First, some revisions to the mission statement of this series. As a relatively attentive, firmly right-of-center, yet critical constituent, I offer this “customer feedback” to a fictional GOP leader curious to know whether and how one constituent received the week’s political messaging. The light analysis is offered to convey those impressions gleaned from a casual political diet of mostly talk radio (Hugh Hewitt via podcasts), news radio (NPR, live and via podcasts), an RSS stream of a few dozen sources (including NRO, Reason, Sullivan, Drum, Powerline, Volokh, Ezra Klein, The Fix, City Journal, New Geography, and lots of smaller blogs), and occasionally following a similarly eclectic Twitter stream. The analysis is specifically not offered as fully researched analysis per se. (But feel free to engage, of course.) They’re mostly uninterrogated first impressions.
The basic idea is that the major political issues of the day ought to be digestible by, at the very least, an educated political observer with a day job. And it is in the spirit of Federalist 62, where James Madison remarked: “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?” The GOP leadership has to educate that sort of person—not conservative pundits and talk show hosts—what they’re up to. If you didn’t convince me you’ve got a righteous position, you’re most certainly not reaching any of the unconverted.
I may also talk about other items from my news feed in the past week not directly related to GOP politics, particularly on slow political weeks like this one.
On with the feedback:
The “Fiscal Cliff”
Relatively quiet on this front this last week due to the holidays. Things started back up again yesterday apparently. Speaker Boehner is convening a meeting with House Republicans Sunday night, I hear, a rare event that suggests the President has given him some reason to think there’ll be something to talk about.
Before I go further, let me take stock. I don’t understand clearly what the GOP is fighting for. If I had to say the first thing that popped into my head, it’d be that the GOP is trying to keep the tax on millionaires from going up. I understand that’s not really it, that they’d be ok with increasing those revenues if they got some “serious” and “meaningful” and “nonfictional” spending cuts. And they don’t believe the Democrats when they say trust us, we’ll identify the cuts later. I read, I think Drum or Klein, this week or last saying that, historically, that approach has worked just fine: Dems propose an amorphous amount of cuts, and they usually do make them when the time comes. But I’m keeping the Regular Joe cap on for now, and I can’t really put in clear terms what the GOP’s goal is here any better than I could put in clear terms what the GOP’s “Replace” plan was in the “Repeal and Replace Obamacare” message.
GOP, you’re not giving me much reason to cheer you on here.
On NPR yesterday, Senior Washington Editor Ron Elving gave a city bus tour of some of the issues at play. I usually don’t jump on the “NPR is a front for the DNC!” bandwagon, but the tilt seemed pretty clear. Granted, I’ve been complaining about the GOP’s messaging, so if you’re painting their picture I can’t fault you for picking up the ugly brush. But Elving discussed the history of the “debt ceiling” dating back to WWI, that it’s been raised “scores of times” and has “just kept going up” without incident—without ever a whisper of concern, from the sound of it. (Is he right?) Raising it should have been just a fait accompli, Elving seems to suggest. But then, Elving goes on, “just in 2011 the newly elected Republican majority in the House dug their heels in and said, you know what, we’re not going to pass that, and we don’t really worry whether or not we’re going to default on the obligations, the debts, the bonds of the United States government because, well, because we just don’t think that’s going to happen.”
But wasn’t that right about the time debt surpassed GDP, an unprecedented, worrisome, and newsworthy event? Even if raising the debt ceiling was heretofore commonplace, spending has not been trending with historical levels. And the “newly elected Republican majority” got there ostensibly because of that, among other things. To suggest they just decided, as if on a lark, to “dig their heels in” seems wrong under the circumstances.
That’s one of several unfair attacks I heard on the Republicans this week. As if they weren’t doing themselves enough damage.
Last Friday, Larry Arnn offered House Republicans this very sound Constitutional advice on Hugh Hewitt’s show:
What the Republicans should do right now, by the way, is they should drive the system back toward its constitutional operation. The government doesn’t work so that the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate and the President can have long discussions and decide what to do. It works instead by the two houses both passing the bill. And so the Republicans have passed a bill. They might very well have stuck with the one they passed and said, look, now it’s time for the Senate to pass a bill, and if they won’t pass a bill, it’s their fault. And they should stick to that.
Now if the Senate passes a contrary bill, that happens all the time, and then they have what’s called a conference committee, and the conference committee is made up of people from both houses, and they follow rules, and the rules are: step one, take everything that’s in both bills; step two, take whatever else you need that’s in between the two bills to achieve the purpose of the two bills—nothing from outside the parameters of the two bills. Now by the way, that happens every week in the American Congress, and that is the solution to this problem.
And one of the reasons the Republicans have trouble is that they forget that they should just stand on that. And Boehner should say, “look, it’s no use for me talking with the President—I mean, I’m happy to talk to him any time, but we’ve passed a bill, it’s time for the Senate to pass a bill. And then when they pass a bill we’ll have a conference and it’ll be a compromise, and both houses will pass it and then this will be over.”
That seems just right to me, and it turns out that’s just what Republicans did. Eventually. Using their indoor voices. As if they didn’t want anyone to know about it. I didn’t hear about it, even though I was waiting for it, until I dug it up in this piece on Huffington Post trying to learn about the House bill that Arnn talked about (link provided from my RSS feed—I won’t go to HuffPo’s website because of the obnoxious videos that autoplay three yards downpage):
“These bills await action by the Senate. And as I, Eric, Kevin and Cathy said yesterday in a joint statement: if the Senate will not approve these bills and send them to the president to be signed into law in their current form, they must be amended and returned to the House,” Boehner said on the call. “Once this has occurred, the House will then consider whether to accept the bills as amended, or to send them back to the Senate with additional amendments. The House will take this action on whatever the Senate can pass –- but the Senate must act.”
Why wouldn’t this be the first option if you’re the Speaker? Why even attempt a private session deal with a recently re-elected president? He’s supposed to be a post-private-sessions president anyway. Why keep participating in these private sessions? And then why only do you get around to the whole constitutional, bicameralism thing in the quietest week of the year? This might have given you some procedural cover had you done it a month ago. Now it’s probably too late.
In the meantime, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid charged that Speaker Boehner was running the House as a “dictatorship.” (Politico riffed with a “Lord of the Flies” reference.) A “dictator” would have gotten Plan B passed. A “dictator” would not be on the brink of getting blamed for a “fiscal cliff” with nothing to show for it. I imagine Reid knows that Boehner can’t come out and say “Reid calls me a dictator, but he couldn’t be further from the truth: Everyone knows I’ve completely lost control of my caucus!” But Reid understands how to message this. Craven though it is.
One final thought on this, resurrected from the comments of last week’s Customer Feedback: If Republicans are “posturing” here, which Republicans are doing more “posturing”? Establishment Republicans like Boehner? Or Tea Party Republicans? I think the former just wants to get a deal done; they’ll try to make Democrats look like wastrels when in recent memory Republicans have not been much better. The Tea Party folks, on the other hand, seem to really care about getting spending/revenues in line, even if they’re a bit tunnel-visioned about it. They’re not “posturing”—they don’t care about perceptions as much as their principles, for better or worse. They blocked earmarks in 2011 and, more importantly, established the Office of Congressional Ethics, “the only independent watchdog ensuring that members live up to the ethical rules,” which wouldn’t exist if the Tea Party didn’t insist upon it, according to Larry Lessig. (I recently read that many of the insider trading-esque loopholes catalogued in Peter Schweizer’s 2010 book Throw Them All Out were closed after that book’s publication. Anyone know whether this was done through the OCE?)
So, Establishment Republicans are craven and have no principles. Tea party Republicans are dangerous in their unyielding fidelity to principles. That meme gets Republicans coming and going.
The Gun Control Debate
The left really hates Megan McArdle. The flap over David Gregory’s banned magazine and the pending police investigation is obviously just political theater. Do any pro-gun folks think it’s effective? It’s just not my taste. [Ok, Mark Steyn’s column this weekend is pretty good.]
So while the usual suspects throw rocks at each other, The Volokh Conspiracy takes the direct route, continuing to offer the best discussion on gun control over the past couple weeks. Eugene Volokh concludes that the answer to the haunting question “so what are we going to do about it?” is, in the end, to very thoughtfully, and very sincerely, do nothing. Or, at least as much as we do about drunk driving deaths. I have to agree. Whatever the causes are, they are subtle and indirect and will be little assuaged by blunt legislative measures. “[W]e should not presume that there’s somehow a moral imperative to Do Something. In fact, there’s a moral imperative not to do something that’s likely to make matters worse.”
Prison Reform
NPR’s Talk of the Nation hosted a wonderful discussion on how some states—including Ohio, led by Republican state senator Bill Seitz—are getting “smart on crime” by reintroducing more rehabilitation measures. Do I ever agree. GOP leaders, take note: This is an issue that will win you points with voters who are tired of “young-white-men’s” economic philosophy and “old-white-men’s” social philosophy.
Right to Work
Forbes published a list of the “best states for business” drawing a correlation between business-friendly states and right-to-work states. Government gives favors to big business and big labor, and I don’t know that the balance is so out of whack in labor’s favor that it warrants a culture war. Private sector unions have been worn way down over the past couple of decades anyway. I typically take a pass unless we’re talking about public sector unions.
But no, Right to Work is not unlibertarian. Hayek said it best, in The Constitution of Liberty:
It would not be a valid objection to maintain that any legislation making certain types of contracts invalid would be contrary to the principle of freedom of contract. We have seen before (in chap. 15) that this principle can never mean that all contracts will be legally binding and enforceable. It means merely that all contracts must be judged according to the same general rules and that no authority should be given discretionary power to allow or disallow particular contracts. Among the contracts to which the law ought to deny validity are contracts in restraint of trade. Closed-and union-shop contracts fall clearly into this category. If legislation, jurisdiction, and the tolerance of executive agencies had not created privileges for the unions, the need for special legislation concerning them would probably not have arisen in common-law countries. That there is such a need is a matter for regret, and the believer in liberty will regard any legislation of this kind with misgivings. But, once special privileges have become part of the law of the land, they can be removed only by special legislation. Though there ought to be no need for special “right-to-work laws,” it is difficult to deny that the situation created in the United States by legislation and by the decisions of the Supreme Court may make special legislation the only practicable way of restoring the principles of freedom.
Flotsam
Over at New Geography, Joel Kotkin points out that the belated “emerging Democratic majority” might not be as viable as Democrats hope—particularly if the GOP can remediate some of its perennial stupidity. Democrats’ pickups—particularly millennials and Hispanics—may not be long for the party, demographically speaking. When Ruy Texeira dreamed of an “emerging Democratic majority,” he may have had Democrats like Truman, Pat Brown, or even Clinton in mind, who would get behind the natural gas revolution to bolster blue collar jobs; encourage more detached housing and dispersal of work rather than small, cramped, urban living; and focus like a laser on taxing Wall Street income rather than lumping Main Street in with it. As McArdle puts it: “Yes, some people don’t work very hard to earn their money, or earn it in ways that seem illegitimate. But the solution is to change the law so that it’s harder to earn money in illegitimate ways, not to take the majority of their money in taxes–and the majority of the money of other people who work quite hard indeed.”
Or as Clayton Christensen points out, via Reihan Salam, industry overinvests in “efficiency” innovation (short term investments) and underinvests in “empowering” innovation (long-term investments); thus, lawmakers should change the way we tax capital gains by reducing the tax burden for longer-term investments:
We should instead make capital gains regressive over time, based upon how long the capital is invested in a company. Taxes on short-term investments should continue to be taxed at personal income rates. But the rate should be reduced the longer the investment is held — so that, for example, tax rates on investments held for five years might be zero — and rates on investments held for eight years might be negative.
(To my dear fictional GOP leader, this is another issue that will win credibility and voters to your party.)
But as I’ve said, it seems to me the left is more concerned with a general principle about wealth per se: The “one percent” is not vilified because they acquired wealth illegitimately, but simply because they acquired wealth “excessively.” And yet, says Kotkin, “The Holy Places of urbanism such as NewYork, San Francisco, Washington DC also suffer some of the worst income inequality, and poverty, of any places in the country.”
This progressive economy works from the well-placed academics, the trustfunders and hedge funders, but produces little opportunity for a better life for the vast majority of the middle and working class.
The gentry progressives don’t see much hope for the recovery of blue collar manufacturing or construction jobs, and they are adamant in making sure that the potential gusher of energy jobs in the resurgent fossil fuel never materializes, at least in such places as New York and California. The best they can offer the hoi polloi is the prospect of becoming haircutters and dog walkers in cognitively favored places like Silicon Valley. Presumably, given the cost of living there, they will have to get there from the Central Valley or sleep on the streets.
Not surprisingly, this prospect is not exciting many Americans. . . .
In this respect, the class issue so cleverly exploited by the President in the election could prove the potential Achilles heel of today’s gentry progressivism. The Obama-Bernanke-Geithner economy has done little to reverse the relative decline of the middle and working class, whose their share of national income have fallen to record lows. If you don’t work for venture-backed tech firms, coddled, money-for-nearly-free Wall Street or for the government, your income and standard of living has probably declined since the middle of the last decade.
![clip_image001[6]](https://ordinary-times.com/timkowal/files/2012/12/clip_image0016.jpg "clip_image001[6]")
Kotkin doesn’t imagine this belated emerging Democratic majority has much to hold it together: Hispanics have been hit particularly hard by the economy with 28% of that ethic group living in poverty. Besides, Hispanics tend to like big cars and homes with yards—anathema to the new Democratic Party’s gentry. And they need blue collar jobs—not exactly in the new Dems’ wheelhouse. The latest news from the sucking sound in California reports 800 oil jobs just emigrated from California to Texas, and I’m quite certain the left’s response is, more or less, “good riddance.” But there just aren’t enough “internet jobs” to replace all the traditional ones we’re hemorrhaging, and it’s in no way clear that the out-of-workforce is suited for those jobs. [Via Walter Russell Meade, more teens are foregoing college education to take “brown jobs.”] And millennials, the “screwed generation,” may follow the trajectory of the boomers before them, who started out left but moved to the center-right with Reagan and never looked back. If the GOP revises their message and/or position on social issues that millennials hold above most everything else, it might fast-forward that shift in trajectory.
Jetsam
At City Journal, Steven Greenhut makes an interesting observation that, because the best way to diminish the value of something is to create more of it, the best way to diminish the value of legislators in the eyes of lobbyists is to create more legislators. Maybe he’s been reading this blog.
That’s it for the week. Happy New Year!
[Late Add: Gov. Bobby Jindal supports making the pill available over the counter. This is a shrewd move. As Andrew Stuttaford points out (in a post I otherwise didn’t care for), “His cannily pragmatic argument is based on the idea that making the pill available OTC will remove much (all?) of the rationale for including it under the HHS rules.” I like Jindal more all the time.]
“[W]e should not presume that there’s somehow a moral imperative to Do Something. In fact, there’s a moral imperative not to do something that’s likely to make matters worse.”
Yes. Any moral imperitive we have should be focused on doing right, doing good. While this may not ultimately be realized for a hist of reason, any attempt to justify actions based on moral imperative should be thoroughly vetted on their ability and likelihood to do right, to do good.
This is not specific to the gun control debate, mind you.
Unrelated, but FYI, the page title of DC’s FP still mentions TVD. Not complaining, just letting you know in case you didn’t realize. And you have my permission to edit this out of my comment if it risks a flaming rock war fight.
I should have said last week that I really liked this idea for a series, Tim, so I’ll say it now.
If I had to say the first thing that popped into my head, it’d be that the GOP is trying to keep the tax on millionaires from going up. I understand that’s not really it, that they’d be ok with increasing those revenues if they got some “serious” and “meaningful” and “nonfictional” spending cuts.”
I think the first part here has hit the nail on the head – this goes back to the “posturing” discussion (which I’ve already given my answer to) – the Republican Leadership is really struggling to find a negotiating posture that both satisfies their base and makes a deal possible – at the moment they seem to be leaning toward satisfying the base more than making a deal.
For better or worse, it seems to me the base is far more militant with taxes than spending. Where they’re in a tough spot is that pretty much everyone agrees that the reversion in rates for AGI under 250K isn’t going up, leaving Republicans to die on the hill of cuts that only affect the highest levels of income.
I am not sure if I could gin one up for them that works better, the best thing for them would be for someone out there on the other side to be able to get tax increases for all as a desirable outcome, leaving Boehner and McConnell room to make a show of fighting for those instead of just the top rates. I can’t see how that could happen, but there it is.
now it’s time for the Senate to pass a bill, and if they won’t pass a bill, it’s their fault.
The Senate has also passed a bill, so this argument cuts both ways.
The problem for the GOP is that the Democrats have a much stronger hand here than they do and waiting gives them an even stronger one when 2013 starts with the tax cuts expiring and Democrats gaining seats in both the Senate and House.
Whoa now. The Republicans want spending cuts, but they don’t want to specify them. They want the Democrats to write them out because they’ll be unpopular. That way, they get what they want and get to blame the other guy. If they want cuts, they should write up the exact cuts in their proposal. Saying “We want unstated cuts and it’s your fault for not stating them” is a little weird.
I don’t see what’s special about a ratio of 1 as it’s neither unprecedented nor functionally special. Just round. Every raising of the debt ceiling coincides with an unprecedented level of debt. That doesn’t make the debt ceiling any less of a ridiculous ritual. It’s a cudgel for the minority party to club the majority party with by grandstanding periodically.
Congress gets to determine spending and they get to determine revenue. They don’t also get to set the number you get when you subtract the two. The fact that a law that allows them to do so is on the books is the ultimate problem. The way we were going, it was only a matter of time before one party realized that it could use this silly ritual as an opportunity to get concessions on other issues by threatening to let the place burn.
Obama in 2006:
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. . . . Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/336762/debt-ceiling-memory-lane-jonah-goldberg#
Yes, Obama engaged in some hypocritical posturing over the debt ceiling in 2006. What, exactly, does that prove about whether or not holding it hostage is reasonable today?
“You’ve got to believe me: I was just lying then. I swear I’m telling the truth now.”
That seldom works.
Are we arguing about whether Obama is an effective spokesman on this particular point, or are we arguing about whether refusing to raise the debt ceiling makes any sense? The fundamental problem here is that the Tea Party types want to make big radical changes to policy, but the only control one house of Congress and at least some of them are aware that actually making these changes would be very unpopular. So instead, they use brinksmanship and hostage-taking to try to coerce their ideological opponents into doing their dirty work for them. That’s not a healthy dynamic.
I think what happens here is the left and the media depict the Tea Party as if they are simply opposing for opposition’s sake. The Tea Party types really do believe the rate of spending is dangerous, and if something is not done relatively soon, the harm will be substantially greater than not raising the debt ceiling. I don’t think it’s bad faith, as you suggest, to contend, as Democratic Senator Obama did just two years before ascending to the presidency, that raising the debt ceiling is bad leadership.
And I just still don’t buy the popular narrative that the particularly divisive politics sprang up from, what, nowhere? The Golden Era of 1945 to 1970 is over. All the low-hanging fruit is gone. The baby boomers are retiring. We’re still reeling from the Great Doubling of the 1990s when the workforces of China, the former Soviet bloc, and India joined the world’s workforce and diluted the relative earning power of uneducated Americans. Most of the great entitlement programs introduced when the U.S. was firing on all cylinders have never been reformed to reflect these new realities. Instead, we moved to fiat currency, fired up the presses, and started borrowing gobs of money from China.
Is there a populist element to fears based on this recent history? Sure. But populism isn’t all bad, especially when the establishment politicians of both major parties appear to be completely oblivious. They are governing for today with apparently no thought to what will happen when their terms are over, let alone in the next generation.
If those leaders could offer a rosier picture of the future or rebut the Tea Party’s concerns about our trajectory, then maybe I wouldn’t be as willing to give the Tea Party the benefit of the doubt. But I don’t see that. So I continue to think that will will probably have to give some temporary pain–like holding firm on the debt ceiling, perhaps–to solve or assuage some of these enormous long-term problems.
It seemed to work fine for Mitch McConnell.
“The Tea Party types really do believe the rate of spending is dangerous, and if something is not done relatively soon, the harm will be substantially greater than not raising the debt ceiling.”
If that’s the case, then they are in good faith, but they don’t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about. But then, considering how often I see people yammering about Greece in comment sections, I think that this is a pretty good explanation of the phenomena I observe.
“And I just still don’t buy the popular narrative that the particularly divisive politics sprang up from, what, nowhere? The Golden Era of 1945 to 1970 is over. All the low-hanging fruit is gone. The baby boomers are retiring. We’re still reeling from the Great Doubling of the 1990s when the workforces of China, the former Soviet bloc, and India joined the world’s workforce and diluted the relative earning power of uneducated Americans. Most of the great entitlement programs introduced when the U.S. was firing on all cylinders have never been reformed to reflect these new realities. Instead, we moved to fiat currency, fired up the presses, and started borrowing gobs of money from China.”
First, I’m not trying to determine why we have the dysfunctional politics that we have. I’m just trying to argue that the behavior of the Republican party has been incredibly dysfunctional lately, and that if we want good government in this country then the party needs to learn to deal with the world as it really is.
And although I think that you are a far more reasonable and well-informed person than the sort of guy that is trying to hold the US’s full faith and credit hostage, your account of how we got here in fiscal terms isn’t right at all. We were running a surplus in 2000, after all. Then the tech bubble popped, we implemented the Bush Tax Cuts, and we started paying for two wars, a larger baseline level of defense spending, and Medicare Part D. That got us to a point where, even at the peak of the business cycle in 2007, we were running deficits in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Throw in a massive recession, stimulus spending, and bailout money, and you’ve got the trillion-dollar deficits that everyone harps on about. This isn’t happening because Medicare, Social Security or Medicaid suddenly became unaffordable, nor is it happening because Barack Obama is turning us into Sweden.
It’s happening because of all of it. I’m not pinning blame on one party or one thing. There’s a host of causes, attributable not only to both parties in politics but many other things, many of which probably aren’t even the sort that can be blamed on anyone. They won’t all be solved by just entitlement reform, and they won’t all be solved by just ending foreign military action. But both of those things are two sides of the same problem: spending money we don’t have at the expense of future generations.
There are always some members allowed to vote no when the debt ceiling vote comes up within the the context of a whip count that will see it passed easily; it’s only now that the leadership has embraced extracting budgetary concessions in return for paying for spending already approved with full faith and credit hanging in the balance. You can talk about Obama’s vote (in a completely different economic and therefore deficit policy context, it should be noted) if you want to, but it doesn’t mean you’re talking in any serious about what actually happening now, or how it’s radically different from what comes before.
Talk about Obama’s vote. Believe it gives you an excuse not to face up to what’s actually being done. That’s fine. In reality, you’re getting almost no actual rhetorical mileage out of it.
If you want, I’ll concede that Obama was a Lying Liar when he said that, just like every member of Congress is when it’s their turn to tut-tut the raising of the debt ceiling. That’s exactly what the debt ceiling law is for. The minority party grandstands and beats up on the majority party for a little while and then “reluctantly” votes to acquiesce to basic arithmetic. The new thing is not to bow to the demands of arithmetic.
Remember, the workaround last summer was to give Obama the ability to raise the debt ceiling himself subject to congressional disapproval after the fact, which he then had the right to veto. That’s basically an admission that the whole point of it is to make whomever is in charge at the time look like the bad guy so everybody else can look like martyrs.
“Don’t blame me. I voted against raising the debt ceiling! I even voted to pass the Official Tut-Tutting act! It was the Arrogant President and his Unprecedented New Totalitarian Powers that he grabbed from us!” Theater.
There are probably a handful of them who really believe that. I will not accuse them of bad faith. Ignorance, certainly. But a lot of them are the same people who voted for Medicare Part D, big tax cuts, and any number of other measures that got us here.
And a lot of them are still happy to propose budgets that cut spending by $X and then cut taxes by $X + $Y, so I’ll be skeptical of their good faith until they come up with a proposal that puts our money where their mouths are. They need to propose a serious budget that really seems designed to cut the deficit before I believe them.
A separate but related point (and some thinking out loud): Voting “no” on the debt ceiling might be regarding as Congress sending “signals” to itself at different points along its timeline. Congress acts differently at different times and in different circumstances — it’s not a consistent or fundamentally very principled institution. When confronted with a spending bill at what we’ll call a “Spending Session,” one group might object that “this will render us insolvent!” Considering this a hypothetical or, at best, a future problem only, the majority plows ahead and passes the spending bill, kicking the insolvency can down the road — either to a later point in the term, or to another Congress altogether.
At a later point, we get to what we’ll call an “Solvency Session” — in which the Congress has to figure out what it’s doing to do about the insolvency created (or exacerbated) by the Spending Session. If, during the Solvency Session, Congress decides to just kick the can again (by raising the debt ceiling), then the next time we get to a Spending Session, Congress will recall that all the prior Solvency Sessions sent the signal that the insolvency wasn’t that dire, so let’s just kick the can to the next Solvency Session and pass this new spending bill now. Until the Solvency Session sends the signal that, yes, things are getting dire, then the Spending Session will never change its behavior.
And did the most recent Solvency Session send a signal that it is serious about insolvency?
The question that has been raised a couple times and never answered is regarding the spending cuts. Why does the TP and GOP, if they are so serious about restraining spending not actually, ya know, propose restraining spending. Why do they always propose spending cuts in the most general terms then demand that the Dems take those lump numbers and apply them to specific (popular) programs? Why exactly are the Dems supposed to take this heat and why, if they won’t up and actually propose cuts, won’t the GOP and Tea Party propose the specifics since they’re the ones demanding cuts as their primary agenda item (after tax cuts of course).
And why, after getting flattened in the last election at least partially for doing this very same evasion, do they think they can get away with it?
There was the Ryan budget that was criticized as draconian and Ayn-Randian, wasn’t it? Democrats do seem to enjoying demogoguing against vouchers as intrinsically evil. Talk of Medicare reform elicits mockups of Republicans literally pushing granny off a cliff.
After that kind of stuff, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask, “do you have any better ideas?”
Yes, it would be horrible if any Republican, say attacked a Democratic President for cutting 718 billion dollars from Medicare. I mean, it’d almost prove the whole party doesn’t really care about deficits, the only care about gutting the welfare state as much as they can.
A couple of things about the Ryan budget. First, Liberals (and by extension, many but not all Democrats) don’t think that dramatically cutting back on the benefits provided by entitlement programs is necessary, nor do they think that we need to cut the deficit now now now. Liberals (and even more Democrats) also don’t tend to think that privatizing entitlements is an effective way of saving money. So when Ryan proposed a budget that cut benefits dramatically (block-granting medicaid and then slashing its funding) and attempted find benefits by privatizing entitlements (voucherizing Medicare) while also, if we don’t live in supply side fantasy-land, cutting benefits dramatically in order to cut spending, there wasn’t any bad faith going on. We really did think (and still do) that the plan was a proposal to cause enormous hardship and suffering for, essentially, no good reason.
Second, even if we judge Ryan’s budget by it’s stated set of value judgments and goals, cutting the deficit, it didn’t actually promise to accomplish those things. After all, the plan threw all of its savings from entitlement cuts away on tax cuts, and even with some downright laughable magic asterisks, it still didn’t balance the budget for decades, and then only if you read the right analysis. So again, we’ve got a plan that was awfully specific on how it was going to slash funding for the poor, sick, and elderly, and that was very specific about how it would slash taxes for the rich, but resorted to hand-waving and fuzzy math when it came to the actual deficit. So given such a plan, I fail to see what’s illegitimate about portraying the guy who wrote it as a zombie-eyed granny starver.
To echo Don Zeko’s comments, Paul Ryan was exactly who I was thinking of when I referred to people with no credibility on the budget deficit. Aside from the medicare voucher plan (which is a bit rich after voting for Part D), his plan looks to be more of the same “tax cuts left and right and tell the CBO to assume that everything will work out” as always.
I’m a extended time watcher and I just believed I’d drop by and say hi there there for the very initial time.