, where there’s no such thing as a serious general election challenge. That moves all of the action to the GOP primary, which has two effects: 1) It increases the likelihood that a Tea Party-type will win the seat; 2) it forces Republicans who aren’t truly Tea Party-types to behave like Tea Party-types so that they can win primaries. This pressure exists in non-safe districts too, but there’s a little more tension for these Republican members, who have to worry about potential primary challenges along with the general election. And then there’s Boehner, who is deeply distrusted by the conservative movement, thus forcing him to consider the possibility of a revolt by restive conservatives before making any major decisions.
Thus, the only real option for Boehner is what we keep seeing this year. When there’s a major piece of legislation where public opinion is on the Democrats’ side, Boehner has to wait until enough pressure and outrage has built that a healthy number of Republicans from marginal districts who value their seats and Republicans from safe districts who value having the majority decide it’s in their interests to resolve the issue. Only then can Boehner move the bill to the floor. And even then, the majority of Republicans will feel compelled – either by their genuine ideological views or by fear of a primary challenge – to vote against it.
Which brings us to the sequester that’s now kicking in. This is hardly a surprising development. Obama has made his negotiating position clear: He wants to get rid of it and enact a “balanced” fix that includes entitlement cuts and increased revenue from tax deductions and loopholes. There is absolutely no way that Boehner could sell anything along these lines to his conference right now. Conservatives in the House and across the country are still smarting from the fiscal cliff deal, so anything involving more revenue – even if it’s not actually from tax rate increases – is a non-starter. For now.
But what happens as the sequester is implemented and Americans begin to see the impact? And as the defense industry, which still has real clout within the GOP, even if it’s not nearly as much as it once did, begins to feel the impact? And what happens as the prospect of an ever worse situation – a government shutdown triggered by the March 27 expiration of the continuing resolution that now funds the government – approaches? What if polls show voters breaking hard against the GOP?
That’s the kind of political toxicity that Boehner needs to sell any kind of a deal to his fellow Republicans – one that would give some ground on revenue, incur the wrath of the right, pass mainly with Democratic votes and (ideally for Boehner) allow the speaker to hold onto his title. In fact, as best anyone can tell, this basically is Boehner’s strategy right now. As Politico reported earlier this week, he seems to be “aiming for a hefty dose of spending cuts and reforms like a change to calculating government benefits called chained CPI and closing a few tax loopholes.”
Chained CPI or some other serious cut to the safety net could prompt anger on the left that could complicate the new Boehner strategy of passing big bills with Democratic support. But that’s not his worry right now. For whatever reason, he likes being speaker, even though he’s an unusually powerless one, and he wants to keep the job. So he’ll take the sequester and wait.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, March 1, 2013
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