Tag Archives: Social Security

The GOP — All Politics, No Policy

“[W]hat you’re seeing clearly demonstrated here is a kind of policy nihilism on the part of the GOP that helps explain why addressing the country’s problems has become all but impossible. It isn’t enough for Boehner to disagree with [NRCC Chair Greg] Walden over Chained CPI. Boehner effectively controls the NRCC. The notion that this is a private matter between him and Walden is just hogwash. If Boehner doesn’t think the NRCC should attack Dems over a policy that GOP leaders themselves say they want Dems to join them in supporting, he could, you know, just say so. After all, if Republicans won’t say they’ll refrain from attacking Dems over Chained CPI — after embracing the Ryan plan to cut Medicare while attacking Dem candidates over Obamacare’s Medicare cuts for two straight cycles — why would they ever embrace entitlement reform, as GOP leaders themselves are asking them to do?”

Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, WaPo

Hypocrisy and politics are like peanut butter and jelly, but I really believe today’s GOP has taken things to a whole new — and low — level.  They are, in effect, refusing to govern.

Covered with Obama Cooties

We all knew this was coming, but it still invites screaming and broken crockery.

The GOP has been demanding that we cut entitlements, the President proposes chained CPI in his budget, and the head of the NRCC, Greg Walden of Oregon, calls the proposal a “shocking attack on seniors.”

Walden is focused on seat numbers in 2014, not budget numbers.  I suggest our Prez do the same.

Prez “Chaining” Himself for Nothing?

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo on the President’s coming out for chained CPI to calculate Social Security benefits:

“[O]n the politics, President Obama and his advisors have made clear this isn’t what President Obama is actually for. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea. It’s rather what he’s willing to do if Republicans are willing to make a big move on revenues. So he’s anticipating claims that he’s not serious about long term cuts and making clear that he’s willing to put real cuts, painful cuts that most of his supporters will hate, on the table. There’s an internal logic there. But the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be much of any evidence that Republicans are going to make that any kind of move like that. So really this is just the President negotiating with himself, validating the wisdom of big Social Security cuts while Republicans are still saying — and show no signs of not saying — that no more taxes should ever go up ever.

“Now, the counter to this is that the optics of going the extra length helps the President with swing voters who want to see he’s trying to compromise. I’m uncertain about that. But that’s certainly part of the calculus.

“But there’s the third point that I think is most important to understanding what’s going on here. This isn’t only about President Obama’s negotiating acumen. In conversations with the president’s key advisors and the President himself over the last three years one point that has always come out to me very clearly is that the President really believes in the importance of the Grand Bargain. He thinks it’s an important goal purely on its own terms. That’s something I don’t think a lot of his diehard supporters fully grasp. He thinks it’s important in long-range fiscal terms (and there’s some reality to that). But he always believes it’s important for the country and even for the Democratic party to have a big global agreement that settles the big fiscal policy for a generation and let’s the country get on to other issues — social and cultural issues, the environment, building the economy etc.

“This has always struck me as a very questionable analysis of the where the country is politically and what it needs. But I put it forward because I don’t think these moves can really be understood outside of this context.”  Emphasis added.

My personal feeling is that the President can’t do a Grand Bargain with the group that’s in Congress now, especially the House, and that we don’t need one anyway.  As the economy comes back, deficits are declining to reasonable levels in the short and medium-term.  A Grand Bargain can wait, but jobs and growth can’t.  The more growth we can fuel now, the less painful that Grand Bargain will ultimately have to be.  Now is the time to pave the way for a future Grand Bargain rather than for doing that Bargain itself.

Progressives are freaking out today about chained CPI, but it ain’t gonna happen without revenues, which means it ain’t gonna happen.  So the President is making an offer that the GOP can — and will — refuse.

Government Won’t Shut Down

Based on comments from Boehner and the White House, it looks as if there will be a continuing resolution to keep the government funded at the sequester levels.

The GOP is picking its battles carefully.  The sequester cuts?  Meh…  People not getting their Social Security checks?  BFD.

So there won’t be a government shutdown on March 27.

Next up is the debt ceiling in May.

Maybe We All Just Agree

The sequester was set up in 2011 because it was supposedly so awful that the Dems and the GOP would definitely do a budget deal rather than let it take effect.

But now that it’s here, it seems to everybody involved to be a better option than the available alternatives.  The GOP would rather live with the defense cuts that were supposedly anathema to them than raise taxes even on very rich people and corporations.  Sen. John Cornyn of Texas is no Neville Chamberlain, and he’s saying the Pentagon cuts won’t hurt our national security.  The GOP senators who are claiming they will, like John McCain and Lindsey “Butters” Graham, are really outliers even in their own party — after all, they both want to stay in Afghanistan forever, and that’s not where either party is.

The Dems would rather live with the cuts to non-defense spending than accept a deal without more revenue.  The cuts won’t affect things like Medicaid or food stamps.  You’re not going to see sick or hungry children sobbing in the streets.

Americans believe the sequester isn’t big enough or relevant enough to their lives to get upset about.  Yes, people agree with the President that we shouldn’t do big cuts or reform entitlements without raising taxes, but people aren’t rising up against the GOP because the sequester isn’t that significant, either in dollars or affected programs.  Nobody’s Social Security check gets cut, nobody’s Medicare benefits get reduced.

People just aren’t feeling the outrage the President is trying to inspire, and if he keeps it up, he might well lose his good will.

It really feels as if we have a bizarre moment of consensus here — Democrats and Republicans and Independents, in and out of government, seem pretty calm about and comfortable with the sequester, especially if it’s tweaked to give department heads flexibility on where to cut.

The GOP has been cast as having the political disadvantage here.  But if these cuts take effect, and people don’t feel pain from them, voters might say, “Hey, let’s cut a little more.”

GOP’s Attack on Obama Speech Continues Demonization of Romney

The GOP has been attacking Obama’s inauguration speech as partisan.  I actually didn’t think it was particularly partisan, and neither did Newtie, so he and I agree on something, which is kind of creepy.

But what do they think a Romney speech would have been like?  With Obama sitting there, Mittens would have declared that the country repudiated Obamacare and wanted less government spending, especially on social programs and entitlements, and less regulation and lower taxes.  He would have said the country wanted the Ryan budget and privatization of Social Security and Medicare.   He would have said his victory was a repudiation of everything from gay marriage to abortion rights to climate change.  Given the failure to re-elect a sitting president, Mitt’s speech would inevitably have been highly, harshly partisan.

In attacking Obama’s speech, the GOP continues to blame their messenger, not their message, when the country soundly rejected both.  Yes, Mitt was a terrible candidate who personified every negative stereotype and caricature of his party.  But they still don’t get that they surrounded him with embarrassing nut jobs like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, and that they forced him to sell a fringe platform.  They still don’t get that if Mississippi rejected a Personhood Amendment, such an amendment is not mainstream.  On this 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, new polls show that less than a quarter of Americans want it repealed.  It’s the same on immigration and gay rights and the Ryan budget and the environment.

The GOP somehow is still convinced that while we didn’t like their guy, we like their policies.  In attacking Obama’s speech, they fail to accept that we like both him and the sentiments he expressed on Monday.

The GOP didn’t just lose the election, they lost their compass.   They can’t find their way to the middle, the golden mean where the majority of votes will always be found.

 

Quote of the Day

“It seems as though what is motivating this from the House Republicans is more than debt reduction. They have a vision about what government should and should not do. They are suspicious about government policy commitments to make sure that seniors have decent health care as they grow older. They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat or whether we should be spending money on medical research. They have a particular view about what government should do and should be. That deal was rejected by the American people when it was debated during the presidential campaign.”

President Obama at his press conference today

Don’t Be Fooled By All the Loose Talk of Default

I want to quote from a Politico article about the GOP’s willingness to refuse either to raise the debt ceiling or to pass a continuing spending resolution, but before I do, I want to point out that their discussion of default and pretty much all you’re reading and will read about default is wrong.

In order to default, the government would have to stop paying its “public debts,” which means the servicing of our bonds.  The Treasury takes in about $200 billion in taxes every month, which is more than we need to pay those debts.  We can avoid default without raising the debt ceiling, and there is no real reason for financial markets to freak out or for our credit rating to be downgraded.

On the other hand, Social Security payments are not “public debts,” and failing to send those checks is not a default.

If you don’t have enough money to pay all your bills, but you pay your mortgage and your car loan, you may not have enough to heat that house or put gas in that car, but you are not in default on your home or car loan.

From “Double trouble:  House GOP eyes default, shutdown,” Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Jake Sherman, Politico:

“House Republicans are seriously entertaining dramatic steps, including default or shutting down the government, to force President Barack Obama to finally cut spending by the end of March.

“The idea of allowing the country to default by refusing to increase the debt limit is getting more widespread and serious traction among House Republicans than people realize, though GOP leaders think shutting down the government is the much more likely outcome of the spending fights this winter.

“GOP officials said more than half of their members are prepared to allow default unless Obama agrees to dramatic cuts he has repeatedly said he opposes. Many more members, including some party leaders, are prepared to shut down the government to make their point.”

Cliff Update

The GOP has dropped its demand that moving to chained CPI for calculation of Social Security benefits be part of the fiscal cliff deal.

They play to return to it as part of the debt ceiling negotiations instead.  Those are going to be fun!

Both parties in the Senate have apparently agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts for families making up to $400,000 or $500,000.

Right now they’re fighting over the Dem position that the spending cuts called for in the sequestration be delayed for two years.  The GOP is balking at this and doesn’t want to use increased tax revenue for more spending.

Negotiations continue, and the Senate is going to reconvene tomorrow.