America wakes up this morning with the specter of a self-inflicted national default behind us, at least until 2013, according to the deal announced last night.
That is unequivocally a good thing for our economy not to mention our national sanity. It's a good thing in the same way that ceasing to bang yourself on the head with a hammer would be a good thing.
But really, what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks (sorry, I've got young kids) was that about?!
If your conclusion is that Democrats got rolled because the President is a lousy negotiator, I disagree. Not on his negotiating skills... as someone said in comments, I wouldn't want him in the auto showroom with me when I'm bargaining for a better price. I disagree that better negotiating skills would have made a big difference. The problem goes much deeper.
What did we just go through and what does it mean for our national politics, our fiscal and economic policy?
What does it mean to cut $3 trillion in government spending? How will it affect retirement security? Education? Jobs in the short run and investment over the long run? Does it put us on a sustainable fiscal path.
We're about to agree to cut $1 trillion from something called discretionary spending. That probably sounds great to some folks and bad to others. But what does it mean?
The president bragged on this very point last night, telling America that discretionary spending as a share of the economy will come down to its lowest level since Eisenhower. As if we've all been walking around thinking, "if only we could get this budget category down to Ike levels, everything would fall into place."
In fact, these cuts will hurt our ability to pursue what I view as most positive aspects of the president's economic agenda -- investment in infrastructure, clean energy, research, education. They will pinch programs that are already budget constrained...programs that help low income people with child care, housing, and community services. (One piece to watch for here -- defense spending is also in this category, and is supposed to account for about one-third of the cuts...that helps, of course, take pressure of these other parts.)
Then, in part two of the deal, we unleash the gang-of-twelve who are assigned to come up with $1.5 trillion more in deficit savings.
They'll be hitting the entitlements -- Social Security, Mcare, Mcaid -- and more defense, but if they deadlock -- a non-trivial probability -- automatic cuts ensue.
The White House, showing a bit of actual bargaining skill, tells us that "the sequester would be divided equally between defense and non-defense program, and it would exempt Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, programs for low-income families, and civilian and military retirement. Likewise, any cuts to Medicare would be capped and limited to the provider side."
OK -- that sounds good. But it just raises deeper questions: after you've already taken $1 trillion out of the system, how the heck do you come up with $1.2 trillion in cuts without hitting these rich targets that Republicans are obviously gunning for?
And remember, these automatic cuts are spending only. No revs allowed. Which raises another question: can we really achieve fiscal sustainability without new revenues? That one has an answer: no.
Here's the point of all this:
This was an ugly debate where reckless ideologues got the better of the grown-ups in the room who were not willing to risk the economy to protect the government.
But before you go blaming the grown-ups, and I totally agree they're terrible negotiators, understand that the grown-ups had virtually no-one behind them. Sure, there was me and Jon Cohn and Ezra Klein and a bunch of others who tried to explain the stakes, but as usual, we were marching in front of a parade with few behind us.
If too many Americans don't believe in or understand what government does to help them, to offset recessions, to protect their security in retirement and in hard times, to maintain the infrastructure, to provide educational opportunities and health care decent enough to offset the disadvantages so many are born with...if those functions are unknown, underfunded, and/or carried out poorly, why should they care about how much this deal or the next one cuts?
Those of us who do care about the above will not defeat those who strive to get rid of it all by becoming better tacticians. We will only find success when a majority of Americans agrees with us that government is something worth fighting for.
This post originally appeared at Jared Bernstein's On The Economy blog.
Chris Weigant: Which Three Democratic Senators?
Ike warned about the military/industrial complex, it has become so.
We have absolutely nothing to show for our many invasions of foreign countries except many thousands
of dead or maimed soldiers & unfathomable debt.
The point is - the majority of people supported Obama's debt reduction plan. However, they happily would have let the debt ceiling expire if a compromise wasn't reached.
What the American people are concerned about are the real numbers, with unemployment at the top of the list, followed by things like the extortion of our primarily private health care system (even under our hobbled Medicare and Medicaid programs, which obscenely are not allowed to negotiate prices) and Social Security.
If we didn't insist in polls on unnaturally isolating the so-called debt problem (one, incidentally, manufactured by banks around the world), and the actual will of the American people were reflected in Washington, we'd be having a very different debate, one in which spending would be greatly increased to shore up our pitiful little fragments of a social safety net first and in which we'd come up with a real stimulus plan to prime the economy.
Only after all this was accomplished -- maybe a few years later -- would anyone even begin to think about maybe reducing the deficit. But certainly not before we built a better future that would enable us to easily pay off the debt instead of condemning our children to lives of desperate poverty because we didn't have the courage to step up and spend to build when the times demanded.
Lawrence O' Donnell was absolutely right when he said that after so much brilliant maneuvering, Obama inexplicably blinked. He had absolutely no reason to- if he were actually paying attention to what the majority of (sane) America said they want- a "clean" bill with actual shared sacrifices (mix of cuts and revenue- with some revenue coming from those who can afford to pay a little more)- and no cuts to Medicare or Social Security.
A bankrupt government is of no use to anyone, doesn't matter what politics they profess to follow.
Write your representative every week. Email is excellent.
Tell them what you want done that week. Put that in the subject line.
Priority One for these people is getting re-elected.
If the music is loud enough they will dance.
Hint: Sign up for the rep's newsletter.
You may find a reply box at the bottom.
It saves typing in your name and address every time.
I believe that this is already true.
We will only find success when we recapture our media away from interests that lie and propagandize against the public interest.
Sorry, but is is FLATLY WRONG.
The media has apparently given you this impression, Jared, but it's NOT TRUE.
The truth is that there's a legion of us who know what's going on and who have followed this closely and WE ARE BEING IGNORED BY THE MEDIA to give the false impression you reported.
The truth also is that the media NEVER reports about the left - and, indeed, anything but the hard right - in any way that could possibly be seen as positive. They artificially make our numbers look small as it serves their interests to keep such a mem alive.