“Driving While Impaired”: After Falling In Sequester Ditch, GOPers Look For Way Out
Remember the Republicans’ debt-ceiling crisis in 2011? It was about a year and a half ago when GOP leaders handed President Obama a ransom note: accept more than $2 trillion in debt reduction or the economy gets it. The parties agreed to more than $1 trillion in cuts, but agreed they needed more time to work on a larger agreement.
So, they crafted a mechanism intended to force both sides to the negotiating table — a sword of Damocles hanging over Washington’s head that would be so severe, Democrats and Republicans would have a strong incentive to strike a deal to avoid the drastic consequences.
The mechanism was automatic sequestration cuts — or “the sequester” — valued at about $1.2 trillion, half of which would come from the Pentagon. (Democrats originally wanted automatic tax hikes to motivate the GOP, but Republicans refused — even hypothetical tax increases were deemed outrageous — and deep Defense cuts were used instead.)
These cuts kick in three weeks from today, and so far, the two sides aren’t close. Democrats want a balanced deal the GOP should find tolerable — spending cuts on one side of the ledger, revenue from closed tax loopholes on the other. Republicans, meanwhile, say they’re prepared to simply let the sequester happen, regardless of the consequences to the economy, the military, or the public.
At least, that’s what they say publicly. Behind the scenes, the GOP strategy is on shaky ground.
One thing is becoming clear: Republicans want to find a way to replace the cuts in the sequester, despite some loud rhetoric to the contrary.
Top House Republican aides privately concede that the politics of allowing the cuts to hit — layoffs, furloughs and a stalled economic recovery — are tough to stomach and they would prefer to make a deal, on their terms of course. […]
A top GOP leadership aide, speaking anonymously to divulge internal thinking, laid out 10 options that the House GOP leadership would be willing to accept, along with savings estimates developed by GOP policy aides, in order to avoid the sequester.
So, the good news is, Republicans are not actively seeking a course that would hurt the country on purpose. The bad news is, they’re still struggling with the whole “compromise” concept.
To date, with just 21 days to go, Republicans leaders have offered nothing — there is no sequester alternative on the table, and in this Congress, no bills to replace the sequester have even been written. There are reportedly 10 different scenarios Republican leaders would be willing to consider, but all 10 are made up entirely of deep spending cuts and would not include so much as a penny in additional revenue.
In other words, Republicans want to replace sequestration with a package that gives them 100% of what they want and 0% of what Democrats want.
This after a national campaign in which Democrats voiced support for a balanced approach, and the American electorate strongly agreed.
It’s nice, I suppose, that there are so many Republican-friendly options to choose from — the menu includes everything from raising the Medicare eligibility age to chained CPI, cutting federal pensions to cutting agricultural subsidies — but so long as GOP officials expect a 100%/0% deal, the likelihood of a breakthrough is remote.
That said, with three weeks to go, I expect some movement away from the intransigent status quo. Put aside the rhetoric and the posturing and we’re left with a picture in which Democrats and Republicans actually have the same goal: to get rid of the sequester. The GOP doesn’t want to admit it, but a bipartisan deal, featuring a combination of spending cuts and revenue from closed tax loopholes and unnecessary deductions could come together with relative ease.
What’s more, if the automatic sequestration cuts happen, and the economy tanks, Republicans probably realize this will be their fault and they’ll likely get the blame. It’s why Josh Green wrote late yesterday that a “Republican crackup over the sequester” almost seems inevitable.
As the process unfolds, I’d like to take a moment to throw in my own suggestion: get rid of the sequester. Don’t try to replace it, don’t struggle to find some satisfying ratio that pleases both sides, don’t delay it for a few months, just cancel it. The deficit is already shrinking, spending has already been cut, and if policymakers want to do even more to improve the nation’s long-term finances, they can work on a deal without some dangerous threat hanging over their heads.
Sequestration was a bad idea. There’s no reason both sides can’t agree to get rid of the darn thing and start fighting over something else.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 7, 2013
“Its Time To Reboot”: Ronald Reagan Is The GOP’s Problem, Not Its Solution
So the Republican Party’s going through some soul searching. And after the results of the 2012 elections that seems like a sensible thing to do.
But so far most of the changes contemplated tend toward the cosmetic—we have to change our “tone,” they say, or the “face” of the party. And that’s all well and good. But one is left to wonder: Is there something going on here that requires plumbing a little deeper into the Republican depths?
I think the answer is yes.
Come back with me to 1981. It’s Ronald Reagan’s inaugural, a shining moment for conservatives and the GOP, punctuated by his famous quotation: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Those words were the apotheosis of a conservative line of argument championed by the likes of William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk for over 30 years. And here was a president not attacking this government program or that one, but instead indicting government as a whole. How satisfying that must have been for those who had long railed against programs like the New Deal and the Great Society.
Not surprisingly, Reagan’s creed became a rallying cry for conservatives and over the past three decades it has remained ever thus. It’s a great slogan that immediately communicates a distinctive set of values, and in that respect, in many cases, it has served the GOP well. But as an organizing principle for electoral success? Well, that’s a little more complicated.
For the GOP’s traditional base—the wealthy—it’s a terrific message. If you have sufficient wealth, you don’t have much need for the domestic programs you see your taxes going to fund, and maybe it offends you to see your money being redistributed by the government to folks less well off than you. If that’s the case, you might prefer a federal government that does less and, as a result, costs less, leaving more of the money you earn in your pocket. In other words, for you, government really is the problem: it diminishes the amount of money you can spend on the things you want, and it does so without offering you something that you regard as an offsetting benefit.
If the number of people who don’t need domestic programs were large enough the GOP would need go no further than Reagan’s creed to win elections. But it isn’t.
Recognizing this, clever Republicans take a step back from the broad sweep of Reaganism and instead try taking it to a more tactical scale, identifying a particular demographic group whose taxes can be said to be paying for a program that benefits someone else. By saying to Group A you are paying for the benefits of Group B some try to mine a latent vein of resentment without threatening government programs that benefit a broader swath of the electorate. See: Reagan appealing to blue color whites by talking about welfare.
Finding the sweet spot between Reagan maximized and Reagan targeted is often the key to Republican electoral prospects, as no less than Reagan himself found out. Early in his first term he managed to push through broad spending cuts. But as people learned the impact those cuts were actually having (remember ketchup as vegetable?) momentum waned. And that’s the thing: take Reagan too far, and your spending cuts start hacking away at programs that people have come to rely on. Think school lunches. Student loans. Social Security. You see, sometimes government is the solution, no matter how much conservatives don’t want to believe it.
Today, the Republican caucus seems fractured between true believers looking to cut anything that moves, and more traditional Republicans who speak Reagan boldly, but apply him more cautiously. And while the radicals have had some well-publicized victories, the long-term health of the party seems dependent upon the veterans’ ability to retake the agenda. One suspects that that is how this play will eventually unfold.
But I’d like to suggest something a little different. There’s an honorable role to be played by a party that holds government expenditure to a rigorous standard. To be sure, for every government program that works there are any number that don’t. Fashioning a government that is narrowly tailored to the problems its constituents face, and that moves efficiently to address them (whether through a program or the absence of one) ought to be everyone’s goal.
Just imagine how constructive a Republican party able to have a rational discussion about the role of government in our lives could be, a party able to contemplate not only the costs but also the benefits of government, and one that offered a principled view about how to distinguish between the two. That would be quite something. And it would offer an extraordinary service to this country.
But for that to happen, something pretty fundamental has to change. There must be a recognition that for all he did for the Republican cause, in this present crisis Ronald Reagan isn’t the solution to your problem; Ronald Reagan is the problem. And its time to reboot.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, February 1, 2013
“The Urgency Of Growth”: Congressional Doom-Mongers Need To End Their Campaign Of Government By Deadline And Emergency
If you care about deficits, you should want our economy to grow faster. If you care about lifting up the poor and reducing unemployment, you should want our economy to grow faster. And if you are a committed capitalist and hope to make more money, you should want our economy to grow faster.
The moment’s highest priority should be speeding economic growth and ending the waste, human and economic, left by the Great Recession. But you would never know this because the conversation in our nation’s capital is being held hostage by a ludicrous cycle of phony fiscal deadlines driven by a misplaced belief that the only thing we have to fear is the budget deficit.
Let’s call a halt to this madness. If we don’t move the economy to a better place, none of the fiscal projections will matter. The economic downturn ballooned the deficit. Growth will move the numbers in the right direction.
Moreover, the whole point of an economy is to provide everyone with real opportunities for gainful employment and economic advance — the generational “relay” that San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro affectingly described at last year’s Democratic convention. When we talk only about deficits, we take our eyes off the prize.
But there is good news. Gradually, establishment thinking is moving toward a new consensus that puts growth first and looks for deficit reduction over time. In the last few months, middle-of-the-road and moderately conservative voices have warned that if we cut the deficit too quickly, too soon, we could throw ourselves back into the economic doldrums — and increase the very deficit we are trying to reduce.
Here, for example, is excellent advice from the deservedly respected (and thoroughly pro-market) economic columnist Martin Wolf, offered last week in the Financial Times: “The federal government is not on the verge of bankruptcy. If anything, the tightening has been too much and too fast. The fiscal position is also not the most urgent economic challenge. It is far more important to promote recovery. The challenges in the longer term are to raise revenue while curbing the cost of health. Meanwhile, people, just calm down.”
“Calm down” is exactly what we need to do. We have been inundated with apocalyptic prophecies about our debt levels. While they come from the center as well as the right, Republicans are using them to turn the next two years into a carnival of contrived crises. These will (1) make normal governing impossible — no agency can plan when budgets are always up in the air; (2) distract us — we need to think about measures, such as an infrastructure bank, that would promote prosperity now and into the future; and (3) drive business people crazy — no enterprise would put itself through the contortions that are becoming part of Washington’s routine.
Only if you believe that deficits mean the end is near can any of this be justified. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, perfectly encapsulated the effort to diminish the importance of all else (including growth) when he declared recently that “deficit and debt” constitute the “transcendent issue of our era.”
No, it’s not. As Bruce Bartlett, the bravely dissident conservative economics specialist wrote a few days ago: “In fact, our long-term deficit situation is not nearly as severe as even many budget experts believe. The problem is that they are looking at recent history and near-term projections that are overly impacted by one-time factors related to the economic crisis and massive Republican tax cuts that lowered revenues far below normal.”
Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers warned in The Post that we can’t “lose sight of the jobs and growth deficits that ultimately will have the greatest impact on how this generation of Americans lives and what they bequeath to the next generation.” And economists at the International Monetary Fund have offered some honorable mea culpas about underestimating the damage that ill-timed austerity programs have done to growth — and to the fiscal positions of the nations affected by them.
You have to hope that President Obama will use his State of the Union message to speak forcefully for growth and the public investments that will foster it. But sensible people also need to rise up and tell the congressional doom-mongers that they have to calm down and end their wholly destructive campaign to turn our great system of self-rule into a government by deadline and emergency.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 27, 2013
“Let’s Compromise, Do It My Way!”: The Republican Fever Has Not Yet Broken
I am grateful for some of the signs emanating from the Right yesterday indicating a willingness to accept the 2012 election results, and/or to stop treating the president of the United States as though he’s some sort of alien usurper of power. But let’s don’t get carried away in suggesting “the fever”–as the president referred to Republican radicalism and obstructionism during the campaign–has indeed broken.
Consider the headlines about Eric Cantor’s effusive expressions of good will and bipartisanship yesterday: “Cantor: Time for Washington to ‘Set Aside” Differences” is how CBS put it. Sounds good. But what, exactly, was Cantor talking about?
House Republicans announced last week their decision to hold a vote to raise the debt ceiling, potentially averting a contentious debate many expected to go down to the wire this February. Cantor said today House Republicans are committed to working on passing a federal budget “so we can begin to see how we’re going to pay off this debt; how we’re going to spend other people’s money, the taxpayers’ money; and begin an earnest discussion about the real issues facing this country.”
“I think times demand as much,” he said. “It’s time that Washington get with it, and that is why I believe, hopefully, the Senate can see clear to doing a budget, putting a spending plan out there for the world to see… So we can begin to unite around the things that bring us together, set aside the differences, and get some results.”
Do you see any change of position here, other than the already-decided House GOP decision to not to stake everything on a debt limit hostage-taking exercise at the end of February? Best way I know to translate what Cantor is saying is: “Let’s see how much agreement we can get on the elements of our agenda,” which are entirely about domestic spending, not defense spending or revenues, and involve direct benefit cuts, not ways to rein in health care costs.
Yes, it’s a good thing that for whatever reason congressional Republicans have decided not to blow up the U.S. economy if they don’t get their way in fiscal negotiations. But for the moment, their way or the highway still seem to be the only options they comprehend.
By; Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 22, 2013
“A Wonderful Experiment”: Before Default, Let Republicans Bump Up Hard Against The Debt Ceiling
A prolonged confrontation over the nation’s debt ceiling — unlike the “fiscal cliff,” which provoked many scary headlines – could truly be grave for both America and the world. While press coverage often mentions the possibility of lowered credit ratings for the US Treasury (again), that might only be the mildest consequence if Republicans in Congress actually refuse to authorize borrowing and avoid default.
Last time the nation prepared to face such an impasse, during the spring and summer of 2011, the chairman of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee – a JPMorgan Chase official named Matthew Zames – laid out a disturbing scenario in a letter to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, in which he foresaw a rolling catastrophe that could inflict hundreds of billions in additional borrowing costs; spark a run on money funds, leading to a renewed financial crisis; severely disrupt financial markets and borrowing, killing fragile economic growth; and push the economy back into recession due to higher interest rates and tightened credit.
In short, the economy would contract sharply and the U.S. – along with the rest of the world – might well be plunged back into negative growth. If that was true in July 2011, it is equally true today, and there is no reason to dismiss that warning.
But the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill insists that they are willing to take these mind-boggling risks, solely for the purpose of enforcing an extreme austerity regime that has already done permanent damage in much of Europe. Between the “Boehner rule” demanded by House Speaker John Boehner, which requires a dollar in new spending cuts for every dollar increase in the debt ceiling, and the House Republican budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan, congressional Republicans evidently want not only to gut Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, but to “eliminate more and more of the basic functions of government over time,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. No education aid, no food safety inspections, no environmental protection, no infrastructure repairs, no cancer research…
From immediate economic jeopardy to long-term national decline, these prospects are obviously appalling – yet many Republican elected officials sound positively pleased about the debt ceiling crisis they have created. Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, told a right-wing radio host recently that a government default would actually be a “wonderful experiment.” He assured listeners, quite falsely, that their Medicare and Social Security checks would continue to arrive every month, no matter what, and that only “stupid” spending would be cut.
If Coburn – or any Republican senator – is so eager to test the debt ceiling, perhaps he should volunteer to bump up against it first. As the Tulsa World reported in 2011, federal spending in Oklahoma amounts to three times as much as the entire state budget, with Social Security alone accounting for almost a billion dollars a month there, and Medicaid and other medical assistance amounting to another $500 million-plus. Coburn’s ultra-conservative, deep-red home state is highly dependent on federal employment and assistance, ranking 12th in retirement and disability payments and 11th in per capita federal payroll, despite its small size.
So by all means, let’s find out, as Coburn suggested, whether we can live “on the money that’s coming into the Treasury” without borrowing to finance those monthly pension checks and all those stupid federal jobs — and let’s start in Oklahoma, tomorrow. Then let’s roll out the same experiment in every state whose senators and representatives are refusing to pay the bills they have already racked up over the years – especially states, like most of those below the Mason-Dixon line, where federal spending is far higher than the tax revenues remitted to Washington.
Surely that would silence all the loud talk about this “wonderful” experiment in fiscal brinksmanship.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, January 16, 2013
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