Dana Milbank summarizes the state of Republican budget negotiations:
House Republicans are saying they’re willing to risk default — an economic disaster — unless Biden agrees to cuts. But they won’t specify which cuts they want; Biden will just have to guess. “I want to look the president in the eye and tell me there’s not one dollar of wasteful spending in government,” McCarthy said, in his inimitable syntax.
I think we've seen this movie enough times to know exactly what they want to cut:
- Stuff that helps poor people: Medicaid, SNAP, Section 8, the EITC, WIC, Pell Grants, TANF, CHIP, SSI, school lunches, ACA subsidies, and probably some programs I've never heard of.
Beyond this they're likely to target a few programs related to climate change, wokeness, oil drilling, and anything else they can dig up that appeals to the MAGA crowd. It won't amount to much, though.
Bottom line: I guess we can keep playing this game where we pretend we don't know what Republicans want even though we all know it perfectly well. But why?
Biden would be crazy to offer up any cuts. Republicans want both the cuts and the ability to blame them on Biden. Just ignore them and keep paying the bills per the 14th Amendment.
Like +25.
"We've reluctantly accepted the president's offer, but it's only a first step. We'll be expecting much bigger cuts in his next budget."
Biden didn't come down in the last shower, and hopefully won't fall for their nonsense. If McCarthy wants to "negotiate", he can start by setting out his demands in concrete detail. Otherwise, he's simply asking Democrats to bargain with themselves.
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All of this was debated, negotiated, and voted for by a majority of both houses of Congress and signed by the President. And now a minority in the House are threatening to blow up the economy if it isn't renegotiated more to their liking. The Democrats should unequivocally refuse to engage with blackmailers and hostage takers. That is not how a government of laws should ever operate.
This is the way Democrats need to be spinning this "controversy". You've provided a good, concise argument that (maybe) even today's "journalists" can folllow.
Because bOtH sIdEs ArE rEaSoNaBlE
The other week, CRFB put out this graphic -- https://bityl.co/GsVa -- in their post about what it'd take to balance the budget in a decade.
Everyone (including the CBO) uses distorted projections when they include 2021 or 2022 as a baseline for decadal proposal reviews. Nonetheless, in order for small-government conservatives to achieve their goals, they're always lying to Americans but especially to themselves. They're, without any hyperbole, unserious about budgets.
Again, expect the reemergence of the sequester as the way out of the 2-year stupid cycle aka GOP House rule.
When I first became interested in Economics, I ran across the assertion by Keynes that the real problem of the future (from his ancient perspective) would be "what to do with all of the leisure time which results from our productivity increases?"
Ha. What an academic. He underestimated the 40% of society which wants to keep slaves.
I did some research back then and found that, indeed, we all could be living in a paradise, if the government would just spend money to reduce unemployment. And I found that the reason for why the government has not done this is held in Section II, paragraph 4 of Michael Kalecki's short 1943 essay, "Political Aspects of Full Employment."
https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf
It turns out that, rather than offering others a helping hand up the ladder, a large segment of the population wants and NEEDS to be able to piss down on someone who is "lower" than themselves. They would happily sacrifice some of their own welfare to be able to do this.
And that's why some Republicans want to make the poor even more miserable.
That's a very interesting paper you linked to. Thanks.
This explains the whole worldview of the southern states, which Lyndon Johnson summarized back in his day. The need to feel superior -- a deeply unfortuante human trait.
But why?
You know the answer to that one, too. But to be clear:
To a large extent, the owners of the large media empires ensure the people they employ report it that way.
To a smaller extent, politicians themselves can discipline the media to some extent, by withholding (or indulging) the coin of the realm - information.
This has been another episode of Short Answers to Obvious Questions. Thank you, please drive through.
I certainly can think of a Speaker of the House salary that's being wasted.
I think it's quite simple. Zero out every dollar in the Inflation Reduction Act. That way all the Democratic activists can start hollering about how disappointed they are with Biden.
The '87,000 new IRS agents with guns' meme has generated such a frenzy on the right, it's going to be very difficult for Republicans to agree to any increase in the debt ceiling that doesn't see the funding reversed. Hopefully Democrats can turn 'Republicans don't care if wealthy people and corporations cheat on their taxes' into a winning argument, but their performance to date doesn't inspire confidence. Instead of aggressively attacking Republicans for being weak on tax cheats, they're meekly defending the measure by claiming there'll be no increase in audits on couples earning less than $400,000 - as if they were poverty-stricken households where a bit of tax fraud is neither here nor there.
Some otherwise sort of decent people vote for Republican politicians because they don't believe they will do all these awful things. I had this conversation with my sister just last fall and who is now a loyal democrat. She pleaded ignorance... It's infuriating.
Oh well. Good luck.
"But why?"
Because insulting the voters' intelligence will continue until they stop voting for Republicans.
That would be the black book with teeny tiny print on exceptionally thin paper? Written by who knows? That expects people living in the 21st century to follow words written over 2000 years ago? That makes perfect sense. Right?
Besides all the perceptive economic points, the political angling, and the philosophical stances laid out by the OP and in the comments, the "why" everybody seems to want to avoid is a quirk of psychology. They aren't crazy, they're religious. And when "god" commands you...well one cannot go against the word of "god."
Simply, when one is invested so deeply into a way of thinking, a narrative of being and finally reality comes bursting in you toe the line and act "rationally." It's the oldest story in the book.
It's not that we don't know what they want to cut. It is that they are unwilling to SAY what they want to cut. They know the cuts would be massively unpopular, and don't want to give their opponents and ammunition.
They want the Democrats to do their dirty work for them.
Exactly. It should be on Republicans to spell it out. We shouldn't just go ahead and come up with the cuts for them. The only reply when they say is they want a lower deficit is "tell me how, then we can talk".
The weird thing is that they could probably negotiate some actual cuts in spending if they engaged Biden in good faith. Biden has shown he loves bi-partisan compromises. But, by throwing temper tantrums and screaming the Republicans gain nothing except love from the base. They have no intention of actually governing. It is just performance art.
Crazy isn't it and that's their voter base. I figure, with Covid, floods, fires, etc, the repulsive voter base is truly diminishing.
The priority is to make Biden and the Dems look bad. Cutting spending on the poor they'd like, no doubt, but it's soooo Obama days. Many voters blame the President and his party for anything that goes wrong, so Republicans want to make things go wrong.
This is national sabotage time pure and simple. When they can't find the votes for a default, that's when they'll want to cut spending on the poor. But even then in ways that make the Dems look bad, because that's what it's about.
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As if "Eve" wasn't enough...
There's some variation on this as one side is larger than the other, but basically cut spending and increase revenue by some combination around 25% to 30%. That's all spending and all revenue.
Neither party will ever come up with anything resembling those numbers so we shamble along doing nothing. Personally, I think we should have raised taxes rather than interest rates but nope, there won't be meaningful reform in these areas, ever.
And I'd like to see us get spending and revenue under control.
For the record, I'd like to see,
* Mortgage interest deduction eliminated (this is more on principal).
* F-35 figured out or eliminated.
* Remove cap on SS taxes.
* Taxes in some fashion increased on top 1%, probably a significant bracket increase.
* IRS funding go through, which it has.
* A really hard look at discretionary funding (homeland, military as a couple).
* Really go after waste, fraud and abuse, there will be some, it's just not some magical solution. Medicare has an interesting approach to this.
* I might even consider long-term increases in retirement aging for SS.
* Medicare negotiation on drug prices.
More if I thought about it, but what's interesting about most of that is that it's far closer to the D's than the R's, which explains why I think so little of R's screaming about this. It's just sound and fury.
Significant cuts to war spending and abolishing the taxable maximum for SS are not at the top of the Democratic platform or points to be used in Congressional Democrats negotiations with the overt fascists.