![On Sequester, GOP Beginning to Regret Believing the GOP. One of the dangers of a long campaign of BS is that you stand a real danger of beginning to believe your own lies. Especially when that long campaign is carried out by an institution, not individuals. People who believe the lie will join the organization to support the lie and the whole thing just snowballs. What began as spin or propaganda for political advantage becomes a guiding principle. And when you go to war against your imaginary enemy, firing blindly into the dark because you know it’s there someplace, you’re going to have real casualties. In this case, the lie is the GOP claim to runaway government waste. That was why Republicans pushed the supposed “nothing-burger nature of the sequester,” in the words of Ed Kilgore. The GOP ran around parading the sequester as a war trophy because “of course there’s so much waste, fraud and abuse that big cuts can be absorbed without pain.” But of course, there is not. Kilgore’s commentary is in reaction to a report by two of the Huffington Post’s best political journalists: Amanda Terkel and Sam Stein. Terkel and Stein took a look at sequester cuts and found them to be much more severe than they’d imagined.
The Huffington Post set out to do an extensive review of sequestration stories from the past week, with the goal of finding 100. What seemed like a daunting task was completed in hours. No one region of the country has been immune. Rural towns in Alaska, missile test sites in the Marshall Islands, military bases in Virginia, university towns across the country, and housing agencies in inner cities are all beginning to feel the cuts.
It’s a disturbing list of hits to essential programs, of job losses, of decreasing demand. The only person in America who could believe this was good news is Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, whose love of European-style austerity and stick-it-to-the-worker policies has dropped his state’s level of job creation from 11th in the nation to 44th — in just two years. Finally, Walker will have more competition way down there at the bottom, as state after state is forced to emulate his idiotic and destructive economic policies. When everyone is forced to suck as hard as he does, maybe he won’t look so bad. European-style austerity is here, there isn’t a huge buffer of government waste that can soften the blow, and Republicans have greeted it all with an enthusiastic round of applause, because they’ve bought their own lie. So how is this all going to work out for America? Well, it’s called “European-style” for a reason, so there’s a place look to answer that question.
ThinkProgress: The 17-nation Eurozone set another dubious record in the opening months of 2013, as its unemployment rate continued to climb from its already record-high rate. The jobless rate also rose for the European Union as a whole as austerity efforts continue to plague the continent’s recovery from the Great Recession:
The jobless rate reached 12 percent in both January and February, the highest since the creation of the euro in 1999, Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, reported from Luxembourg. The January jobless rate for the 17-nation currency union was revised upward from the previously reported 11.9 percent.For the overall European Union, the February jobless rate rose to 10.9 percent from 10.8 percent in January, Eurostat said, with more than 26 million people without work across the 27-nation bloc.
Not well. It’s not going to work out well. Already, Republicans are starting to feel the sequester’s pinch and beginning to get cold feet about it. That whole thing about billions in waste that can easily and painlessly be cut from federal spending is turning out to be a fairy tale. You hope enough Republicans realize they’ve bought a bill of goods before their chumpishness does too much lasting damage. Hoping they learn a lesson about believing their own propaganda, however, is probably too much to ask. -Wisco [photo from Wikimedia Commons]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/23dcaf6aad4a4720224c143eb9243764/tumblr_mkmwexbmuQ1qfengno1_1280.jpg)
On Sequester, GOP Beginning to Regret Believing the GOP.
One of the dangers of a long campaign of BS is that you stand a real danger of beginning to believe your own lies. Especially when that long campaign is carried out by an institution, not individuals. People who believe the lie will join the organization to support the lie and the whole thing just snowballs. What began as spin or propaganda for political advantage becomes a guiding principle. And when you go to war against your imaginary enemy, firing blindly into the dark because you know it’s there someplace, you’re going to have real casualties.
In this case, the lie is the GOP claim to runaway government waste. That was why Republicans pushed the supposed “nothing-burger nature of the sequester,” in the words of Ed Kilgore. The GOP ran around parading the sequester as a war trophy because “of course there’s so much waste, fraud and abuse that big cuts can be absorbed without pain.”
But of course, there is not. Kilgore’s commentary is in reaction to a report by two of the Huffington Post’s best political journalists: Amanda Terkel and Sam Stein. Terkel and Stein took a look at sequester cuts and found them to be much more severe than they’d imagined.
The Huffington Post set out to do an extensive review of sequestration stories from the past week, with the goal of finding 100. What seemed like a daunting task was completed in hours. No one region of the country has been immune. Rural towns in Alaska, missile test sites in the Marshall Islands, military bases in Virginia, university towns across the country, and housing agencies in inner cities are all beginning to feel the cuts.
It’s a disturbing list of hits to essential programs, of job losses, of decreasing demand. The only person in America who could believe this was good news is Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, whose love of European-style austerity and stick-it-to-the-worker policies has dropped his state’s level of job creation from 11th in the nation to 44th — in just two years. Finally, Walker will have more competition way down there at the bottom, as state after state is forced to emulate his idiotic and destructive economic policies. When everyone is forced to suck as hard as he does, maybe he won’t look so bad.
European-style austerity is here, there isn’t a huge buffer of government waste that can soften the blow, and Republicans have greeted it all with an enthusiastic round of applause, because they’ve bought their own lie.
So how is this all going to work out for America? Well, it’s called “European-style” for a reason, so there’s a place look to answer that question.
ThinkProgress:
The 17-nation Eurozone set another dubious record in the opening months of 2013, as its unemployment rate continued to climb from its already record-high rate. The jobless rate also rose for the European Union as a whole as austerity efforts continue to plague the continent’s recovery from the Great Recession:The jobless rate reached 12 percent in both January and February, the highest since the creation of the euro in 1999, Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, reported from Luxembourg.
The January jobless rate for the 17-nation currency union was revised upward from the previously reported 11.9 percent.
For the overall European Union, the February jobless rate rose to 10.9 percent from 10.8 percent in January, Eurostat said, with more than 26 million people without work across the 27-nation bloc.
Not well. It’s not going to work out well. Already, Republicans are starting to feel the sequester’s pinch and beginning to get cold feet about it.
That whole thing about billions in waste that can easily and painlessly be cut from federal spending is turning out to be a fairy tale. You hope enough Republicans realize they’ve bought a bill of goods before their chumpishness does too much lasting damage.
Hoping they learn a lesson about believing their own propaganda, however, is probably too much to ask.
-Wisco
[photo from Wikimedia Commons]
![In just 2 years, the economic brilliance of Gov. Scott Walker has taken WI from 11th to 44th in job creation.
[photo via robynejay]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/d453ab14f622ae22262884f40cb8d5af/tumblr_mkl0gacMsQ1qfengno1_1280.jpg)
Poll: federal spending to promote job creation immensely popular.
Even solid majorities of Republicans would support such a move.
Preserving Social Security and Medicare is not a partisan issue and we’ll call out any politician who’s wrong on these issues, regardless of their party. Means Testing and the Chained CPI will hurt America’s seniors yet President Obama and some Democrats in Congress are using them as a bargaining chip to lure Republicans to the budget table.
That’s simply wrong.
![The budget plan no one is talking about.
Ezra Klein:
The correct counterpart to the unbridled ambition of the Ryan budget isn’t the cautious plan released by the Senate Democrats. It’s the “Back to Work” budget released by the House Progressives.
The “Back to Work” budget is about exactly what the name implies: Putting Americans back to work. The first sentence of the budget lays it out clearly: “We’re in a jobs crisis that isn’t going away.” So that’s the budget’s top priority: fixing the jobs crisis. The budget begins with a stimulus program that makes the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act look tepid. It includes $2.1 trillion in stimulus and investment from 2013-2015. The main policies there are a $425 billion infrastructure program, a $340 billion middle-class tax cut, a $450 billion public-works initiative, and $179 billion in state and local aid. This is a lot of stimulus. The liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that would be sufficient to “boost gross domestic product (GDP) by 5.7 percent and employment by 6.9 million jobs at its peak level of effectiveness (within one year of implementation).”
»READ MORE»
[photo via Digiart2001 | jason.kuffer]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/3d1c4f55a620bf69dc0e7e60768a0048/tumblr_mjo4adRy0q1qfengno1_1280.jpg)
The budget plan no one is talking about.
The correct counterpart to the unbridled ambition of the Ryan budget isn’t the cautious plan released by the Senate Democrats. It’s the “Back to Work” budget released by the House Progressives.
The “Back to Work” budget is about exactly what the name implies: Putting Americans back to work. The first sentence of the budget lays it out clearly: “We’re in a jobs crisis that isn’t going away.” So that’s the budget’s top priority: fixing the jobs crisis.
The budget begins with a stimulus program that makes the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act look tepid. It includes $2.1 trillion in stimulus and investment from 2013-2015. The main policies there are a $425 billion infrastructure program, a $340 billion middle-class tax cut, a $450 billion public-works initiative, and $179 billion in state and local aid.
This is a lot of stimulus. The liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that would be sufficient to “boost gross domestic product (GDP) by 5.7 percent and employment by 6.9 million jobs at its peak level of effectiveness (within one year of implementation).”
[In an ABC News interview] Obama and George Stephanopoulos, a former White House aide in the Clinton administration, talked almost entirely in the cerebral, inside-Washington policy and strategy terms befitting two cerebral, inside-Washington strategists and policy wonks. In other words, Obama talked to Stephanopoulos instead of his audience.
![Putting Social Security and the Economy in Chains. It’s one of those bad news/good news sorts of things. The bad news is that President Obama is definitely looking at some sort of benefit cut in entitlement spending. The good news is that congressional Democrats most definitely do not agree — and if they say it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. After President Obama met with Republicans to iron out some sort of a deal on deficit reduction, he met with Senate Democrats to pitch ideas to them. It was not a sale.
The Hill: …Though they are his most powerful congressional allies, there is tension in that relationship too given fears of liberal Democrats that Obama will make too many concessions with House and Senate Republicans on entitlement cuts, all in the hope of reaching a deficit deal. Obama stood firm Tuesday when pressed to back away from benefit cuts during the meeting with the Senate Democratic Conference, according to lawmakers who attended. […] [B]ehind closed doors, liberals in the Senate caucus raised concerns about Obama’s readiness to consider cuts to Social Security benefits and his support for a deficit-reduction package evenly split between spending cuts and tax increases.
I suppose the President and Democrats could be playing good cop/bad cop with Republicans, but Obama’s been so willing — scratch that; so eager — to compromise with Republicans in the past that he’s opened negotiations with them by meeting them halfway. I think he is the overly-helpful good cop. I don’t think there’s any playacting here at all. This was what lost us the public option in healthcare reform. Had the president started from a very liberal position — say, singlepayer healthcare — we might’ve negotiated down to a public option. But healthcare reform was something we needed to get done. So Democrats were willing to take a bad deal and perhaps revisit it down the road. But deficit reduction? Yeah, Republicans want everyone to freak out over the deficit, but there’s actually no reason anyone should. Deficits will rise during economic downturns because revenues fall. It’s been said that the best social program is a job. Along those same lines, the best deficit reduction program is high employment in a good economy. Make the economy and employment your top priority and most of your deficit reduction work will be done for you. Increased employment, combined with better pay, increases revenues and reduces deficits. Prosperity is by far the best and most painless way to address deficits. And you don’t get prosperity by slashing entitlement spending, because that’s a direct attack on consumer demand. You can’t get rich by saving money, you get rich by making money. Saving money is just making the most of the status quo. But the White House seems bamboozled by Republican deficit hysteria. The Hill reports, “Obama did not back down from a proposal to switch to the chained consumer price index formula for calculating Social Security benefits.” Chained CPI is a complex issue, so I’ll give you a link explaining it and use the space here to say it’s just your typical Republican attack on consumer demand. Suffice it to say it means a reduction in benefits over time. Social Security has a budget separate from the rest of the federal budget. And that budget is solvent and deficit free. It’s not responsible for deficit spending, so why should it be cut? Here’s where you get into the very special kind of robbery that is Republicanism: it should be cut to save fabulously rich people from paying more in taxes. Since Social Security does not add to the deficit and is separate from the federal budget, cutting benefits to reduce benefits is just a raid on the trust fund to plug budget holes. Republicans like to say that taxation is theft. That’s ridiculous. If you want an accurate metaphor, taxation is rent. Don’t like the rent in this building? Use the power of the free market and move to the Somalia Arms. No one’s actually forcing you to stay here and keep paying all this rent. It’s a free country. You can leave. But raiding Social Security to keep taxes low for billionaires — now that’s theft. After all, you paid into Social Security. It’s your money we’re talking about here. And it’s all very real money, because Social Security is barred by law from paying out benefits at a deficit. It’s real money that was collected for one purpose and one purpose only, suddenly being taken and applied to an entirely different purpose altogether. Imagine your banker telling you, “We took some of the money from your retirement account and used it to patch the roof on the bank. Sorry, you won’t be getting that money back.” What’s being proposed with chained CPI is not a lot different. They want to pay you less of your own money, so they can take that money and apply it somewhere else. That’s Wall Street’s hand in your pocket and that’s a Rolex on the wrist. They don’t actually need the money. “We knew some would hold [the view that entitlement spending should be off the table],” a White House official said of the meeting. “It’s exactly what we anticipated. But we need to all come together and find out what we can and can’t live with. That’s the way we compromise. We don’t have to give up on our values to reach a compromise. I think that’s the message the president sent today.” But unless the president secretly agreed to abandon chained CPI and pretend it’s still on the table, “giving up on our values” is exactly what the president is asking Democrats to do. Whether it’s the President’s plan or not, Democrats should commit to being the baddest goddam bad cops this White House and Republicans have ever seen. Give not an inch. Not a millimeter. Not a dime of your money should be spent on keeping billionaires’ taxes down. Not a penny. The goal should be to increase employment and grow the economy, not shield already spoiled billionaires from taxes. -Wisco [photo via BotheredByBees]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/fa90a45530e20a9b2c6f6541b81b5531/tumblr_mjlsk0FXUI1qfengno1_1280.jpg)
Putting Social Security and the Economy in Chains.
It’s one of those bad news/good news sorts of things. The bad news is that President Obama is definitely looking at some sort of benefit cut in entitlement spending. The good news is that congressional Democrats most definitely do not agree — and if they say it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. After President Obama met with Republicans to iron out some sort of a deal on deficit reduction, he met with Senate Democrats to pitch ideas to them. It was not a sale.
The Hill:
…Though they are his most powerful congressional allies, there is tension in that relationship too given fears of liberal Democrats that Obama will make too many concessions with House and Senate Republicans on entitlement cuts, all in the hope of reaching a deficit deal.
Obama stood firm Tuesday when pressed to back away from benefit cuts during the meeting with the Senate Democratic Conference, according to lawmakers who attended.
[…]
[B]ehind closed doors, liberals in the Senate caucus raised concerns about Obama’s readiness to consider cuts to Social Security benefits and his support for a deficit-reduction package evenly split between spending cuts and tax increases.
I suppose the President and Democrats could be playing good cop/bad cop with Republicans, but Obama’s been so willing — scratch that; so eager — to compromise with Republicans in the past that he’s opened negotiations with them by meeting them halfway. I think he is the overly-helpful good cop. I don’t think there’s any playacting here at all. This was what lost us the public option in healthcare reform. Had the president started from a very liberal position — say, singlepayer healthcare — we might’ve negotiated down to a public option.
But healthcare reform was something we needed to get done. So Democrats were willing to take a bad deal and perhaps revisit it down the road. But deficit reduction? Yeah, Republicans want everyone to freak out over the deficit, but there’s actually no reason anyone should. Deficits will rise during economic downturns because revenues fall. It’s been said that the best social program is a job. Along those same lines, the best deficit reduction program is high employment in a good economy. Make the economy and employment your top priority and most of your deficit reduction work will be done for you. Increased employment, combined with better pay, increases revenues and reduces deficits. Prosperity is by far the best and most painless way to address deficits. And you don’t get prosperity by slashing entitlement spending, because that’s a direct attack on consumer demand. You can’t get rich by saving money, you get rich by making money. Saving money is just making the most of the status quo.
But the White House seems bamboozled by Republican deficit hysteria. The Hill reports, “Obama did not back down from a proposal to switch to the chained consumer price index formula for calculating Social Security benefits.” Chained CPI is a complex issue, so I’ll give you a link explaining it and use the space here to say it’s just your typical Republican attack on consumer demand. Suffice it to say it means a reduction in benefits over time.
Social Security has a budget separate from the rest of the federal budget. And that budget is solvent and deficit free. It’s not responsible for deficit spending, so why should it be cut?
Here’s where you get into the very special kind of robbery that is Republicanism: it should be cut to save fabulously rich people from paying more in taxes. Since Social Security does not add to the deficit and is separate from the federal budget, cutting benefits to reduce benefits is just a raid on the trust fund to plug budget holes. Republicans like to say that taxation is theft. That’s ridiculous. If you want an accurate metaphor, taxation is rent. Don’t like the rent in this building? Use the power of the free market and move to the Somalia Arms. No one’s actually forcing you to stay here and keep paying all this rent. It’s a free country. You can leave.
But raiding Social Security to keep taxes low for billionaires — now that’s theft.
After all, you paid into Social Security. It’s your money we’re talking about here. And it’s all very real money, because Social Security is barred by law from paying out benefits at a deficit. It’s real money that was collected for one purpose and one purpose only, suddenly being taken and applied to an entirely different purpose altogether. Imagine your banker telling you, “We took some of the money from your retirement account and used it to patch the roof on the bank. Sorry, you won’t be getting that money back.” What’s being proposed with chained CPI is not a lot different. They want to pay you less of your own money, so they can take that money and apply it somewhere else. That’s Wall Street’s hand in your pocket and that’s a Rolex on the wrist. They don’t actually need the money.
“We knew some would hold [the view that entitlement spending should be off the table],” a White House official said of the meeting. “It’s exactly what we anticipated. But we need to all come together and find out what we can and can’t live with. That’s the way we compromise. We don’t have to give up on our values to reach a compromise. I think that’s the message the president sent today.”
But unless the president secretly agreed to abandon chained CPI and pretend it’s still on the table, “giving up on our values” is exactly what the president is asking Democrats to do. Whether it’s the President’s plan or not, Democrats should commit to being the baddest goddam bad cops this White House and Republicans have ever seen. Give not an inch. Not a millimeter. Not a dime of your money should be spent on keeping billionaires’ taxes down. Not a penny.
The goal should be to increase employment and grow the economy, not shield already spoiled billionaires from taxes.
-Wisco
[photo via BotheredByBees]
The worst things about the House GOP’s new budget
— Gives huge tax cuts to the rich and corporations
— Forces seniors to pay more for health care
— Jeopardizes Medicaid
— Repeals health coverage from 30 million Americans
— Cuts food stamps
![Paul Ryan’s Self-Serving Budget Plan.
I don’t really like to visit the same post twice, but a Steve Benen piece I quoted earlier asks a damned good question: why does Paul Ryan feel the need to balance the budget in ten years?
Ryan’s budget prioritizes balanced budgets for no apparent reason: The point behind the new GOP plan is to balance the budget within 10 years. Why? No one has any idea, and most credible economists believe such efforts might even do severe damage to the economy. Ryan’s op-ed said his rushed efforts to eliminate the deficit that Republicans built up during the Bush/Cheney era will help thanks to low interest rates — but as Ryan should know, interest rates are already extremely low.
And, it pays to point out, those low interest rates aren’t exactly helping. Ryan either pretends not to know or legitimately does not know that interest rates represent the creation of wealth in its most common form. So low interest rates may be good for a short term economic boost, but in the long term they’re actually not all that great. Doubt me? Look at the awesome and rollicking economy today’s low interest rates have brought us.
Which makes another observation by Benen seem like an obvious answer:
Ryan’s budget is needlessly confrontational : There’s simply no way Senate Democrats would ever endorse such a far-right budget plan, so there’s no real point to Ryan’s vanity exercise. It will put House Republicans on record in support of a fairly radical vision — which the American mainstream will find outrageous — but to no practical end.
From a PR standpoint to rally the base, it serves an excellent purpose. People never seem to notice that the Republican base makes heroes out of those who throw the most victim cards around (Sarah Palin, anyone?). Having the entire Democratic Party pointing out how ridiculous and terrible your plan is isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. If Ryan’s trying to carve out a larger role in his party, this is exactly how you’d do it — put out a uselessly austere proposal with no chance in hell of ever becoming law, then welcome the criticism heaped upon said plan by the left and the “biased” media. If the public hates it, who cares? It’s about getting Rush Limbaugh to say nice things about you.
This isn’t an alternative to anything, this is picking a fight for the sake of picking a fight.
[photo via Gage Skidmore]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/964d22163215e7227a729b1e90ff67fb/tumblr_mjk0gnkFL81qfengno1_1280.jpg)
Paul Ryan’s Self-Serving Budget Plan.
I don’t really like to visit the same post twice, but a Steve Benen piece I quoted earlier asks a damned good question: why does Paul Ryan feel the need to balance the budget in ten years?
Ryan’s budget prioritizes balanced budgets for no apparent reason: The point behind the new GOP plan is to balance the budget within 10 years. Why? No one has any idea, and most credible economists believe such efforts might even do severe damage to the economy. Ryan’s op-ed said his rushed efforts to eliminate the deficit that Republicans built up during the Bush/Cheney era will help thanks to low interest rates — but as Ryan should know, interest rates are already extremely low.
And, it pays to point out, those low interest rates aren’t exactly helping. Ryan either pretends not to know or legitimately does not know that interest rates represent the creation of wealth in its most common form. So low interest rates may be good for a short term economic boost, but in the long term they’re actually not all that great. Doubt me? Look at the awesome and rollicking economy today’s low interest rates have brought us.
Which makes another observation by Benen seem like an obvious answer:
Ryan’s budget is needlessly confrontational : There’s simply no way Senate Democrats would ever endorse such a far-right budget plan, so there’s no real point to Ryan’s vanity exercise. It will put House Republicans on record in support of a fairly radical vision — which the American mainstream will find outrageous — but to no practical end.
From a PR standpoint to rally the base, it serves an excellent purpose. People never seem to notice that the Republican base makes heroes out of those who throw the most victim cards around (Sarah Palin, anyone?). Having the entire Democratic Party pointing out how ridiculous and terrible your plan is isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. If Ryan’s trying to carve out a larger role in his party, this is exactly how you’d do it — put out a uselessly austere proposal with no chance in hell of ever becoming law, then welcome the criticism heaped upon said plan by the left and the “biased” media. If the public hates it, who cares? It’s about getting Rush Limbaugh to say nice things about you.
This isn’t an alternative to anything, this is picking a fight for the sake of picking a fight.
