President Obama

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Two Women from Arizona meet the President

In the last 24 hours, President Obama has had encounters with two women from Arizona.  One, Gabrielle Giffords, Congresswoman at the State of the Union Address.  The other, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer when he landed in Phoenix this afternoon. 

Giffords who missed last year’s speech after being shot in the head has made an amazing recovery.  Here is how the New York Times described last night

There is no protocol to announce a member of the House as she enters the House chamber on the night of the State of the Union address, so Representative Gabrielle Giffords slid in quietly, flanked by two other Arizonans, Representative Jeff Flake, a Republican, and Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a Democrat, who led her gingerly to her front-row seat on the Democratic side. Ms. Giffords clutched the hands of both lawmakers as applause

…

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also made a beeline for Ms. Giffords after she entered the chamber, as did Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who placed his hands on Ms. Giffords’s face and kissed her.

Her final visitor at her seat was President Obama, whom she clung to, eyes shut, swaying a little, before he kissed her cheek and made his way to the lectern.

Giffords announced her resignation today bringing many, including John Boehner to tears.  Must one almost die to bring unity to Congress?

Then this happened today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a lot of speculation as to what they were saying to each other, the President and the Governor.  It is reported that the President was not happy about Brewer’s book, Scorpions for Breakfast.  According to Politico.com, the President didn’t think she had accurately describe their meeting in the White House.  Whatever.  This picture makes her look  angry and the President slightly bemused.

In 24 hours, the President has had two very different encounters with women from Arizona.

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Obama and Gingrich: The Cool and the Hot

South Carolina is over and Newt Gingrich is the winner – the big winner.  Some are predicting that Mitt Romney can’t come back from this self-inflicted near death experience, that he doesn’t have the personal or political skills to fix the way he has handled the non-release of his tax returns.  (Note to Mitt:  So your 2011 returns aren’t ready yet.  Just release the last 5 or 6 years.)  Romney’s saving grace may be Florida where there has been early voting and a lot of Republicans (this is a closed primary) and many have voted before all this drama.  Since Romney has been working to get his folks out, maybe that will save him, but if it is Newt who ends up the nominee, is it bad for the President’s reelection?

My husband thinks that Newt is dangerous and could get enough people to buy into what he is saying to prevail.  I think it will be a hard election no matter who the Republican nominee is but one thing is for certain – if it is Obama and Gingrich the contract in styles will be stark.  Gingrich is a bomb-thrower while the President is calm and methodical.  Roger Simon writing in Politico this morning says “Anger, umbrage and bitterness are so much a part of Gingrich’s public persona that he likes to attack the very concept of happiness.”  In contrast you have the President playing what Andrew Sullivan calls “the long game.”    (Sullivan’s long article for Newsweek is well worth reading no matter which side you are on.)

Simon goes on to say

Gingrich, like other candidates for the Republican nomination, has a fondness for quoting the Founding Fathers, but he now says that when they wrote “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, it did not mean what we think it means.

“Happiness in the 18th century meant wisdom and virtue, not hedonism,” Gingrich says without a scintilla of embarrassment, even though he, himself, has pursued a fair amount of hedonism in his lifetime.

And they promised us the right to pursue,” Gingrich continues. “There is no provision for a Department of Happiness. They issued no happiness stamps. And if you said that you were going to take happiness from some and distribute it to others, the Founding Fathers would have asked by what right?”

So if we don’t have happiness to look forward to, what does Gingrich offer?

Work. Effort. Struggle.

“Work is something you need,” Gingrich says. “I don’t think it’s inappropriate for a 12- or 13-year-old to push a mop.

…
Americans don’t want sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. They want blood, toil, tears and sweat. They want a dependably gloomy man in the Oval Office. They want Newt!
 
Newt Gingrich gives his victory speech in S.C. | Reuters
 
 
This is a man with big ideas.  Remember the Contract with America?  Gingrich is not a patient man and I understand that his campaign is not well organized.  Look at his failure to get on the ballot in his new home state of Virginia.  He has also said he wants to be able to haul judges before Congress to testify if they make rulings he doesn’t like.  This doesn’t bode well for District Judge John A. Gibney if Gingrich gets elected.  Gibney issued the ruling denying Perry, Gingrich, Santorum and Huntsman access to the Virginia Republican Primary ballot. 
 
Will Gingrich’s anger continue to play well?  Will the American voters in November, assuming he is the nominee, want a President who is angry? 
 
On the other hand, the President has a style that may be difficult to sell for another term.  He plays what Andrew Sullivan calls the long game.   
it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.
Sullivan goes on to talk about why it seems to take the President so long to do things.
 

What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for. And so I railed against him for the better part of two years for dragging his feet on gay issues. But what he was doing was getting his Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to move before he did. The man who made the case for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was, in the end, Adm. Mike Mullen. This took time—as did his painstaking change in the rule barring HIV-positive immigrants and tourists—but the slow and deliberate and unprovocative manner in which it was accomplished made the changes more durable. Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.

And last week we got another example of the President’s style in the proposed reorganization of the six agencies that deal with business.  Joe Davidson had an interesting piece in his Federal Diary column in the Washington Post.

When President Obama detailed proposals to reorganize and streamline certain government functions last week, some folks wanted to know why it took nearly a year to develop the plan.

One reason is the involvement of federal employees.

No, they didn’t gum up the bureaucracy or sit on their hands or hinder progress, as is too often the unfair and inaccurate caricature of government workers.

Instead, they were a valuable part of a long process leading to Obama’s announcement that six agencies dealing with business and trade would be consolidated into what is now the Commerce Department. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which takes the largest part of Commerce’s budget and includes the National Weather Service, would move to the Interior Department.

The reorganization proposal, which must be approved by Congress, took time, Jeffrey D. Zients, the administration’s chief performance officer, told reporters last week. “We talked to hundreds of businesses, reached out to federal employees,” he said. “This is very rigorous work, and we wanted to make sure we got it right.”

So now, the employees of the agencies concerned have a stake in what happens.  It is all about buy in. 

If November is Gingrich v. Obama we will have a clear contrast in styles.  I wonder if Gingrich sings.

 

President Barack Obama at the Apollo Theater on Thursday The President at the Apollo Theater

Photo: Shahar Azran/WireImage

Obama sings. Maybe that is the President’s secret weapon.

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Citizens United and the 2012 election

We thought the Congressional elections in 2010 were heavily influenced by PACs after the Supreme Court Citizens United decision but we actually did not get the full impact.  While the case was decided with various concurrences and dissents in part,  it upheld the right of corporations to have free political speech.  Because, as Mitt Romney can tell you, “corporations are people, too.”  So now we are reaping what the Supreme Court sowed.  Secret money is flowing to Super PAC’s and influencing the Republican primary.  And anyone who says that it is OK because unions have the same rights is mad.  Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate, just dropped $5 million to shore up a pro-Gingrich PAC.  No union I know could do that.  New York Times published this account on the 9th

But on Friday, the cavalry arrived: a $5 million check from Mr. Adelson to Winning Our Future, a “super PAC” that supports Mr. Gingrich. By Monday morning, the group had reserved more than $3.4 million in advertising time in South Carolina, a huge sum in a state where the airwaves come cheap and the primary is 11 days away. The group is planning to air portions of a movie critical of Mr. Romney’s time at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he helped found.

The last-minute injection underscores how the 2010 landmark Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance has made it possible for a wealthy individual to influence an election. Mr. Adelson’s contribution to the super PAC is 1,000 times the $5,000 he could legally give directly to Mr. Gingrich’s campaign this year.

And Mr. Adelson is not the only one.  Most contributors are hidden.

So what can we do about this?  Martha Coakley, Masschusetts Attorney General  writes in the Huffington Post that we need a Constitutional amendment to make it clear that corporations are not people.

There is a national movement afoot to amend the Constitution to make clear that the First Amendment applies only to people and not corporations. Several proposed amendments have been introduced in Congress, including the so-called “People’s Rights Amendment” introduced by Congressman James P. McGovern with bipartisan support. Further, at least 10 states, including Massachusetts, have introduced resolutions calling on Congress to pass one of these proposed amendments.

I was proud to join with 25 other state Attorneys General during the Citizens case in filing a brief urging the Supreme Court to leave the states’ ability to regulate and restrict corporate political spending intact. And I am proud to be the first state Attorney General to call for passage of a constitutional amendment to reverse the Citizens decision.

But Constitutional amendments take time and the outcome of an effort is never certain.  I remember working for the Equal Rights Amendment which finally failed.  The ideal may be that states should be allowed to make their own regs for their states.  Montana is already headed in that direction with the recent Montana Supreme Court ruling that Citizen’s United does not apply to Montana campaign finance laws.

Last Friday [December 30, 2011], the Montana Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a 1912 voter initiative – the Corrupt Practices Act – that prohibits corporations from making contributions to or expenditures on behalf of state political candidates and political parties. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that a similar federal prohibition was unconstitutional, prompting a wave of bills and court rulings that erased prohibitions on corporate and union political expenditures around the country.

“For over 100 years, Montana has had an electoral system that preserves the integrity of the political process, encourages full participation and safeguards against corruption,” state Attorney General Steve Bullock said in a statement after the ruling, adding, “the [Montana] Supreme Court’s decision upholds that system and is truly a victory for all Montanans.”

 Montana Supreme Court

Of course it will be appealed.

Besides state by state fights and the long road to a Constitutional amendment, President Obama could issue an Executive Order.  He could direct that any company that gets any federal money has to disclose its political contributions.  Remember that corporations are people.  People who give money have to say they are citizens and who employs them.  It makes sense that corporations have to make some disclosures also.  Steven Rosenfeld writing in AlterNet thinks this is a possibility.

“It’s simple—any company that is paid with taxpayer dollars should be required to disclose political contributions,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., who has pushed for the White House to issue the order. “With public dollars come public responsibilities, and I hope President Obama will issue his executive order right away.”

The order, if issued, would likely be the only campaign finance initiative to emerge from Washington this year as nothing is expected from Congress. It would take effect after the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council adopts new disclosure rules. That could come as the 2012 election season moves beyond the primaries and it would offer a new way to see who is behind the newest independent groups spending millions on political attack ads.

…

Spending on federal contracts was $541 billion in 2010, which was about 4 percent of the gross domestic product, according to the Congressional Research Service, and almost 15 percent of the federal budget. The top 100 contractors are some of America’s biggest firms, and include support services for the military overseas, weapons makers, computer companies, telecommunication firms and other service providers. Companies that could fall under the disclosure order employ about 22 percent of the domestic workforce, CRS said. 

When the possibility of an executive order was last floated, Congressional Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce rose up in arms.  Maybe now that they see the distortion money is causing in the Republican primaries, the Congressional Republicans, at least, will change their tune.  Given the growing awareness of Super PAC’s through the sheer volume of advertising being unleashed in South Carolina, the average citizen may well decide to support measures to mitigated their influence.

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Obama’s Holiday Scorecard

I may be stretching the “holiday” a bit, but since Congress is still on vacation, I will use the term to talk about my tally of his most recent almost 10 days.

First, the pluses.  The recess appointments, the cuts to the defense budget and his continuing feisty attitude.  The negative is the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act.

The negative first.  Alexander Cockburn’s analysis in the Nation is the best I’ve seen.  He explains

The change came with the whisper of Barack Obama’s pen, as he signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual ratification of military Keynesianism—$662 billion this time—which has been our national policy since World War II bailed out the New Deal.

Sacrificial offerings to the Pentagon aren’t news. But this time, snugly ensconced in the NDAA came ratification by legal statute of the exposure of US citizens to arbitrary arrest without subsequent benefit of counsel, and to possible torture and imprisonment sine die. Goodbye, habeas corpus.

We’re talking here about citizens within the borders of the United States, not sitting in a hotel or out driving in some foreign land. In the latter case, as the late Anwar al-Awlaki’s incineration in Yemen bore witness a few months ago, the well-being or summary demise of a US citizen is contingent upon a secret determination of the president as to whether the aforementioned citizen is waging a war of terror on the United States. If the answer is in the affirmative, the citizen can be killed on the president’s say-so without further ado.

This is the latest disappointment on civil liberties.  I had such high hopes for a reversal of the Bush II trend after we elected a Constitutional expert.  In the sum, Obama has been almost worse.  ratifying decisions made by W and going further.

 

The President at Shaker Height HS

(Doug Mills/The New York Times)

 

On the positive side, the New York Times says

On Wednesday, after waiting until the dust in Iowa had settled, clearing out space in newspapers and on television, Mr. Obama delivered another jab, announcing four recess appointments, including that of Richard Cordray as head of a new consumer protection agency, despite Republican opposition. On Thursday, the president went to the Pentagon and outlined a new military strategy that embraces hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to what is a Republican sacred cow, and made it clear that American ground forces would no longer be large enough to conduct prolonged, large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns like those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The cuts in the defense budget are a welcome change.  I have thought since the days when I demonstrated at the Pentagon against the War in Vietnam.  Let’s face it, the last 3 groundwars we have engaged in have been disasters.  Maybe the Bush I war to repel Iraq from the invasion os Kuwait can be counted as a success. But Bush 1 knew when to stop.

(Doug Mills/The New York Times)
 
In an unusual appearance at the Pentagon briefing room on Thursday, Mr. Obama outlined a new national defense strategy driven by three realities: the winding down of a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, a fiscal crisis demanding hundreds of billions of dollars in Pentagon budget cuts and a rising threat from China and Iran.

A fourth reality, not mentioned in the briefing room, was Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign and the chorus of Republican presidential candidates who have sought to portray him as decimating the Pentagon budget and being weak in his response to Iran.

Mr. Obama, who spoke surrounded by a tableau of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in dress uniforms and with chests full of medals, underscored the national security successes of his administration — the ending of the Iraq war, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya — before declaring that the United States would downsize to a smaller ground force, get rid of “outdated cold war-era systems” and step up investments in intelligence-gathering and cyberwarfare.

…

The new strategy document finally defines away the Defense Department’s historic requirement to have the ability to fight and win two wars at once — a measure that one official said “has been on life-support for years.”

The strategy released under Mr. Obama in 2010 said the military was responsible for “maintaining the ability to prevail against two capable nation-state aggressors.”

In contrast, the strategy released Thursday said the military must be able to fight one war, but is responsible only for “denying the objectives of — or imposing unacceptable costs on — an opportunistic aggressor in a second region.”

Senior Pentagon officials said that viewing military requirements through something as static as the two-war model had become outdated, and that the true measurement was whether the Pentagon could field a force capable of carrying out a wide range of military actions to protect the nation’s interests.

Pentagon officials made it clear that the department’s priorities in coming years would be financing for defense and offense in cyberspace, for Special Operations forces and for the broad area of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

I have never agreed with 100% of what any politician does, but this scorecard isn’t bad.  It will be interesting to see what the impact of all this is on the President’s re-election.

 

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Accept the tax increase and defeat the Republicans

I was eating my lunch at my desk today as I often do (I know a bad habit) and the Republicans were voting down the Senate bill in several complicated procedural moves I don’t pretend to understand.  I do know the bottom line:  Increase in payroll taxes, no unemployment extension, and funny things happen to reimbursements to doctors for Medicare.  Anyway, I posted on the New York Times comment section on the story of the Republican vote, that maybe we should accept the tax increase as a way of contributing to the Republican’s defeat in 2012.  Last time I check it had over 300 recommendations!  Maybe I’m on to something here.  But I have to give credit to my husband at FortRight who said at breakfast, “it might be worth $1000 to see the Republicans go down.”

Stand firm, Harry Reid.  Stand firm, Mitch McConnell.  You made your compromise as the House asked and just because John Boehner can’t herd his cats or maybe squirrels (Ana Marie Cox on her Guardian blog quoted a friend who called them squirrels because “[they] are panicky and prone to irrational running into traffic.”) doesn’t mean you have to save him.  Here is John with his squirrels.

Now they want the President to order the Senate back.  Stand firm, Mr. President.  Yes, not passing the bill will hurt briefly, but the Republicans will get the blame and will be forced to come back in January and be serious about a real bill, with real funding to pay for it.  As Ana Marie Cox said, “Congressional Republicans are roadkill.”

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The complicated deficit deal

I know I’ll be writing more about the imact of the “compromise” in the days to come, but for now here a summary.  The Atlantic Wire has the best written summary I’ve been able to find.

The basic plan, as explained by The New York Times‘ Carl Hulse and Helene Cooper, Politico’s David Rogers, and The Hill‘s Alexander Bolton, goes something like this:

1. Raise the debt limit by $900 billion and cut spending by the same amount over 10 years. Members of Congress can vote to show they don’t like the increase but Obama can veto their disapproval. 
2. Create a bipartisan committee with three members of each party from each chamber of Congress to find spending cuts the size of a second debt limit increase of $1.5 trillion. As a special holiday treat, the plan must be presented to colleagues by Thanksgiving and voted on by Christmas.
3. If the plan passes, Obama can raise the limit by $1.5 trillion.
4. If the cuts committee can’t come up with a plan, Obama can get only a $1.2 trillion debt limit increase, and Congress must either:
a. Pass a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, or
b. Allow spending cuts the size of the debt limit increase over the next 10 years, with at least half coming from cuts to defense spending. These cuts would be automatic by the end of 2012.
 
 
There is still a chance to get revenue increases through the committee’s recommendations.  That is what the Democrats have to run around the country selling:  increased revenues and more chanced to create jobs.  I heard Nancy Pelosi say at one point that the country did not want this debt crisis business, but were interested in “jobs, jobs, jobs.”  This has to be the new Democratic message:  OK, we have pretty much caved on the debt business, now create some jobs.
 
 
We Have a Debt Limit Deal: Now What?
 
So smile now, because if there aren’t more jobs soon – and the deficit deal has the potential to make a lot more of them go away – you might not be smiling in November 2012.
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Watching the circus

Watching the circus in Washington used to be a fun activity, but right now it is just depressing.  I got home from work last night expecting to watch the Republican vote on the Speaker’s plan only to learn that it had been postponed.  When I went to bed at 10 it was still pending.  At 5 this morning, I learned it didn’t happen because the Republican leadership didn’t have the votes.  All this for a bill that is DOA in the Senate.

We are all being held hostage by a handful of tea partiers and other Republicans who are convinced that their election gave them some kind of mandate to kill the country.  As they are learning in Wisconsin, people are beginning to have buyer’s remorse.  On the other hand, the tea partiers are threatening to run against the very people they elected if the new Congressmembers don’t come through.  Among those making the threats are Sarah Palin and the founder of the Texas Tea Party on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show last night.  So I don’t think the 20 or so votes that Boehner is looking for will materialize, but then again, this whole spectacle is full of surprises so one never knows.

Everyone, including President Obama, has let this small faction define the fight.  I think Eugene Robinson is right:  The Republicans have one easily stated idea:  Reduce the deficit (and deny Obama a second term) while the Democrats and particularly Progressives don’t have an easily stated idea.

Those who would chronicle events in Washington can find no richer source of analogy and metaphor than the Three Stooges. These days, I’m thinking of the times when an exasperated Moe, having suffered the indignity of an accidental spritzing or clobbering, turns to Larry or Curly and demands, “What’s the big idea?”

The premise of the debt-ceiling fight is too far-fetched for a Stooges film, since no audience could imagine leaders of a great nation stumbling into such a mess. Moe’s trademark line is still relevant, however, even if it’s not followed by the two-fingered poke in the eyes that our elected officials richly deserve.

It is clear that unless President Obama ends up taking unilateral action to break a hopeless deadlock, Republicans will win. The House, the Senate and the White House are all working within GOP-defined parameters: New tax revenue is off the table, painful budget cuts are a given, everyone seems to accept the principle that a debt-ceiling increase — which allows the Treasury to pay bills Congress has already incurred — must be tied to reductions in future spending.

Besides not having an easily stated idea that everyone repeats, the Democrats have done all the compromising.  And it hasn’t worked out so well.  Look back at the retention of the Bush tax cuts:  Do you see any jobs?  Robinson concludes

Obama talks about “winning the future,” but that’s too nebulous. I’d suggest something pithier: jobs, jobs, jobs.

People may dislike paying taxes, but they dislike unemployment more. Progressives should talk about bringing the nation back to full employment and healthy growth — and how this requires an adequately funded government to play a major role.

The next time Moe asks about the big idea, Democrats, say “jobs.” You might avoid a slap on the noggin and a poke in the eyes.

I think it maybe time for the President to stop trying to compromise, to get together with Reid and Pelosi and make a real proposal.  To quote Paul Krugman

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

,,,

So what’s with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it’s coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it’s not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

Time for the President to not only talk the talk as he did last week, but also walk the walk.  Compromise by only one side has lead to this circus that is not even very entertaining.  At the very least, round up enough votes in the Senate to pass the Reid plan so the Democrats can at least say they did something.  You can compare plans here.  And please, let there be only one vote.  I don’t think anyone can take this again in 6 months.

 

 

 

 

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The “gang of six” plan and the debt ceiling

In case you are wondering what it is, the New York Times has published a summary.  It is really a budget and deficit reduction plan and not something to raise the debt ceiling which still has to be done.  And time is running out.

A couple of interesting comments about the plan on Politico’s Arena.

First from Jeff Smith, professor at the New School and former Missouri State Senator:

The one real piece missing from this entire conversation? The piece that would make the numbers work and dramatically reduce the pain?

Comprehensive immigration reform. That’s right. There’s only one pool of 15 million people begging to be able to pay more into the system, and this country has spent the last several years fighting to make sure they can’t.

We need to get over our xenophobia, give them a path to citizenship, and let them start paying in to the system at regular rates in regular intervals. The nation’s immigrant population tilts much younger than the native-born population and is predominantly in the workforce, and would reverse the trend of a rising retiree-to-worker ratio, thereby shoring up both major entitlement programs

The immigrants would pay taxes, pay into social security, and Medicare.

Bernie Sanders (D-VT) points out

While the spending cuts for programs that working people desperately depend upon are enforced by specific spending caps, there is no such enforcement or clarity regarding the $1.1 trillion to be raised in revenue over 10 years.

What happens if that revenue target is not reached? There is no language that deals with that. Where does the revenue come from? That very important issue is kicked to the tax writing committees with no guarantee that hundreds of billions of dollars in new revenue will not come from the pockets of low- and moderate-income Americans. While nobody knows for certain what provisions might be adopted, there is reason to expect that some of the areas that the House and Senate will be looking at include the home mortgage deduction for middle-class families, taxes on health care benefits, and increased taxes on retirement programs such as 401(k)s and IRAs. In other words, while there is a reasonable degree of specificity in terms of cuts there is only vagueness in terms of revenue.

But Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research asks the questions I’ve been wondering about:  What is wrong with the deficit at a time when we have no jobs and isn’t there a solution besides massive budget cutting?

The arithmetic is clear as day. The United States does not now, nor will it in the near future, face a serious problem meeting its debt obligations. It had a debt to GDP ratio of 116 percent after World War II. The baseline projections have it getting to 90 percent by 2021. 116 percent is much larger than 90 percent. (The difference will be more than $5 trillion in 2021.) This should be understandable even to a 6-figure Washington policy wonk or budget reporter.

Other countries had and have much higher ratios of debt to GDP and still face no problem paying their bills. In Japan, the ratio of debt to GDP is more than 220 percent, yet private investors are willing to lend the country money long-term at interest rates of less than 1.5 percent. Of course investors are also willing to put their money on the line in the U.S., lending us money long-term at interest rates close to 3.0 percent. So the people who actually have money on the line are saying as clearly as they can that the debt is not a serious problem.

Furthermore, there are many ways to deal with the debt that do not require attacking ordinary workers, who have been the victims of Wall Street greed and economic mismanagement by the deficit hawks. (People like Kent Conrad held positions of responsibility in the years of the build-up of the housing bubble, but were so utterly incompetent they either did not see it or recognize its danger.)

We could just have the Fed hold $3 trillion in government debt indefinitely. It would then refund more than $1 trillion in interest payments to the Treasury over the next decade. The inflationary impact of the additional reserves could be offset by raising bank reserve requirements. What could be more simple and costless than this mechanism? But the Gang of Six would rather cut Social Security and Medicare.

We could follow the example of England and impose a financial speculation on trades of stock, futures, options, credit default swaps and other financial instruments. This could raise more than $1. 5 trillion over the next decade. But the Gang of Six would rather cut Social Security and Medicare.

It is my understanding that we didn’t have a debt ceiling until World War I and that no many countries have one so why not do away with our?  Politico had this piece about that from Moody’s a few weeks ago.

The United States should do away with the debt ceiling altogether to bring greater certainty to investors in U.S. Treasury bonds, Moody’s suggested Monday.

With the August 2 deadline for raising the debt ceiling barely more than two weeks away, the bond-rating agency issued a report Monday noting that the U.S. is one of just a few countries that has a statutory borrowing limit and saying that the limit creates “periodic uncertainty” for investors, Reuters reported.

Rather than continuing to use the debt ceiling in an effort to keep U.S. borrowing down, the government should look toward Chile, Moody’s suggested. There, “the level of deficits is constrained by a ‘fiscal rule,’ which means the rise in debt is constrained though not technically limited.” Chile is considered to be Latin America’s most fiscally sound country.

And, the report noted, it’s not like the debt ceiling has been effective in keeping U.S. debt down: Congress has in the past raised it often and has not linked it to spending levels.

So the bottom line is that the Gang of Six plan may be a place to start talking budget and deficit reduction, but we should do something about the debt ceiling first – like abolish it.

 

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Tax breaks and the debt/budget crisis

Feeling hot and kinda pessimistic this evening.  I feel as if the progressive forces are fighting windmills and I worry that President Obama will cave in with dire consequences. 

Here is a very interesting chart posted by Chris Bowers on the Daily Kos this afternoon.

Class Warfare

If these numbers are accurate, and I believe they are,  it is interesting how they match up.  We don’t really have to do much to keep programs running. 

In the meanwhile Politico reports

Turning right with a vengeance, Republicans will bring to the House floor Tuesday a newly revised debt-ceiling bill that is remarkable for its total absence of compromise at this late date, two weeks before the threat of default.

Final revisions made Friday submerge conservative demands to reduce all federal spending to 18 percent of gross domestic product — a target that threatened to split the GOP by requiring far deeper cuts than even the party’s April budget. But Republican congressional leaders still want a 10-year, $1.8 trillion cut from nondefense appropriations and have added a balanced-budget constitutional amendment that so restricts future tax legislation that even President Ronald Reagan might have opposed it in the 1980s.

Indeed, much of the deficit-reduction legislation signed by Reagan would not qualify under the new tea-party-driven standards. And even the famed Reagan-Tip O’Neill Social Security compromise — which raised payroll taxes — passed the House in 1983 well short of the 290 votes that would be required under the constitutional amendments being promoted by the GOP.

One of the more interesting aspects of this fight centers around the battle between Eric Cantor and John Boehner for control of the Republican House.  If Cantor wins, it may drive the more moderate Republicans toward the Democrats.  But it doesn’t appear at this point that the Tea Party Republicans really care about reelection – and perhaps they don’t even care if Obama wins reelection.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, right, stands with House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio on Capitol Hill in Washington. | AP Photo

Paul Krugman has an interesting take of the Republicans.

Let’s talk for a minute about what Republican leaders are rejecting.

President Obama has made it clear that he’s willing to sign on to a deficit-reduction deal that consists overwhelmingly of spending cuts, and includes draconian cuts in key social programs, up to and including a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. These are extraordinary concessions. As The Times’s Nate Silver points out, the president has offered deals that are far to the right of what the average American voter prefers — in fact, if anything, they’re a bit to the right of what the average Republican voter prefers!

Yet Republicans are saying no. Indeed, they’re threatening to force a U.S. default, and create an economic crisis, unless they get a completely one-sided deal. And this was entirely predictable.

First of all, the modern G.O.P. fundamentally does not accept the legitimacy of a Democratic presidency — any Democratic presidency. We saw that under Bill Clinton, and we saw it again as soon as Mr. Obama took office.

As a result, Republicans are automatically against anything the president wants, even if they have supported similar proposals in the past. Mitt Romney’s health care plan became a tyrannical assault on American freedom when put in place by that man in the White House. And the same logic applies to the proposed debt deals.

Put it this way: If a Republican president had managed to extract the kind of concessions on Medicare and Social Security that Mr. Obama is offering, it would have been considered a conservative triumph. But when those concessions come attached to minor increases in revenue, and more important, when they come from a Democratic president, the proposals become unacceptable plans to tax the life out of the U.S. economy.

…

Which brings me to the culpability of those who are only now facing up to the G.O.P.’s craziness.

Here’s the point: those within the G.O.P. who had misgivings about the embrace of tax-cut fanaticism might have made a stronger stand if there had been any indication that such fanaticism came with a price, if outsiders had been willing to condemn those who took irresponsible positions.

But there has been no such price. Mr. Bush squandered the surplus of the late Clinton years, yet prominent pundits pretend that the two parties share equal blame for our debt problems. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, proposed a supposed deficit-reduction plan that included huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, then received an award for fiscal responsibility.

So there has been no pressure on the G.O.P. to show any kind of responsibility, or even rationality — and sure enough, it has gone off the deep end. If you’re surprised, that means that you were part of the problem.

It was fun for a while to watch Boehner herding the Republican cats and watching the infighting, but now it is time for moderate Republicans to join the Democrats and show some common sense.

 

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The War Powers Act

 

So, who needs permisson for what?  What should a woman have to do to have an abortion?  Should the President live in South Dakota or Kansas and have to follow those rules to declare war.  I think the President should notify Congress (which he hasn’t).  As Congressman Mike Capuano explained

Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, and the War Powers Act of 1973, states that unless a crisis threatening our security requires immediate action, only Congress may authorize the use of force. I firmly believe that the Constitution entrusts Congress – not the President acting alone – to decide when to put U.S. troops in harm’s way. The President has not yet fulfilled his obligation to seek Congress’ approval to continue military operations in Libya.This decision was not easy, but I feel very strongly about this matter and I don’t expect that the Administration will decide to seek Congressional approval at this point. I also want to make it very clear that my concerns go beyond one President and one war. In fact, I am more concerned about future Presidents who may wish to bring this country to war based on insufficient facts. There is no more important matter than war and peace, and the Constitution is very clear on this matter. I appeared on CNN earlier week to talk about the lawsuit; you may watch the interview here: http://inthearena.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/15/capuano-u-s-action-in-libya-illegal/.

 

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But I’m not sure that  Mike was  envisioning this!  Maybe it is time to rethink the War Powers Act to meet the current day defition of war.  Maybe it should include actions taken as part of a NATO or UN mandate.  Maybe it should include actions with no “boots on the ground.”  War has changed since the 1970’s.  Let’s think about this.