The House of Representatives voted this morning on Congressman Paul Ryan‘s budget proposal.  It passed by a vote of 221 to 207.  The 221 yeahs were all Republican, 197 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted no.   You can read the official vote count here.  You can read the official vote count here.  Read more about the actual legislation here.

This is how the House Budget Committee describes the Republican budget plan:

Washington owes the American people a responsible, balanced budget. This is a plan to balance the budget in ten years. It invites President Obama and Senate Democrats to commit to the same common-sense goal. This budget will achieve the following:

1. Stop spending money we don’t have by cutting wasteful spending.
2. Fix our broken tax code to create jobs and increase wages.
3. Protect and strengthen important priorities like Medicare and national security.
4. Reform welfare programs like Medicaid so they can deliver on their promise.

You can read the summary here and the full plan here.

Before I give my critique of Ryan’s budget, I would like to be very clear about something.  I do not have anything against him.  I just disagree with the approach he has taken to the overall budget and Medicare.

So, I do have problems with Ryan’s budget.  They are:

1. It doesn’t go anywhere near defense spending.  Not only that, despite claiming to be supporters of “fiscal responsibility” the GOP controlled House voted to give the Defense Department more money than it requested.  From the Associated Press, “The House Armed Services Committee on Thursday overwhelmingly backed a $642 billion defense bill that calls for construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast, restores aircraft and ships slated for early retirement and ignores the Pentagon’s cost-saving request for another round of domestic base closings.”  
2. Since the Defense Department budget is off the table, major cuts will be made to other discretionary spending.  It should be noted that this part of the budget is really small and cuts to these programs will not do a lot to impact the deficit or debt.
3. The Obamacare “repeal” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Sure, it gets rid of a lot of it but “Ryan’s budget doesn’t actually assume the repeal of all of Obamacare. It keeps the tax increases and Medicare cuts so that it can balance in 10 years, as top Republicans in the House promised conservatives.”  Link here.
4. It does nothing to address the sequester.  According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the sequester’s impact on the economy is very real.  They looked into this and found, “In the absence of sequestration, CBO estimates, GDP growth would be about 0.6 percentage points faster during this calendar year, and the equivalent of about 750,000 more full-time jobs would be created or retained by the fourth quarter.” More on that can be found here.
5. It fails to address economic growth.  In 1992, one Clinton/Gore campaign slogan was “It’s the economy, stupid.”  That idea applies today.  A better rate of economic growth would solve a lot of our deficit and debt problems.  Louis Woodhill writes this in Forbes: ”The FY2014 Budget Resolution makes a few vague statements about economic growth, but it doesn’t promise that following Ryan’s plan will deliver a growth rate above the woefully inadequate CBO baseline, which peters out to a pathetic 2.19% rate by FY2023. This is what makes the whole exercise a suicide mission for House Republicans.”
6. Yes, we have a divided government but all the reports I have read indicate House Democrats received more votes than House Republicans and the only reason the GOP has a majority is gerrymandering (see my post on the Reform We Need for more on my view on this — and no, both sides try to do it so I don’t put all the blame for gerrymandering on the right side of the aisle).  The bigger issue, is that voters rejected the GOP budgetary priorities when they rejected the Romney/Ryan ticket.  Read more here.

While those are my basic problems with the plan, the specifics of which programs will be cut bother me a lot.  I watched Ryan this morning on the House floor talk about the differences between how Republicans and Democrats view government and I am going to address some of that now.

Ryan said, “This budget debate was constructive. It revealed each side’s priorities. We want to balance the budget. They don’t. We want to restrain spending. They want to spend more. We think taxpayers give enough to Washington. They want to raise taxes by $1 trillion—just take more to spend more. We want to strengthen programs like Medicare. They seem complicit in their demise. We see Obamacare as a roadblock to patient-centered reform. They see it as a sacred cow. We think national security is a top priority. They want to hollow out our military. We offer modernization and reform, growth and opportunity. They cling to the status quo.”

You can watch that below.

My belief is that government exists to do for us collectively what we cannot do individually.  While I do not share Ryan’s view that a balanced budget is the end all, be all of everything (to me that is a GOP “sacred cow”), I am not opposed to it.  The last time we had a balanced budget was not under a GOP administration but during President Clinton’s tenure.  Moreover, the Republicans spent a lot like drunken sailors when they had control so I am not sure what he is talking about there.  I also do not want to “hollow out our military.”  I want to make it more efficient.  I suspect if I were to talk to Ryan, he would have a similar answer to questions about Medicare — he says he doesn’t want to destroy it, he wants to save it by making it more efficient.

I do not think we should cut:

1. Education spending:  our workers compete against workers all over the globe. I would like our people to be as (or more) qualified as anyone else.   I saw an interview with Apple where they said they would love to manufacture more products in the US but we don’t have the numbers of qualified people they need to do it all.  We need more engineers, scientists, etc.  We face shortages in healthcare (nurses, techs and a variety of physician specialties such as primary care doctors and surgeons).  This is not the time to cut education spending.
2. Transportation & infrastructure spending:  Our infrastructure is crumbling.  Our highways, bridges and rail lines are so far behind other countries, it is crazy.  Repairing these systems would be a way to get large numbers of people jobs that cannot be exported anywhere.
3. Clean energy research and development.  I know, I know there have been some bad companies but the more energy sources we have, the lower the costs will be and the less dependent we will be on unstable and unfriendly regimes.
4. Programs to help the poor.  With unemployment where it is, too many people depend on food stamps, unemployment insurance and other programs to cut them off.  One of my mom’s friends (and no, Ryan has never said anything like this — as far as I know), she said “when the little squirrel cannot find a nut, he dies.”  I don’t want that to be our country’s approach to the poor.
5. Medicare — it should not be a voucher system.  You can read about my thoughts on Ryan’s plan for that here.

Watch Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) talk about the GOP budget plan.  He is also the Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee.

Originally this post was going to be solely about the Republican budget plan in the context of Ryan’s religious views. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) opposed Ryan’s budget last year and have expressed similar concerns with this year’s proposals.  Their opposition stems from cuts to programs such as food stamps, child tax credits and others that help the poor.  Their letters to Congress last year were in response to comments the Budget Committee chairman made:

“A person’s faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private,” Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, said in the interview. “So to me, using my Catholic faith, we call it the social magisterium, which is how do you apply the doctrine of your teaching into your everyday life as a lay person?

“Those principles are very, very important,” Ryan said. “And the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenets of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life, help people get out of poverty, out into a life of independence.”  Source: the Hill.

A statement by the USCCB released yesterday laid out their case for including provisions to help the poor in any budget:

“We support the goal of reducing future unsustainable deficits, but insist that this worthy goal be pursued in ways that protect poor and vulnerable people at home and abroad,” said Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, and Bishop Richard E. Pates of Des Moines, chairman of the USCCB Committee on International Justice and Peace.

“The moral measure of this budget debate is not which party wins or which powerful interests prevail, but rather how those who are jobless, hungry, homeless or poor are treated. Their voices are too often missing, but they have the most compelling moral claim on our consciences and our common resources. The bishops stand ready to work with leaders of both parties for a budget that reduces future deficits, protects poor and vulnerable people, advances the common good, and promotes human life and dignity,”

The bishops also suggested the following three principles guide lawmakers:

• Every budget decision should be assessed by whether it protects or threatens human life and dignity.
• Every budget proposal should be measured by how it affects “the least of these” (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.
• Government and other institutions have a shared responsibility to promote the common good of all, especially ordinary workers and families who struggle to live in dignity in difficult economic times.

Ryan responded to the Bishops’ concerns and argued that his budget proposals neither hurt the poor nor do they violate his Catholic faith.  From Town Hall Magazine.

“Our budget incorporates solidarity by recognizing a critical role for government in providing a strong safety net for those in need. And it restores the balance between solidarity and subsidiarity by returning a lot of power to individuals, to families and to communities. We are a nation that prides itself on looking out for one another—and government has an important role to play in that. But relying on distant government bureaucracies to lead this effort just hasn’t worked.

Some Catholics seem to mistake the preferential option for the poor for a preferential option for Big Government. When you look at the results of that approach—one out of every six Americans in poverty today, many of them mired in programs whose outdated structures often act as a trap that hinders upward mobility—that’s just not consistent with how I understand my Catholic faith. We need to break down the barriers to opportunity and attack the root causes of poverty. Informed by constitutional oath and my Catholic faith, this is a moral obligation I take very seriously.”

Ryan also defended the morality of his budget in The World Over with Raymond Arroyo, EWTN:

“These programs aren’t working the way they should. One in six Americans are in poverty today. We have the highest poverty rates in a generation. What House Republicans proposed in our budget was sensible reforms  want to do is put the kind of reforms in these programs – using subsidiarity, solidarity, local control, ideas that worked when we tried them in some other areas in the 1990’s. We want to reform these programs with the idea of getting people out of poverty onto lives of self sufficiency. Right! And there isn’t a monopoly. That’s my point. I can no more claim exclusive justification for my economic and political views than a liberal can for theirs within the Church’s social teaching. This is a matter for prudential judgment left to the laity to exercise their discretion. People of good will can disagree on these things. You have these hits come at you — like that letter — but we should raise the tone of the debate. We shouldn’t just try to shoot the messenger and try to nullify the notion that there are other ways in which to implement Church teaching. That just does a disservice to the kind of debate we need to have.”

Now, I do not doubt Ryan’s sincerity in this area.  I think he does believe that his plans will help the poor and I don’t think he cares more about the rich.  I cannot say the same thing about Mitt Romney — I do believe he thinks his wealth has more to do with how great he is and not so much to do with the incredible opportunities he has had that others have not.  Yes, I am aware of and appreciate the work he has done in his communities to help others, I don’t think he is a fundamentally evil or awful person, I just think he doesn’t get it.  I have read reports that Ryan had suggested the Romney/Ryan 2012 campaign spend some time in lower income neighborhoods in the cities they visited to educate people on how their policies would be more helpful to poor Americans than Obama’s.  These ideas were allegedly shot down because the campaign did not see the value as they did not expect to get any votes in those areas.

(Side note: if these reports are true, Ryan’s idea was a great one and should have been followed.  It may not have gotten a huge number of votes in those areas, though I am sure it would have gotten some, but it would have made the ticket more appealing to a number of people who may have been on the fence.)

The bottom line, however, is that Ryan’s budgets and Medicare plans violate what I think of when I think of Jesus’ teachings.  I am all for the idea that “if you give a man a fish, you feed him for one day but if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime” but cutting off assistance to people in real need, won’t accomplish that goal.

And if you want to read more about Ryan’s views on how to help the poor and his religious ideology:

1. Op-ed “Government Must Refocus its Safety Net to Those in Need”.
2. Interview with National Catholic Register’s Charlotte Hays – Ryan: ‘We have pursued solidarity but abused Subsidiarity’.
3. National Catholic Register Op-ed:  Applying Our Enduring Truths to our Defining Challenges.
4.  Ryan’s Opening Statement at House Budget Committee hearing on reforming the safety net.

Thank you to everyone who helped with this by sending supporting materials and documents.  Also I was impressed that Congressman Ryan went out of his way to praise his staff (that’s the former Hill staffer in me talking) and with Congressman Chris Van Hollen for thanking Ryan for his professionalism.  I may disagree with him but we should be able to disagree with people while remaining civil and it seems these two men have.  Good for you.

I promise to do an analysis of the Senate Democrats’ budget proposal.

And now for something completely different… (and hopefully fun)

I write political satire as Alyson Durden for Pardon the Pundit.  I have written a number of pieces where I call Ryan a vampire.  Now, I know Ryan is not a vampire and truly hope his staff, who were most helpful when I was researching his response to Catholic opposition to his budget plans, will not be totally offended because I meant it all in good fun.

Some are:

1. Paul Ryan Denies Allegations He Is a Vampire.
2. Ryan Claims “Twilight” Success Means He Does Have a Mandate, Admits He Is a Vampire.
3. Revealed! The Real Reason Romney Picked Ryan Was to Woo the All Important “Twilight” Voters.
4. As the Markets Worry about the Fiscal Cliff, Washington Works to Reassure America it is Working to Save “Twilight”.

And here is a goofy, fake add I put together making fun of a Democratic commercial bashing Ryan for his Medicare plans.  I did send it to his staff and it has received at least one thumbs down so I do hope it wasn’t from them because I was actually trying to point out the absurdity of the idea that his goal is to kill old people.

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For most of the country, March means one thing: college basketball.  This year, in Washington, DC it means something completely

This may be from “Alice in Wonderland” but it could be Congress.

different.  The madness to which I refer is what’s happening with our federal budget.  If you are not troubled by the fact that we are facing this fabricated chaos, you should be.

What’s the deal?  Every year, Congress passes a budget.  This is supposed to happen through the appropriations process where the various committees in the House and the Senate decide how much money each agency should get to do their business. When they cannot agree on this, they basically punt and just extend the budget from the year before.  This is called a “continuing resolution” or “CR.”  They have been doing this — in increments as short as days.

This by itself is amazingly stupid and makes for an incredibly inefficient way to run anything and the federal government is just a huge example.  On Morning Joe last week one military expert said they would save millions of dollars by just doing their job and passing a real budget.  Something they have not done since 2008.  We have been operating under CR after CR since 2009.  That’s right.  No real budget has been passed since President Obama was inaugurated the first time.

Question: if you failed to do your job for four years, would you still have it? If you say yes, is your company hiring?  Well, Congress’ main job is to keep our government running and they do that by funding it.  They need a budget for that.  Punting doesn’t count.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “What about the sequester?”  Good question.  You see the CR keeps funding at last year’s level (or rather 2008’s level) but the sequester changed that so does the CR cancel the sequester?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  That is the madness Congress now faces.  Some CR proposals include provisions to keep the sequester but maintain funding for the programs and agencies not impacted by the sequester.  But that may not be legal or doable under the CR rules.

And Alice thought she had stepped into a strange world.  So Congress, who passed the sequester and CRs and President Obama, who has signed them have created a universe where no one really can tell how much money they will have and cannot plan for the coming year in any reasonable way.  Way to go!  I don’t mean to be cynical but this is not the change I could believe in.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab (from the The Hill):

Although the White House has endorsed that idea before, White House press secretary Jay Carney unequivocally took it off the table during his daily briefing Monday.

It’s not altogether surprising — Democrats firmly backed away from the Medicare change during the last round of budget negotiations, and congressional Republicans didn’t push especially hard. But by backing away from its own proposal on the Medicare age, the White House is eliminating one option to save more than $100 billion over the next decade, and probably more over the longer term (because the change would gradually phased in more than 10 years).

Shielding entitlements from cuts is clearly a high priority for Obama’s second term — the State of the Union should offer more specifics, but remember that Obama used the bigger-picture inauguration speech to fire a shot across the GOP’s bow on Medicare and Medicaid, saying he wouldn’t abide steep cuts that would undermine the programs’ promise to seniors and the poor.

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Here’s precisely why raising the Medicare eligibility age appears to be the only solution to keeping the program solvent: the Republican Party, which hates Medicare and always has, and the compliant DC news media, which self-consciously dittos the Republicans so as to not appear too “liberal,” say so.

And so it is.

But I probably don’t need to tell you that it’s really, really flipping stupid — times a thousand. And it’s simply designed to sabotage Medicare and the broader healthcare system.

During election campaigns the Republicans invariably pretend to be in love with Medicare, as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan reminded us this year by turning the Affordable Care Act’s Medicare savings into a cudgel to flog the president and the Democrats as enemies of the program when in fact the opposite is true in nearly every way. Not only did Romney inject the $700 billion savings into the discourse as a campaign issue, it practically became a centerpiece of his campaign — not to mention one of his biggest lies. And now the same Republicans who joined Romney in this line of attack are insisting that Medicare be one of the programs on the fiscal cliff chopping block.

The idea is a familiar one. They want to raise the eligibility age from 65 to 67, and they’re receiving hearty endorsements from the cynical, nearsighted and compliant DC press. For example, within a strikingly revealing Politico exposé about creating the DC elite, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote this:

They will also tell you Medicare, which is on pace to be insolvent in 12 years, is a much, much bigger mess and threat to long-term economic vitality — and much harder to solve. Yes, the rich need to get smaller benefits, but that is almost meaningless in terms of fixing it. Ultimately, many Americans will have to get less generous benefits that start to kick in at an older age — and those changes need to start a decade from now. Otherwise, the math simply doesn’t work.

This is the common wisdom. Sadly. The only way to “fix” Medicare, they say, is to stick it to regular Americans who need it the most. There’s no other solution, they say, other than to protect the rich and screw the middle class. And that’s precisely what they intend to do. It turns out that stripping 65- and 66-year-olds of Medicare benefits will cost those people two dollars for every dollar the government saves by keeping them out of the program.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in the first year alone such a shift in the eligibility age would save the government around $5.7 billion. Sounds great! But it’ll actually cost seniors and the system more than $11 billion in the first year. Matt Yglesias wrote:

That includes $3.7 billion in higher costs for 65- and 66 year-olds, $4.5 billion from employers through company-sponsored insurance, $0.7 billion from state governments, and $2.5 billion in higher average prices for third parties once younger seniors are shifted out of the Medicare risk-pool and into the general population.

And the (very liberal) Wall Street Journal agrees that raising the eligibility age is a huge mistake.

The Republicans don’t really care because the goal isn’t savings for the system — the goal is to begin a trend in which every time Medicare reform comes up, raising the eligibility age becomes the standard fare. So it gets rolled back and rolled back, while fewer and fewer people are covered. Undermine and weaken the system by a thousand cuts. And, as an added bonus, the roll back trend make totally sabotages the notion of actually expanding Medicare or implementing Medicare For All.

Ironically, and in spite of what The Very Serious Republicans and Politicos, expanding Medicare to include everyone is one of several ideas that could actually help both Medicare and the broader healthcare system. By allowing everyone, especially younger Americans, to enter the system, a tsunami of new revenue enters the system from a demographic that’s generally healthy and would use very little of the system’s resources. Plus, Medicare operates with greater efficiency and lower overhead than private insurance, while privately doctors, hospitals and pharmaceuticals remain intact and, in some cases, prosper because everyone can receive care and pay for it.

Shy of providing Medicare For All, what about passing the public option? During the debate over the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the CBO reported that the public option would save the government $68 billion over ten years. It would further bend the cost curve and, hell, if they decided to raise the Medicare eligibility age anyway, it would at least give seniors an affordable stop gap.

Or they could simply make the Medicare tax portion of the payroll tax progressive. In other words, in the current system everyone pays a Medicare tax of 1.45 percent, regardless of income. Why not apply the Medicare tax with 1.45 percent as the minimum bracket and increase the tax for subsequently higher income brackets, while means testing wealthier Americans to discover whether they really need the same benefits as middle and working class Americans?

Of course none of this is considered to be Very Serious enough, so unless there are some loud voices telling them to cut crap, the Very Serious people in Washington appear to be moving the direction of raising eligibility age. And it’ll be a disaster.

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In response to President Obama’s offer last week to hike taxes by $1.6 trillion and to exempt Medicare and Social Security from cuts to beneficiaries, the Republicans have finally presented a counter offer. From Buzz Feed:

House Republicans put their criticisms of President Barack Obama’s fiscal cliff package to paper Monday with an offer of their own.

The $2.2 trillion Republican package includes $800 billion in revenue from tax reform and $600 billion in health care savings, among other proposals.

The plan, detailed in a letter that was sent from House Republicans to the White House on Monday, is based in principle on a proposal originally engineered by Erskine Bowles, the co-chair of the president’s deficit-reduction commission.

And of course, the counter offer does not include raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and focuses almost entirely on spending cuts. Given Obama has stated explicitly that he will not accept a deal that doesn’t raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, the counter proposal is completely pointless. You can read the offer in full here:

boehner offer

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From Huff Post:

House Speaker John Boehner says President Obama should drop his proposal to avoid automatic tax increases and spending cuts at the end of the year, and instead embrace a plan outlined by Erskine Bowles — co-chair of the White House’s commission on fiscal responsibility — at a congressional hearing last November.

“The new revenue in the Bowles plan would not be achieved through higher tax rates, which we continue to oppose and will not agree to in order to protect small businesses and our ailing economy,” Boehner writes in a letter (PDF) to Obama. “Instead, new revenue would be generated through pro-growth tax reform that closes special-interest loopholes and deductions while lowering rates. On the spending side, the Bowles recommendation would cut more than $900 billion in mandatory spending and another $300 billion in discretionary spending. These cuts would be over and above the spending reductions enacted in the Budget Control Act.”

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Less of this, please (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The looming fight over the ‘fiscal cliff’ promises to be another gigantic sellout of the middle classes and poor. President Obama has talked about a ‘Grand Bargain’ he intends to make with the Republicans in order to stop a set of $1.2 trillion spending cuts and tax hikes that are scheduled to take place on Jan. 1st should Congress not agree on a plan to reduce the deficit. According to most economists, the automatic cuts and tax hikes are very likely to cause a recession, reversing progress made over the past year and a half that has seen economic growth and steady job creation.

As Cenk Uygur writes, Obama has essentially sold out the Democratic base before negotiations have begun:

President Obama has proposed that the Grand Bargain include $4 trillion in savings. He has said over and over again that the ratio would be $3 in spending cuts to $1 in tax increases. This is before his legendarily disastrous negotiating begins. So, let’s do some quick math. According to the president’s own plan that would be $3 trillion in spending cuts, which is significantly higher than the current plan of $1.2 trillion in spending cuts.

Let me add one other fact, if all you do is let the Bush tax cuts expire for people making over $250,000, you would already have $1 trillion in tax increases. And we were told because of this election that was already non-negotiable. That’s what we fought to make sure would happen and the president has guaranteed it. So, what exactly do progressives gain out of this Grand Bargain?

The reality is that this is cost shifting. They are going to move the spending cuts away from defense and on to the middle class and poor by hacking away at Medicare and Medicaid. This is defined as courageous in Washington. What a load of crap. What would be courageous is taking on the rich and the powerful and the large political donors, which is the exact opposite of what’s going to happen.

Uygur hits the nail on the head here – the reality of the ‘Grand Bargain’ is that Republicans get to hold the country to ransom, much like they did with the debt ceiling, and force through savage cuts that will hit the poor and elderly. Obama has yet again started negotiating from the right by outlining cuts to the welfare state and a minor tax hikes for the rich  that would be considered conservative in any other era or country.

Glenn Greenwald (painfully accurately) outlines what the negotiations will most likely look like:

STEP ONE: Liberals will declare that cutting social security and Medicare benefits – including raising the eligibility age or introducing “means-testing” – are absolutely unacceptable, that they will never support any bill that does so no matter what other provisions it contains, that they will wage war on Democrats if they try.

STEP TWO: As the deal gets negotiated and takes shape, progressive pundits in Washington, with Obama officials persuasively whispering in their ear, will begin to argue that the proposed cuts are really not that bad, that they are modest and acceptable, that they are even necessary to save the programs from greater cuts or even dismantlement.

STEP THREE: Many progressives – ones who are not persuaded that these cuts are less than draconian or defensible on the merits – will nonetheless begin to view them with resignation and acquiescence on pragmatic grounds. Obama has no real choice, they will insist, because he must reach a deal with the crazy, evil GOP to save the economy from crippling harm, and the only way he can do so is by agreeing to entitlement cuts. It is a pragmatic necessity, they will insist, and anyone who refuses to support it is being a purist, unreasonably blind to political realities, recklessly willing to blow up Obama’s second term before it even begins.

STEP FOUR: The few liberal holdouts, who continue to vehemently oppose any bill that cuts social security and Medicare, will be isolated and marginalized, excluded from the key meetings where these matters are being negotiated, confined to a few MSNBC appearances where they explain their inconsequential opposition.

STEP FIVE: Once a deal is announced, and everyone from Obama to Harry Reid and the DNC are behind it, any progressives still vocally angry about it and insisting on its defeat will be castigated as ideologues and purists, compared to the Tea Party for their refusal to compromise, and scorned (by compliant progressives) as fringe Far Left malcontents.

STEP SIX: Once the deal is enacted with bipartisan support and Obama signs it in a ceremony, standing in front of his new Treasury Secretary, the supreme corporatist Erskine Bowles, where he touts the virtues of bipartisanship and making “tough choices”, any progressives still complaining will be told that it is time to move on. Any who do not will be constantly reminded that there is an Extremely Important Election coming – the 2014 midterm – where it will be Absolutely Vital that Democrats hold onto the Senate and that they take over the House. Any progressive, still infuriated by cuts to social security and Medicare, who still refuses to get meekly in line behind the Party will be told that they are jeopardizing the Party’s chances for winning that Vital Election and – as a result of their opposition – are helping Mitch McConnell take over control of the Senate and John Boehner retain control of the House.

There’s always hope that Obama will stand his ground, and given his recent hammering of Mitt Romney, he has some political capital to play with. Paul Krugman has written a plea to the President to take a firm stance with the Republicans, and go over the so called fiscal cliff if necessary in order to preserve the President’s standing with his base and save the economy from more unnecessary damage:

President Obama has to make a decision, almost immediately, about how to deal with continuing Republican obstruction. How far should he go in accommodating the G.O.P.’s demands?

My answer is, not far at all. Mr. Obama should hang tough, declaring himself willing, if necessary, to hold his ground even at the cost of letting his opponents inflict damage on a still-shaky economy. And this is definitely no time to negotiate a “grand bargain” on the budget that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory……

This time, nothing very bad will happen to the economy if agreement isn’t reached until a few weeks or even a few months into 2013. So there’s time to bargain.

More important, however, is the point that a stalemate would hurt Republican backers, corporate donors in particular, every bit as much as it hurt the rest of the country. As the risk of severe economic damage grew, Republicans would face intense pressure to cut a deal after all.

Meanwhile, the president is in a far stronger position than in previous confrontations. I don’t place much stock in talk of “mandates,” but Mr. Obama did win re-election with a populist campaign, so he can plausibly claim that Republicans are defying the will of the American people.

I’m not holding out a huge amount of hope for this – while I think Obama has been incredibly crafty at handling the Republicans in certain regards, when it comes to negotiating on the economy, he has consistently fallen short and allowed big business and the Republicans to define the terms of the debate. The tax system in America is already dangerously skewed to reward the rich and punish the poor, making debt reduction and economic growth almost impossible. An exacerbation of the status quo could be horrific. Tax cuts for the rich do not create economic growth or new jobs, and slashing spending on medicare/medicaid and social security does nothing other than make the lives of millions of Americans unbearably difficult. Austerity is a recipe for disaster during a recession (see much of Europe as an example of this), and Obama may well be on the verge of undoing the progress he made during his first term.

The Left has to intelligently hold the President to account here and tell him that he must not yield to Republican demands. There’s no need to self sabotage (as Glenn Greenwald/Jane Hamsher etc are likely to do), but Obama should be forcefully reminded about who put him back into office, and what he needs to do to retain their loyalty.

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Paul Krugman on the deficit reduction plan that is widely regarded by serious economists as, well, frankly ridiculous:

So, a public service reminder: Simpson-Bowles is terrible. It mucks around with taxes, but is obsessed with lowering marginal rates despite a complete absence of evidence that this is important. It offers nothing on Medicare that isn’t already in the Affordable Care Act. And it raises the Social Security retirement age because life expectancy has risen — completely ignoring the fact that life expectancy has only gone up for the well-off and well-educated, while stagnating or even declining among the people who need the program most.

Yes, I know, inside the Beltway Simpson and Bowles have become sacred figures. But the people doing that elevation are the same people who told us that Paul Ryan was the answer to our fiscal prayers.

Deficits, deficits, deficits. It is literally all the Right can talk about, and their only solution to it is to take an axe to public services while cutting taxes. Again, it’s worth repeating (for the billionth time) that there is no evidence tax cuts and spending cuts during bad economic times results in anything other than more economic pain. Case study in point: The whole of Europe.

Case closed.

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After a week of Romney trying to undo the damage of the “47%” video, these are the latest numbers on his likeliness to win the election if it were held today (from Nate Silver):

What conclusion can we draw? Andrew Sullivan deduces the obvious:

We have found that Romney in general loses votes the more he opens his mouth in public and private (two categories fast merging). He’s lost the core terms of this campaign (it’s now a choice, not a referendum), he has lost the specifics (the vagueness of his tax plan is indeed a red flag), he is insisting you can cut the debt by cutting taxes for the very rich like him, then calls half the country deadbeats.

It’s hard to see how Romney can come back at all now – bar a series of incredible performances at the debates and a hidden video of Obama saying something equally as stupid as Romney’s “47%” diatribe, it’s basically over.

Because as Matt Taibbi writes, Americans simply don’t like Mitt Romney. He fails the ‘which candidate would you rather have a beer with’ test that seems to be the most trustworthy predictor of Presidential elections these days:

How many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife’s name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing “entitlements” like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it’s paying its bills to him on time?

As it’s turning out, not that many.

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By Bob Cesca: In a speech filled with misleading statements and nostalgic lines about how wonderful life used to be before President Obama was inaugurated, the single-most ridiculous line from Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech Thursday night was this:

“…Every president since the Great Depression who came before the American people asking for a second term could look back at the last four years and say with satisfaction, ‘You are better off than you were four years ago.’ Except Jimmy Carter. And except this president… This president cannot tell us that you’re better off today than when he took office.”

He absolutely can, and he should!

Yes, I agree that there are still people who are hurting. Unemployment remains unacceptably high, and, ultimately, the depth of the Great Recession is still playing itself out in the difficult task of mitigating it and returning the economy to a place of steady prosperity.

But when it comes to the question of whether we’re better off, there’s no doubt that everyone is better off now than we were when, for example, the economy was collapsing with no end in sight; when we were engaged in two wars with no end in sight; when healthcare was less affordable; when mutual funds, IRAs and 401(k) retirement plans were losing value as the stock market crashed; and so forth. More of this presently.

By the way, this is a risky question for Romney since a Republican president with a strikingly similar economic agenda was in office four years ago, and he was navigating his way around a worsening economic freefall. Why would Romney even dare to bring this up? I’m sure the question the president and the Democrats will be asking this coming week in Charlotte is whether we should continue the policies that ended the disaster and sparked an economic recovery, or whether we should revert back to the policies that were in place prior to the recession — policies that John McCain and Sarah Palin were proposing in 2008 and which Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are proposing today. On one hand we have an administration that’s responsible for policies that have proven to be effective given the dire circumstances, and on the other hand we’re hearing about Republican boilerplate policies that absolutely failed.

So how effective were the policies of the Obama administration?

Insofar as the Republicans have blamed the president for everything that’s bad, it’s only fair then to credit him for the things that have significantly improved, and many of the following things are, in fact, a direct result of the president’s actions.

1. Several weeks after the president was inaugurated and before any of his policies had taken effect, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its bottom: 6,626. This was the low point in a slide that began as far back as October 2007 when the Dow surpassed 14,000. From that day onward, it dropped. Since its low point and under the watch of the Obama administration, however, the Dow has climbed back to 13,090 as of Friday. That’s a massive recovery in just three-and-a-half years, and this resurgence began in earnest just after the president signed the dreaded stimulus, which pumped over $700 billion back into the economy when no one else, from consumers to corporations, were prepared to do the same.

2. When the president took office, the gross domestic product — the pulse of the American economy — was contracting by 8%. In other words, the last time the economy was shrinking to this degree was 1947. In early 2009, no one knew how deep the contraction was, and we’re still discovering the true depth of the crisis. Regardless, by the third quarter of 2009, the economy was growing again. To this day, it continues to grow by around 1-2% per quarter.

3. The economy hemorrhaged 800,000 jobs during the month the president took office. 700,000 the month after. 750,000 in March of 2009. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus) was signed in that same month, March, and following the measure, fewer and fewer Americans were fired until November 2009 when the private sector began to add new jobs for the first time since December 2007. In terms of new job creation, we’re actually better off now than we were nearly five years ago. Obviously, more jobs need to be added, but we also have to examine why job creation isn’t more robust. Primarily, corporations are inexplicably sitting on record cash assets. $2 trillion, in fact, according to the Wall Street Journal — the highest level of cash assets since 1959. Furthermore, public/government sector jobs at the federal, state and local level have dropped off for the first time in recent history. Experts assert that this has hurt job growth and the unemployment rate.

These are three of the biggest indicators of economic health in America. But what about the deficit and the debt — the crazy scary numbers the Republicans were screeching about last week?

4. According to the CBO, the president inherited a 2009 deficit of $1.2 trillion from President Bush’s final spending request back in 2008. I’m not talking about 2009 spending authorized by President Obama but fiscal year 2009 spending requested by Bush, which somehow President Obama has become responsible for in the eyes of many Republicans. Actually, the Obama administration only added an additional $400 billion to the deficit for the remainder of 2009. That’s still a big chunk of money, but bear in mind the stimulus and other measures that were necessary as a means of breathing life into the economy when no one else would. Add to that a seriously constricted level of tax revenue due to layoffs and reduced incomes. By the end of the president’s first year, the deficit was $1.4 trillion. Huge by ordinary standards, but that economic era and the colossal recession was hardly ordinary. Since then, the deficit has been reduced nearly every year (the deficit increased by $6 billion in 2011 from $1.293 trillion to $1.299 trillion, then dropped to $1.1 trillion for 2012). Fact: the president has reduced the deficit from $1.4 trillion to a projected $977 billion in the last fiscal year of his first term, 2013. $500 billion in total deficit reduction in four years. While I personally would have preferred more spending given the depth of the recession, from the perspective of deficit reduction, this can be considered a considerable achievement and far from the big spending, big government myth the Republicans have created. Meanwhile, the national debt continues to grow, but the year-over-year growth of the debt has slowed from 15% in the president’s first year to 4% in his third year. Likewise, the year-over-year growth in the size of government is the lowest since the 1950s.

What’s next?

One million unemployed Americans found jobs in the first six months of 2012 alone. Inflation is 1.4% — a full point below its all-time average and four points below its 5.6% rate in July, 2008. Home sales are up. Home prices are up. Consumer debt is down. Income tax rates remain at an all-time low. The Medicare prescription donut-hole is closing, with 5.2 million seniors and people with disabilities having saved $4 billion on prescription drug costs because of the evil, evil Affordable Care Act. Preventative medicine is now fully covered by both Medicare and private insurance without deductibles or coinsurance. Millions of Americans in their 20s are now insured under their parents’ health insurance. Medicaid and SCHIP have been expanded, making it easier for struggling families to get healthcare. Women are closer than ever to paycheck equality. The war in Iraq is over. Bin Laden was hunted down and killed.

Are you better off than you were four years ago? From a national perspective — from the perspective of life becoming a little bit easier and the future a lot brighter, the answer again is a resounding yes.

Adding… By way of a post script, I’d like to add that several Obama campaign surrogates turned up on the Sunday shows and actually avoided the obvious answer to this question. Clearly they were worried that answering “yes” would appear insensitive to the Americans who are still struggling. The governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley — a Democratic supporter of the president — actually answered, “No.” What the hell? Astonishingly self-defeating and weak. Perhaps a response to the effect of, “Without a doubt the nation is significantly better off than it was four years ago, and it will continue to get better and stronger when the president is re-elected,” would completely thread the politically sensitive needle without giving Romney a major win on this too-important question. But to run away from the answer undermines the entire basis for the campaign. I suspect Governor O’Malley will end up in numerous Romney ads. Unfortunately and stupidly.

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