Lemkin

"We shouldn’t dread the debt limit. We should welcome it. It’s an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction."

— John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, tipping his hand. I’d say this is the first time you can see real fear of the status quo. More broadly, that doing nothing will fix most of the deficit over the near term by eliminating the Bush tax cuts and a few other money-sapping provisions. Were it deemed reasonably likely that Obama will win reelection in the fall, they’d quickly calculate that the only chance the GOP has for full extension of the Bush tax cuts is to force the issue before that happens. You do that by holding the full faith and credit of these United States hostage. Again. And the only way they get there is by reneging on their previous agreements and hope nobody remembers that they’re doing so. Nothing that has transpired in the past 20 years leads me to believe they are wrong on this count.
Sadly for them: they think this cunning scheme to yet again needlessly and recklessly and by choice yet again delivering the nation to the economic precipice has the benefit of being a big political winner for them. Sadly for the rest of us: you can only put this particular gun to the hostage’s head so many times before it gets fired. Maybe this time, maybe next. But soon.

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Even more reason to do nothing. The joy of gridlock will hike capital gains taxes up to 25% in the absence of any actions on the part of Congress. Barring anything actually, you know, happening in the Congress, Mitt and other Masters of the Universe will finally see something approaching a reasonable tax rate. Very Serious People will tell you otherwise, but for the next few years gridlock is decidedly Our Friend.

Uh, We Did Elect Him

jeffmiller:

“First, in addressing global terror and violent extremism, we need the kind of comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy I called for last August. We need to strengthen security partnerships to take out terrorist networks, while investing in education and opportunity. We need to give our national security agencies the tools they need, while restoring the adherence to rule of law that helps us win the battle for hearts and minds. This means closing Guantanamo, restoring habeas corpus, and respecting civil liberties.”

— Candidate Obama, 2008 (eBooks, Databases, and other searchable on-line content from askSam)

I wish we had elected this man.

Perhaps you are forgetting that Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, put the kibosh on any movement towards even beginning to wind down Guantanamo. Obama did exactly as he said he would and got the ball rolling on the Executive side; he is not a dictator (reports on FOXnews to the contrary). The onus is on all of us, the citizens in various districts, for not pressuring our individual representatives to drop their wrong-headed opposition to a return to rule of law. As FDR said (and Obama frequently quoted on the campaign trail) “You’ve convinced me… Now go out and make me do it.” Precisely. The Presidency is not a political-suicide pact. Underestimating the limitless potential for utterly craven demagoguery around this issue doesn’t in any way change the fact that he walked (partway) into a political chipper shredder trying to restore sensibility in this domain. There was never a broad based, citizen uprising in support of making this entirely sensible return to normalcy, so it died on the vine. Period.

We are getting precisely the government we deserve. We vote these tools into Congress and then blame all the rest of those tools in DC because our tool brought in some needless and destructive water management dollars to the district.

Without an educated and engaged electorate, nothing will change. Inventing supposed lies, “flipflops,” or failures on the part of Obama doesn’t educate anyone.

Do nothing, Congress. Ezra Klein and EJ Dionne both write today about the benefits of simply letting various existing policies expire…doing so would net $7.1 TRILLION in deficit savings over the same decade that the “Super-committee” can’t find a way to reliably extract $1T. This path requires no votes, it requires no legislation, it requires no GOP assistance of any kind. Gridlock is all that’s required to make it happen.
So why is it no Serious Person (to whom deficits are, always have been, and always will be the preeminent policy question come-what-may) ever talks about the biggest deficit reduction plan currently out there, a plan that outstrips all other extant deficit plans by several orders of magnitude? Because they don’t actually care about deficits. None of them do. Because deficit reduction is not the goal. The GOP and their media enablers do not care about deficits. They care about eliminating social spending in this country to lower taxes on the richest 1%. Period. Everything and anything else that happens is collateral damage to that desired policy outcome.

Gridlock works. Gridlock will help America. Relying on gridlock is the best possible negotiating tool for Democrats. Period. Be prepared to end the Bush tax cuts. All of them. Be prepared to end the “doc fix.” All of it. Be prepared to end it all. Then you begin to drive policy decisions and have actual governing authority to get jobs bills and other things done.

Instead, they will, of course, continue to negotiate with themselves and parrot right-wing talking points. This is why they fail.
Just sit there quietly and let it all expire. Whenever the GOP talks about deficits, you bring up the $7T you are cutting deficits by over the next decade. When the GOP gets tired of that, realizes you are serious about this, and is ready to talk, they’ll come to you. Then you set the terms. Then you begin to govern. This is how politics works. The Democrat seems to have largely forgotten this. Again: this is why they fail.

State of the Art →

John Cole at Balloon Juice officially wins blogging for the week:

In the long term, assuming [some version of an Obama jobs] plan gets through the House (it won’t), then we get to go through our usual drama of the blue dogs from Red States (Manchin, Nelson, Landrieu, McCaskill, etc.), Lieberman just so he can continue to be the world’s preeminent douchenozzle, and some others I am sure I am missing. They’ll cockblock it on the Senate side, moaning about the program being a deficit buster while conveniently ignoring the fact that each one of them represents a welfare state sucking at the federal teat. Finally, at the 11th hour, Snowe and Collins will swoop in and offer tax cuts for the ultra-rich as a sweetener and they will support it. At this point, Bernie Sanders or whatever progressive hero of the moment will claim he can’t support anything with tax cuts for the rich in it. This will bring things to a standstill for a couple more weeks until another shitty jobs report comes out, and the Senate, acting in the fierce urgency of when-the-fuck-ever will pass some piece of shit that is too small, unfocussed, and does nothing other than provide the left with another opportunity to fracture and start flinging shit at each other. Republicans will have spent the entire time using procedural tricks to slow things down while having Frank Luntz work on the framing of the issue so that by the time it is about to hit the President’s desk, they will already have a cute name, the talking points will be distributed, and we’ll all be hearing about the new “Porkulus” or “Obamacare” or whatever the fuck childish name they come up with. In three months time, when employment hasn’t picked up because we are actually in the same god damned depression we’ve been in since 2007, Rick Perry can claim that Keynesian ideology has once again been disproven. Because everyone hates the bill, Friedman, Brooks, and other members of the Centrist jihad will claim this as proof that the bill is great.

Read the whole thing.

GOP Loves Tax Hikes →

Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok:

If Republicans have their way, taxes will increase next year by $120 billion. Republicans in favor of tax increases? Sadly, yes.

The post goes on to lay out its theories on the GOP loving only tax cuts for the rich and so forth. But I think this is wrong.

The House GOP is against this particular tax cut continuing solely because Obama wants it to continue. Any policy underlying that singular issue is beside the point. “Obama’s for it” is reason enough for them to oppose anything to the bitter end.

A simple experiment would clear this up for the broader electorate. Obama should choose two or three of the most dearly held GOP beliefs and take them up. Argue for their immediate passage. But he should be sure to stand clear of the microphone, as there will be a stampede of Tea Klanners vying to be the first to refudiate lower capital gains taxes, or an end to the “death” tax, or massive corporate welfare giveaways to our Galtian Overlords.
We’ve said it before, and Serious People tend to think it’s some kind of a joke when you point it out to them, but if he wants to succeed on the policy front Obama needs to come out against wind power, trains, lower taxes, and single payer health care. It’s the only way those issues will ever get any traction from either party.

Try it and see. It’s the awful truth of today’s politics and sadly how things “work.”

"In short, the Boehner plan would force policymakers to choose among cutting the incomes and health benefits of ordinary retirees, repealing the guts of health reform and leaving an estimated 34 million more Americans uninsured, and savaging the safety net for the poor. It would do so even as it shielded all tax breaks, including the many lucrative tax breaks for the wealthiest and most powerful individuals and corporations."

— Robert Greenstein, writing about the “Boehner plan” at the nonpartisan CBPP.
Said it approximately one billion times: this isn’t some side affect. It’s the intended consequence. The debt ceiling is simply a useful construct for ramming the same old policy of “zero social safety net, all wealth and benefits to top 2%” GOP dream government setup. All it is, was, or ever will be. If they fix the debt ceiling this morning, they will be using the next federal budget (which will need to be done to have a government post-September) to push the exact same line by this afternoon.
The GOP does not care about deficits. If they did, they’d have taken any of the four increasingly huge deficit cutting plans offered them. They want low to nonexistent tax rates on the top 2%. Simple arithmetic will show anyone that this means eliminating the social safety net; as Ezra Klein has noted: the federal government is better thought of as an insurance conglomerate with a large standing army. To cut taxes to “GOP preferred” levels, services have to go. And to get rid of those hugely popular and helpful services, a large number of people using them have to be convinced said services (and government in general) aren’t working or even in their interest at all. This is the core GOP governing strategy in fifty words or less. Everything they have done and said in the past several decades of tight, lockstep messaging with the aid of the most popular “news” network on television has been aimed at and in service of making those 48 words reality.
Everyone not already up the ladder will kindly go die in the streets. Today they’re using the debt ceiling, tomorrow it will be the FY2012 budget, the next day it will be veterans benefits or whatever else comes to hand. And until they are forced to pay a steep political price for steadfastly using gridlock and economic hostage situations as a negotiating strategy, they will continue to use them. That Congressional and Executive Democrats seemingly haven’t figured this out yet is why they fail.

"I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years."

— John Cole, peering in to the future on February 5, 2009.

(Source: washingtonmonthly.com)

"The United States never had a debt ceiling until 1939, and doesn’t need one now. Congress can control debt by its control over revenues and expenditures; all the debt ceiling does is create the possibility that the government will not be able to borrow the money needed to carry out the laws Congress has already passed."

— Mark Kleinman says what should be the first thing out of Obama’s (and every other Democratic) mouth every time a microphone is switched on. Or, perhaps, paired with the depressingly ever-present “God bless you and may God bless America” tagline. Whatever works for them.

Give the utter lack of any unified message on the issue, it’s genuinely remarkable that public opinion has turned so mightily in favor of what you could broadly call the “Obama position” on the debt ceiling. People still don’t seem to grasp what the hell the debt ceiling is or what purpose, if any, that it serves… but they’re beginning to dislike GOP demagoguery on it no matter what. At least we’ve got that going for us.

Obama's Other Card →

Even as the political battle mounts over federal spending, the end result for federal policy is already visible — and clearly favors Republican goals of deep spending cuts and drastically fewer government services.

President Obama entered the fray last week to insist that federal deficits can’t be reduced through spending reductions alone. Federal tax revenue also must rise as part of whatever deficit reduction package Congress approves this summer, he said. Obama has been pushing to end a series of what he calls tax loopholes and tax breaks for the rich.

But even if Obama were to gain all the tax-law changes he wants, new revenue would make up only about 15 cents of each dollar in deficit reduction in the package. An agreement by the Republicans to accept new revenue would be a political victory for Obama because “no new taxes” has been such an article of faith for the GOP.

I think this analysis leaves out a critical piece of the calculation: the December 2012 expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Recall that Obama, above all else, is the “outcomes” President. He’s more than willing to take a temporary political setback or even a seeming political loss in the short term if that in turn leads to the long-term policy outcomes he prefers.

So: to get a deal on the debt ceiling he gives the GOP a fatter ratio of cuts to revenues for now. Keep in mind, these “cuts” are really a framework that then plays out over most of a decade and will ultimately be changed and tuned by several Presidents and Congresses (and that’s assuming they stick to the framework at all).
Next year though, assuming Obama’s reelected, everything changes on the revenue front. If the Congress simply fails to act, the full set of cuts expires. If they act, but the GOP includes extension of the cuts for those making more than ~$200k/yr, Obama vetoes it. And, really, if we assume that the GOP will fail in its efforts to destroy the economy in the next few weeks, Obama likely prefers one of those two outcomes. Why? Again, it’s because they are the best long-term outcomes for the country. That both reflect poorly on the GOP is a bonus side benefit going into the 2014 midterms. To be sure, a tax rise represents real short term pain for the less well off, but that pain yields long term stability and, let’s face it, sanity in the revenue structures of the United States.

Expiration of the Bush tax cuts is a key pillar in the “do nothing” solution for our current deficit/revenue issues. The assumption that all or most of them are going to expire if Obama is reelected needs to be included in any meaningful political calculus regarding the ratio of cuts to revenue increases in the current negotiation. Assuming expiration, you ultimately end up with a number of difficult but doable fixes that can be handled one at a time. If those “fixes” are, you know, paid for, the country will once again be on firm financial footing, complete with a reasonably robust social safety net for as far as the eye can see. This is precisely the outcome Obama is playing for.