Just when I thought I could not get any more angry at Democratic politicians, the Washington Post is reporting that President Obama’s budget proposal next week will include cuts to Social Security benefits, through chained CPI, and cuts to Medicare, plus means testing for Medicare (a surefire way to erode support for the program). In exchange for this, more or less, Obama seeks $580 billion in new revenue over ten years (a pittance compared to the cuts we’ve seen since 2001).
This seems like political suicide to me. With a tough Senate map in 2014, the last thing Democrats need to do is cut the GOP’s “Dems want to cut your S.S. and Medicare” ads for them. It’s handing the GOP an issue that they don’t deserve.These cuts are THEIR POLICY, have been for decades, and they should be made to own them. But I fear we’re looking at 2010 on steroids. Just last week an insurance-industry backed astroturf outfit got seniors so exercised about cuts to “Medicare” (it was really the inefficient “Medicare Advantage”) that legislators’ phones were overrun with calls and Medicare reversed course. What do you think this will do? And how do you think it will pay out in an election when Obama’s budget is the document formally calling for the cuts? Anyone remember this:
“Number one, I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security,” Biden said, per a pool report. “I flat guarantee you.” August 14, 2012.
More galling still, the cuts are being sold as part of a “deficit reduction” package despite the facts that (1) Social Security contributes NOTHING AT ALL to the deficit, and (2) to the contrary, nearly 30 years of Social Security surpluses have been raided to pay for things like…the Bush tax cuts. In other words, working people paying FICA have paid more than was needed for Social Security benefits, and the excess already has been applied to “deficit reduction.” Now they want more “deficit reduction” by making the generations who paid those excess FICA rates receive smaller benefits.
This is just atrociously bad policy and worse politics. The GOP already is eating it up.
I just called Senator Warren’s office and expressed my firm hope that she will hold the line and vote no on any budget containing these cuts. They reiterated that she opposes chained CPI and Medicare cuts, but the real issue is how she votes in a “yes” or “no” vote. I will call Sen. Cowan’s office, and Rep. Kennedy as well. I urge you to do the same.
This Grand Bargain fetish is the zombie that won’t die. It’s up to us to kill it.
Not to get too caught up in the labeling game, but is it fair to say he’s actually pretty much center-right? It’s one thing to give something up in negotiation with a conservative congress- this is something else entirely.
I agree that the package of cuts, as outlined in the WaPo article, is distasteful. But I also think that the package is designed not to pass – the GOP will never agree to the tax increases, and the White House supposedly has “made clear that the GOP must accept nearly the entire offer of tax hikes for spending cuts in order to strike a deal.”
So this might be a variant of rope-a-dope. Make a “reasonable” proposal that the liberals in your own party dislike but that looks bipartisan-y and gets the chattering class on your side. Let the GOP reject it, and then try to marginalize them in the 2014 elections, arguing that the only thing they will accept is the Ryan budget, which we already know Americans detest.
Or it might be Obama caving. I’m not sure. I’m hoping for the former.
working in any event. The GOP will say “Obama proposed these cuts” and the complicated truth will not get out there any more than in did in 2010 when “Obama cut your Medicare.”
Virtually nothing Obama can do will “get the chattering class on [his] side.” By definition they will find both parties’ positions about equally valid, but say Obama needs to give in more. That’s what they do. As Krugman says in the post I linked:
His inaugural made me hope he realized this dog and pony show doesn’t work, but maybe he strongly believes in chaining Social Security to CPI, at this point we have no proof that he doesn’t.
There was a time when Democratic politicians were forced to go to Cadillac Square in front of hundreds of thousands of unionized workers and make a speech like this, those days are sadly over and we are all suffering because of it.
I’m not sure he believes in it, per se. But it seems clear he thinks it’s a small price to pay to get his Grand Bargain, which I believe he thinks will clear the way for progress on other issues.
I don’t agree that, in terms of policy or politics, it’s a small price to pay. Nor do I believe that any “Grand Bargain” would permit any progress on anything. To the contrary, by locking in even more spending cuts it will foreclose the possibility of positive change any time soon.
I took a fairly cynical view of the inaugural. It’s easy to make that kind of speech but it’s in the deals and the votes that the real work gets done.
It’s spoken of in reverential terms as if it is the Holy Grail of the Obama presidency. Are we to believe that in the lame duck period between November 2016 and January 2017, all the anguish of eight years will give way to some magical solution both universally supported and brilliant public policy that will suddenly make Obama look like the smartest man on earth for playing his cards the way he did? Also, when did “serious people” become conservative? I remember when it seemed like the chattering classes really were serious and the idea of both parties giving and taking meant something. So much for the liberal media theory!
But dismantling Social Security is hardly a good legacy for a Democratic president, neither is austerity in the face of the worse economic crisis since the Depression, a rather Hooveresque position. This is not the way to win back the House, and one would’ve thought by the 12′ campaign and early rhetoric he had learned that.
that he learned his economics, the little he seems to know, at your alma mater? How did you ever turn out this way?
The Law School is full of Posners, Pearlsteins, and Easterbrooks that favor the Friedman school, and Austin Goolesbee was definitely friendly with that crowd too.
I think coming from a working class background and having unionized parents didn’t hurt, in our arguments my dad was always able to counter my theories with his common sense. It also doesn’t hurt that I was a History major and understand that the New Deal worked even though most economists still deny that.
I lived in my grandmother’s house with her and my uncle as a college student, and rode the subway to class. The theories (NAFTA and WTO were the rage then) didn’t match up with the lived experience of people I knew in the neighborhood at all.
I was actually being told by professors that union workers whose jobs were lost should “reinvent” themselves in the higher-wage high tech industry. People are not like game pieces who can just switch from the careers they’ve always done to high tech work requiring specialized knowledge if not advanced degrees. Those people ended up in the new, oh-so-exciting “service” economy instead and still, at 55, live in their parents’ home. Goodbye American Dream.
Some economists–Krugman, Thoma, DeLong–actually care about people. Delong was one of the Clintonites that worked on NAFTA. When writing about it ten years after the fact, he was still looking at the treated, not for the effect it had on individual people, but it’s effect on trade. Economists are useful, but they tend to treat people as modeled abstractions.
I researched information on the effects of NAFTA and found relatively little about it online. Lots of editorials and such, but not much on the effects. DeLong unapologetically said that by 2000, trade with China had canceled out any benefits from the deal. NAFTA was a focus for labor, which was already declining in the North due to companies moving to the South. It’s all part of the globalization. Maybe someday I’ll read a book about it.
Are Stiglitz and Kuttner. Krugman is a bit polemic and has occasionally taken quotes and numbers out if context, he is also as much of an unquestioning free trader as the Tom “next six months” Friedmen. But Stiglitz has been in positions of power before and was the first to really call for regulating the banks globally.
Kuttner is not only a smart and great writer but he also proposes concrete alternatives rather than non stop criticism. I’ve liked Krigman lately, partly because I’ve steadily moved leftward on economics and partly because I feel he has gotten better editors. But the American Prospect is both strongly center left and solidly wonkish. Kuttner also helped resurrect Democratic Socialists of America with Brother Cornel West.
I don’t read the Prospect as often as I should. I’ve not read Cornel West, but he’s enough of a pain in the ass to the establishment that I should read him too.
Here’s a WhiteHouse.gov petition to save Social Security.