The GOP — Garbage In, Garbage Out

From “Paul Ryan’s budget:  Social engineering with a side of deficit reduction,” Ezra Klein, Washington Post:

“Here is Paul Ryan’s path to a balanced budget in three sentences: He cuts deep into spending on health care for the poor and some combination of education, infrastructure, research, public-safety, and low-income programs. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts remain, but the military is spared, as is Social Security. There’s a vague individual tax reform plan that leaves only two tax brackets — 10 percent and 25 percent — and will require either huge, deficit-busting tax cuts or increasing taxes on poor and middle-class households, as well as a vague corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.

“But the real point of Ryan’s budget is its ambitious reforms, not its savings. It turns Medicare into a voucher program, turns Medicaid, food stamps, and a host of other programs for the poor into block grants managed by the states, shrinks the federal role on priorities like infrastructure and education to a tiny fraction of its current level, and envisions an entirely new tax code that will do much less to encourage home buying and health insurance.

“Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career.”

“The problem is that these ideas are not, on their own, popular.  In fact, they’re deeply unpopular, and considered quite radical.  That’s why Newt Gingrich rejected Ryan’s initial budget as ‘right-wing social engineering’….  But presented on their own, Ryan’s plans scare people.

What Ryan has found is that the way they’ll get a hearing is if they’re presented as necessary, prudent measures to forestall an even more dramatic debt crisis.

“But whether these are good or bad ideas, they are not, under any reasonable definition of the term, necessary ideas.”

We’ve got Paul Ryan using phony scare tactics on the budget, and Rand Paul doing the same on the drones.  When I think of the GOP today, I think, “Garbage in, garbage out.”  We have neither a debt nor a drone crisis.  How can we solve  our real problems when one party is so focused on imaginary ones?

McConnell Draws Battle Lines

President Obama said that he won’t negotiate on the debt ceiling and that he will be looking for more tax increases (through tax reform).  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has a new op-ed telling the Prez to fuhgeddaboudit and that the fiscal cliff deal “was the last word on taxes.”

McConnell says the debt ceiling won’t get raised without negotiations on spending cuts:

“Now the conversation turns to cutting spending on the government programs that are the real source of the nation’s fiscal imbalance. And the upcoming debate on the debt limit is the perfect time to have that discussion.

“We simply cannot increase the nation’s borrowing limit without committing to long overdue reforms to spending programs that are the very cause of our debt.”

So now we have more of a chasm than a cliff.  Let’s see Biden solve this one.

The Lament of a Major GOP Player

From “All I Want for Christmas Is a New GOP,” Mark McKinnon, The Daily Beast:

“What I want for Christmas is a new Republican Party.

“All sanity seems to have left the ranks of those in charge of the GOP—or, more accurately, those who want to be in charge. Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) demonstrated in a jaw-dropping performance Thursday on Morning Joe the depth of the problem and why we are bound to go over the fiscal cliff.  He made it clear he won’t vote for a tax increase on anyone, no matter how much they make. So, by his logic, we will end up going over the cliff, and raise taxes on everybody, because he and too many others like him in the party are unwilling to raise taxes on anyone. This intransigence will also make a core Republican tenet of broader tax reform more difficult to pursue because the new Congress will then be fixated on smaller bore issues like fixing the rates.

“And so voters look at the ‘negotiations’ and see on one side the president—the guy who just won the election by a substantial margin—willing to compromise by lowering his revenue target from $1.6 trillion to $1.2 trillion and moving the goalpost for tax-rate increases from $250,000 a year to $400,000 a year. And on the other side, they see Republicans like Huelskamp responding with a one-finger salute to everything.”

The GOP really has already gone over the cliff — the crazy cliff — and now they’re trying to take all of us with them.

The GOP’s “Player To Be Determined” Offer

So the GOP has made a fiscal cliff offer to Obama, such as it is.  They say their plan will cut deficits by $2.2 trillion over a decade.

They propose $800 billion in tax revenue, but through reform, not raising rates.  This is half what President Obama has asked for in increased revenue.  They don’t specify what loopholes they would close or what deductions they would limit or eliminate.  Unlike a straight rate increase, this would take a long, long time to negotiate, so it would be more of a Memorandum of Understanding than a final revenue deal.

The rest, or $1.4 trillion, would come from spending cuts in programs like Medicare and from changing the way Social Security cost-of-living increases are calculated.  They give no specifics about how they would cut Medicare — whether from raising the eligibility age  and/or having the rich pay higher premiums.

The Social Security change has been bandied about for awhile and is probably inevitable.

Other than that, the GOP is basically throwing numbers out there to increase revenue and cut spending without any specifics.  It’s like “player to be determined” in baseball.

A Reminder of What The Election Should Be About

From “Capitalism Version 2012,” Thomas L. Friedman, NYT:

“America’s success for over 200 years was largely due to its healthy, balanced public–private partnership — where government provided the institutions, rules, safety nets, education, research and infrastructure to empower the private sector to innovate, invest and take the risks that promote growth and jobs.

“When the private sector overwhelms the public, you get the 2008 subprime crisis.  When the public overwhelms the private, you get choking regulations.

“[T]he ideal 2012 election would be one that offered the public competing conservative and liberal versions of the key grand bargains, the key balances, that America needs to forge to adapt its capitalism to this century.

“The first is a grand bargain to fix our long-term structural deficit by phasing in $1 in tax increases, via tax reform, for every $3 to $4 in cuts to entitlements and defense over the next decade.  If the Republican Party continues to take the view that there must be no tax increases, we’re stuck.

“As part of this, we will need an intergenerational grand bargain…. We need a proper balance between government spending on nursing homes and nursery schools….

“Another grand bargain we need is between the environmental community and the oil and gas industry….

“Another grand bargain we need is on infrastructure.  We have more than a $2 trillion deficit in bridges, roads, airports, ports and bandwidth….

“Within both education and health care, we need grand bargains that better allocate resources between remediation and prevention. … We waste too much money treating people for preventable diseases and reteaching students in college what they should have learned in high school.

“Capitalism and political systems — like companies — must constantly evolve to stay vital.”

The problem is too much willfulness and not enough will.   We limp along on last-minute, short-term, lowest-common-denominator bargains, but can’t manage the “grand bargains” that will get this country soaring again.