President Obama met with the Republicans in the House yesterday.  I think Politico had the best take on the meeting.

After years of pining for more face time with the president, House Republicans  found out Wednesday that Barack Obama looks and sounds the same behind closed  doors as he does on TV.

President Obama meets with Congress. AP Photograph

I think they are finally learning what many of us have known for a while:  what you see is what you get with Barack Obama.  Michelle has been trying to tell everyone this for years.  So he has his line and the Republicans led by Paul Ryan have theirs.  But where does that leave the rest of  us?  How to deal in a meaningful way with the sequester and the budget?  I see two paths:  One, those affected by the cuts start putting on the pressure and two, we begin looking at alternatives to either the Republican or White House budget proposals.

On the first, the lobbying has begun.  The New York Times reports

Construction companies are lobbying the government to spare their projects from across-the-board cuts. Drug companies are pleading with the White House to use all the fees they pay to speed the approval of new medicines.

And supporters of Israel have begun a campaign to make sure the Jewish state receives the full amount of military assistance promised by the United States.

A frenzy of lobbying has been touched off by President Obama’s order to slice spending this year by $85 billion, divided equally between military and civilian programs. The cuts have created new alliances and strange bedfellows.

Hunter R. Rawlings III, a historian of ancient Greece who is the president of the Association of American Universities, joined Wesley G. Bush, the chief executive of Northrop Grumman, the maker of surveillance drones and B-2 bombers, in a news conference in which they denounced the automatic cuts known as sequestration.

Health care and education groups, advocates for poor people, and state and local officials who fought in the past for bigger budgets are now trying to minimize the pain.

How much money do you think will be spent on lobbying?  I don’t even want to begin to add it up.  What a waste of money.  But I guess some people will still have jobs.

For an alternate budget we can look at the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget proposal.    The Economic Policy Institute assisted in putting the budget together and scoring it.  Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research calls it “A Serious Budget That the Serious People Won’t Take Seriously”.  The Progressive Caucus has been proposing budgets for a number of years now and takes the position that if their proposals had been adopted, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now.

So what exactly are they proposing?

Direct hire programs that create a School Improvement Corps, a Park Improvement Corps, and a Student Jobs Corps, among others.

Targeted tax incentives that spur clean energy, manufacturing, and cutting-edge technological investments in the private sector.

Widespread domestic investments including an infrastructure bank, a $556 billion surface transportation bill, and approximately $2.1 trillion in widespread domestic investment.

Ends tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans on schedule at year’s end

Extends tax relief for middle class households and the vast majority of Americans

Creates new tax brackets for millionaires and billionaires

Eliminates the tax code’s preferential treatment of capital gains and dividends

Abolishes corporate welfare for oil, gas, and coal companies

Eliminates loopholes that allow businesses to dodge their true tax liability

Calls for the adoption of the “Buffett Rule”

Creates a publicly funded federal election system that gets corporate money out of politics for good.

Provides a Making Work Pay tax credit for families struggling with high gas and food cost 2013-2015

Extends Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child and Dependent Care Credit

Invests in programs to stave off further foreclosures to keep families in their homes

Invests in our children’s education by increasing Education, Training, and Social Services

It would also end the war in Afghanistan and do selective, not blanket cuts to the military budget.  It basically spends money to put people back to work and stabilize the economy.  This assumes that people who work pay taxes and put money back into the economy.  It also achieves deficit reduction.  All through government spending.  As Dean Baker poinst out

For those upset that the budget debate is getting ever further removed from the real world problems of an economy that is suffering from a deficit of 9 million jobs, there is good news. The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) has produced a budget that is intended to make the unemployment situation better rather than worse.

The story of course is that we are still in a situation where we need the government as a source of demand in the economy. This is independent of how much we like the government or the private sector. The private sector does not expand and create jobs just because governments want it to, as is being discovered now by leaders in the United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, Spain and everywhere else where deficit reduction is now in vogue. In the current economic situation, loss of demand from the government is a loss of demand to the economy. That is why recent steps to reduce the deficit, such as the ending of the payroll tax cut (which put money in consumers’ pockets) and the sequester, will lead to slower growth and higher unemployment.

Would this happen with the adoption of the progressive budget?  I don’t know, but I know that what is going on now isn’t working either.  And what is worse, people are tuning out and shrugging their shoulders assuming nothing can be done.

Gail Collins has this fantasy.

White smoke poured from the Capitol today and crowds of onlookers broke into shouts of jubilation, crying: “We have a budget!”

Inside, where the nation’s legislators had been walled off in seclusion, the newly chosen tax-and-spending plan was garbed in the traditional brass staples for its first public appearance. Insiders said it planned to take the name of Budget for Fiscal Year 2014.

I guess that is alternative number three.  Maybe we should try sequestering Congress.

Related articles

• CPC/Dem Back-To-Work Budget Announced, “Wired For Republican” Media Ignores (ourfuture.org)
• Progressive ‘Back to Work’ Budget Wins Praise for Anti-Austerity Approach (beavercountyblue.org)
• Will The Media Cover The “Back To Work” Budget? (ourfuture.org)
• House Progressive Caucus Unveils Bold Budget to Bankrupt America Quickly (reason.com)
• Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget Analysis (themoderatevoice.com)
• Congressional Progressive Caucus : Press Releases : Progressive Caucus Leaders Demand Administration’s Full Response on Drones (ramyabdeljabbar.wordpress.com)