The President is now to the right of Bowles-Simpson.
We are on the brink of fiscal disaster, but it is the President who is creating job stifling "uncertainty" and it is the President who is engaging in "class warfare".
But most importantly, it is all his fault because he steadfastly refuses to put anything on paper.
3 comments:
One question is "savings" from reduced spending in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of the Dem proposals count savings from the concept that we will be spending as much each of the next ten years. Thus, even though all agree we will in fact be spending less, regardless of any deal, they count those savings. One of those fun accounting tricks. And just to head off the talking point the Ryan plan doesn't do that.
Funny. You use the talking point of the day and then assume I will respond in like. You are sadly misguided.
The difference is, we will actually save that money as opposed to the accounting trick of just ignoring the war outlays during the Bush years.
So it's not really about proposing debt reduction of any kind. It really is about proposing debt reduction your side approves.
I think the dynamics of this episode have finally dawned on me:
The GOP controls the House and with it, the timing and content of budget bills like this one. Treasury default is imminent, as of an estimated default date, with associated economic crash(es) and calamity. The Senate and President are in between, and have zero actual leverage over the makeup of the bill.
The House GOP is waiting until the latest possible moment to pass the bill, for the Senate to reject and/or President to veto, on penalty of Treasury default. A possible Joint Committee is also squeezed, meaning either a clear (or very clean) passage through the Senate, or third option for rejecting the bill.
IIRC, the "Boehner Plan" trades a relatively light amount of permanent/long-term changes for 8 or 9 months of debt cap at current deficit rates. This "plan" is effectively a turn of the doubling cube, with next year's Presidential election providing the higher stakes for the next round. In context of this "plan", the recent GOP divisions and resulting rework of Speaker Boehner's original proposal boil down to arguments over how the payload is divided between this year's current or next year's "double-stakes" rounds.
So, all GOP negotiations to this point have been in bad faith, and the various proposals summarized in the above graphic are mostly academic. I suppose if 40 seats of obstruction in the Senate were a Super-Majority, 200-whatever seats in the House acting on behalf of the entire Congress and White House should be called a Super-Duper Majority.
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