“Dire Consequences And Denial”: With Their Jobs Secure, Republicans Could Less About The Rest Of America
The sequester’s automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are set to go into effect on Friday, and there is no plan as yet to stop it.
America, this is your feeble government at its most ineffective and self-destructive.
The White House favors a balanced plan that would include spending cuts and some tax increases for the wealthy. Republicans reject any solution that includes tax increases.
These are two fundamentally different perspectives, only one of which is supported by a majority of Americans.
A Pew Research Center/USA Today survey released Thursday found that only 19 percent of Americans believe that the focus of deficit reduction should be only on spending cuts. Seventy-six percent want a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, with more emphasis on the former than the latter.
But the impasse could have dire consequences. A study last year by Stephen S. Fuller, a professor at George Mason University, estimates that the sequester could cost 2.14 million jobs and add 1.5 percentage points to the unemployment rate. Fuller’s analysis was cited in a Congressional Research Service report prepared for members of Congress.
What’s more, the sequester would reduce military spending by $42.7 billion; nonmilitary discretionary spending would drop $28.7 billion, in addition to a mandatory $9.9 billion reduction in Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In anticipation of the very real possibility that the sequester could come to pass, some Republicans are leaning on the shoulder of an old friend: denial.
This week on CNN, Senator Rand Paul pronounced the $85 billion in mandated cuts a “pittance” and a “yawn” that is “just really nibbling at the edges.” He also called President Obama’s warnings about the sequester’s impact “histrionics,” “ridiculousness” and “emotionalism.”
What a perfect segue to Rush Limbaugh, who took to the air this week to denounce predictions about the sequester’s effects as a “manufactured” crisis, saying that “for the first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country.”
Limbaugh continued:
“In truth, we’re gonna spend more this year than we spent last year. We’re just not gonna spend as much as was projected. It’s all baseline budgeting. There is no real cut below a baseline of zero. There just isn’t. Yet here they come, sucking us in, roping us in. Panic here, fear there: Crisis, destruction, no meat inspection, no cops, no teachers, no firefighters, no air traffic control. I’m sorry, my days of getting roped into all this are over.”
Those not denying the crisis are hoping to exploit it.
Karl Rove, writing in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, called the president “a once-in-a-generation demagogue with a compliant press corps” who will subject the American people in the short term to a “slew of presidential photo-ops with those whom he claims will lose jobs.” Mr. Rove advised House Republicans to “pass a continuing resolution next week to fund the government for the balance of the fiscal year at the lower level dictated by the sequester — with language granting the executive branch the flexibility to move funds from less vital activities to more important ones.”
Rove supports the steep cuts but wants to allow the president “flexibility” in applying them. That Rove is as slick as an eel. In other words, he wants to force the president to rob Peter to pay Paul and take the flak for making all the tough choices.
Another Pew Research Poll released this week found that although many Americans favor cutting government spending in the abstract, most don’t agree with cuts to specific programs. “For 18 of 19 programs tested, majorities want either to increase spending or maintain it at current levels,” Pew found. “The only exception is assistance for needy people around the world.”
Ah, foreign aid, the tired old whipping horse that would do virtually nothing to reduce the deficit, as it accounts for a paltry 1 percent of the federal budget.
Rove’s plan to shift to the president the burden of choosing where to bring down the ax is Rove’s way of getting Republicans “to win public opinion to their side.” That is a roundabout way of acknowledging that right now they’re losing. A Bloomberg poll released this week found the president’s job-approval rating at its highest level and the Republican Party’s favorable rating at its lowest since September 2009.
Furthermore, the Pew/USA Today survey found that if a deal isn’t reached in time, about half the public will blame Congressional Republicans while fewer than a third will blame the president.
And if the sequester happens, we’ll all lose. It will be a disaster for the job market and the economy. But no one can accuse these politicians and pundits of caring about such things as long as their own jobs are secure.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 22, 2013
“Same Old Talking Points”: Republicans Are Committing Political Malpractice
Republican voters must be steaming mad.
But they don’t seem to show it despite the political malpractice of their party leaders over the last several years.
Republicans bet everything to defeat President Obama’s health care reform plan — without ever offering a real alternative or working with Democrats to find common ground. Then they doubled-down on hopes the Supreme Court would overturn the law. They doubled-down again believing that voters would deny President Obama re-election and they could repeal the law. They lost every time. Now, the country will live under a health care law — for probably a generation or more — that could have been based on many Republican ideas had they simply negotiated.
The GOP is doing the same thing with the budget sequester fast approaching on March 1. President Obama wants additional tax revenues by closing loopholes in the tax code as part of a plan to avoid the across-the-board spending cuts. He’s also promised significant cuts — including to both Social Security and Medicare — in return. But Republicans on Capitol Hill aren’t interested. They could likely win more spending cuts than they would have to concede in new tax revenues if they negotiated. Instead, they dig in.
The GOP’s stance is especially maddening since just two months ago they were willing to raise tax revenues by closing loopholes during the “fiscal cliff” debate. Now every Republican leader speaks from the same talking points saying additional tax revenues are “off the table.” As a result, the country will get fewer but more damaging spending cuts via the sequester.
Common sense would suggest Republican voters would rise up against their party leaders for failing so dismally to advance their party’s stated goals. Their silence is deafening.
By: Taegan Goddard, The Cloakroom with Taegan Goddard, The Week, February 19, 2013
“Weather Vane Man”: Tracking Paul Ryan’s 5 Different Positions On The Sequester
House Republicans are attempting to blame Democrats and President Obama for “sequestration,” the automatic budget cuts that will begin taking effect on March 1 if Congress fails to avert them. But even as they cast that blame and ignore their own role in creation of the sequester, which wouldn’t exist had Republicans not refused to raise the debt ceiling in August 2011, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) is expected to count the sequester’s automatic cuts in the next version of his budget, BuzzFeed reports:
According to two senior GOP aides familiar with Ryan’s thinking on the budget, the Wisconsin Republican and former vice presidential candidate will use the so-called sequester as part of the baseline level of spending for his budget.
Ryan’s position on the sequester has changed multiple times:
1. Helped make the sequester happen. Ryan was among the Republicans leading demands for spending cuts to offset a debt ceiling increase in the summer of 2011, and was among the leaders who refused to consider new revenues in those negotiations. Had Republicans not refused to raise the debt ceiling in the first place, the sequester wouldn’t exist.
2. Voted for plan to create the sequester, then bragged about it. Ryan took credit for the sequester in August 2011, bragging to Fox News that it guaranteed the massive budget cuts Republicans were seeking. “We got that in law,” he boasted. On the House floor, he said the Budget Control Act’s spending cuts were “a victory for those committed to controlling government spending.”
3. Called the sequester “devastating” during the presidential election. Ryan blasted Obama for wanting the sequester’s “devastating defense cuts” to take place during the presidential election, when he was the GOP’s vice presidential candidate.
4. Blamed the likelihood of the sequester occurring on Obama. The sequester “will probably occur” because “the president has not a proposal yet on the table,” Ryan told CBS News last week. “Don’t forget it’s the president who first proposed the sequester. It’s the president who designed the sequester as it is now designed,” he added.
5. Will include sequester cuts in his latest budget.
This is hardly a new strategy for Ryan, who crisscrossed the country blasting Obama for cutting Medicare spending even as he included the cuts in his last budget proposal and made even bigger changes to the program.
By: Travis Waldron, Think Progress, February 15, 2013
“Willfull Ignorance”: Short-term Memory Loss Grips Republicans In Washington
ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos devoted a good chuck of “This Week” to discussed automatic sequestration cuts yesterday, and asked Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) for his prediction. The Republican congressman said President Obama came up with the sequester — a claim that simply isn’t true — before saying his caucus is “prepared to negotiate on redistributing the cuts.”
It led to this exchange:
STEPHANOPOULOS: And you’re saying all cuts. Republicans are accepting absolutely no revenues?
COLE: No. Look, absolutely none. The president’s accepted no spending cuts back in the fiscal cliff deal 45 days ago, so you get all — no spending cuts back then. Then you’re going to get no revenue now.
Around the same time, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who appears to spend more time on Sunday shows than in the Senate, said he’s open to some revenues as a way to replace the sequester, but added, “[W]e have raised taxes. Why do we have to raise taxes again?”
Of course, by that logic, there’s no reason not to ask, “We have cut spending. Why do we have to cut spending again?”
It’s troubling that Republican policymakers have such short memories, and seem to have no idea what policies they voted for as recently as 2011. It’s one of the more breathtaking examples of willful ignorance in recent memory.
But if we assume that lawmakers like Cole and McCain are sincere, and they literally can’t remember the basics of recent budget policy, then it’s probably worthwhile to set the record straight.
In 2011, Democrats and Republicans agreed to between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, depending on how one tallies the numbers. The cuts included no new revenue.
In 2012, Democrats and Republicans agreed to a deal that raised revenue by about $650 billion. The new revenue included no new cuts.
In 2013, Republicans are saying they remember what happened in 2012, but the 2011 policy has been blocked from memory.
This is crazy. Folks like Cole and McCain keep saying the 2012 deal didn’t include spending cuts, so the sequester has to be 100% in the GOP’s favor now, without exception. Why? Because Republicans haven’t gotten spending cuts.
Except they already did get spending cuts. Indeed, the cuts from 2011 were twice as big as the revenue from 2012.
Even if the parties agreed to an entirely balanced agreement this month to replace the sequester — roughly $600 billion in revenue and $600 billion in cuts — Republicans would still be getting the much better end of the deal. The total for the entire package, negotiated in parts over the course of two years, would be over $4 trillion in debt reduction — with a cuts-to-revenue ration of about six to one.
For that matter, Obama isn’t calling for “tax increases”; he’s calling for new revenue through closed tax loopholes and ending certain tax deductions. As recently as last month, Republican leaders said such a policy doesn’t count as a “tax increase,” though it’s suddenly become outrageous now that the president agrees.
This really isn’t that complicated. Either Republicans have a child’s understanding of fiscal policy, the memory capacity of a goldfish, or they think Americans are fools. At this point, I’m no longer sure which, though I’m open to suggestion.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 11, 2013
“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
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