In Which I Agree With Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell says Obama's budget is "not serious."

He's right. It's not serious.

A budget that doubled - no, tripled - funding for Pell Grants, LIHEAP, food stamps, unemployment compensation and TANF would be serious.

A budget that paid for those increases by restoring the republicans' 90 percent marginal tax rates for the rich would be serious.

A budget that appropriated $1 trillion for infrastructure construction - highways, bridges, water and sewer system, schools, freight rail, high-speed passenger rail, upgraded electrical grid - thus creating millions of new, well-paid jobs would be serious.

A budget that cut defense spending in half by cancelling unneeded hardware, ending welfare for contractors and withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan would be serious.

But President Obama is not serious about "winning the future." He's playing tiddlywinks with people's lives.

Once again, he is opening negotiations with an already fatally compromised package. He justified it by saying it's the best he can get.

It probably is the best he can get. But the "best you can get" is what you're supposed to end up with at the end of negotiations. You never make "the best you can get" your opening bid.

If the absolute minimum you have to have at the end of negotiations is X, then you start out saying you absolutely have to have 2X. Or maybe 10X. Then you negotiate down, knowing you won't go below X, and hoping to get 2X.

Barack Obama is not stupid. He knows that the rethuglicans are going to demand massive tax cuts and spending cuts. He knows that if he really wanted to end up with any spending and tax increases at all in the final budget, he would have to open negotiations with humongous spending and tax increases. Yet he didn't.

On second thought, maybe he is serious - serious about hammering the final nails in the coffin of the middle-class economy, and making permanent the feudal serf-and-lords system that drives rethuglican wet dreams.

In his first press conference on the budget, Obama said:

"We need to cut spending, fight for jobs."

Those are mutually exclusive goals, Mr. President. Why do I think you're willing to sacrifice jobs for spending cuts instead of the reverse?

Down With Tyranny:

Obama's budget is treacherous ground for committed liberals and trusted tribunes for legitimate rights of working people and others who can't afford to hire K Street lobbyists. Arizona Congressman Raúl Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus handled it diplomatically while staying true to his beliefs and those of his constituents:

“The president’s proposed budget makes significant cuts to several important federal efforts. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) would see funding drop from $5.1 billion to $2.5 billion, which has rightly prompted concerns about why families struggling to keep warm in winter are being asked to shoulder more financial burden than Wall Street executives. Cutting dirty energy subsidies has to be a priority. Are we going to continue paying oil and gas companies to charge poor families more for winter heating than they can afford?

The president’s commitment to funding education is admirably highlighted in this proposal. However, other valuable programs such as community development block grants are being gutted. Nickel and diming our way to economic recovery, especially on the backs of working Americans who did nothing to cause our economic problems, is not the right way to go. Rather than slashing LIHEAP and community grants, which didn’t cause this recession and generate more in economic activity than they cost, we have to look at the kinds of structural decisions that we’ve put off for too long. Reining in our military expenditures cannot wait forever. Setting appropriate tax levels for the top two percent of earners, who got a break in last year’s tax package when Republicans filibustered a Democratic middle class tax cut bill, has to happen if we’re serious about fiscal responsibility.

We need to take a hard look not just at this year’s numbers or next year’s numbers, but at our entire approach to budgeting. Ending federal payouts to oil, coal and timber companies who only use them to line executives’ pockets is an excellent way to start. We need to look at common sense ways to raise revenue for the public good and save money over the long term, not just cut assistance for low income families until there’s nothing left.”

And earlier, this:

Yesterday Paul Krugman summed up a first-look at Obama's conservative budget beautifully in two elegant paragraphs:

There was an old Washingtoon, probably from the mid-1980s, in which Democrats meet to plan their new centrist strategy-- which consists of tax cuts for the rich, reduced spending on the needy, and big defense budgets. “But how is this different from the Republicans?” asks one member of the group. “Compassion,” replies the leader. “We care about the victims of our policies.”

That’s pretty much my initial reaction to what we know so far about the Obama budget. It’s much less awful than the Republican proposal, but it moves in the same direction: listening to the administration, you’d think that discretionary spending, not health care, is at the heart of our long-run deficit problems-- and you’d also think that the job of rescuing the economy was done, with unemployment still at 9 percent.

SNIP

Yes, of course the Republican budget is much, much worse. So does that mean it is our fate to always have to chose between an F and a D or C?

Of course the repug cuts help rich people and fuck over everybody else - what do you expect from a pig but a grunt?

President Obama, however, has no such excuse.

Kevin Drum:

I don't think you need to make up anything new and complicated to explain this. They want to cut the nutrition program because it's welfare for poor people. They want to cut the nonproliferation budget because it represents squishy liberal idealism. And they want to cut the IRS budget because rich people don't like being audited. Other parts of the GOP proposal include cuts to rail projects, the EPA, NOAA, Bill Clinton's program to put more cops on the street, the NSF, energy efficiency programs, the SEC, green building programs, clean water funding, employment training, various health programs, Head Start, community service, public broadcasting, foreign aid, rental assistance and other housing programs, FEMA, and both CDC and NHS. I'll confess that I don't quite get the last two: do Republicans think that capturing the House means we'll have fewer natural disasters and less disease? But the rest of this stuff is really straightforward: they're all programs that benefit poor people, hurt rich people, or just generally stink a little too much of liberalism.

But then, what do you expect? They're Republicans. What else would you expect them to cut?

No, the problem is with Democrats who keep babbling about more cuts instead of demanding higher taxes.

Crooks and Liars has the video of Robert Reich explaining that the whole issue of the deficit and debt is irrelevant – “the wrong debate about the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

At The Nation, John Nichols explains how Obama's budget fails the moral test.

Steve M. points out that Obama is still playing Fuck the Liberal Base:

Republicans pick cuts that will please their base. Obama looks at his base and says, "Screw it -- in 2012, who are they going to vote for? Republicans?" Polls say New England is solidly blue, so he thinks he can risk shafting New England and other cold-weather areas on heating assistance. Polls say young people still support him, so he can cut Pell grants. Many of the states that get grants under the Great Lakes initiative -- Illinois, New York, Michigan -- are states he probably thinks are in the bag in 2012. So that can get cut, too.

Republicans provide constituent service. Democrats provide the exact opposite.

And don't be fooled by Obama's already-broken promise to end the bush/obama tax cuts for the rich.

The Obama budget again holds to the idea that we should extend the Bush tax cuts on all incomes up to $250,000, while letting the tax cuts over that expire.

That, of course, is after the temporary agreement that was reached in the lame-duck session expires. But, hell, if we're talking right now about budgeting for the long term, why not stress that idea of eliminating the tax cuts on the rich two years from now? I know it's not politically feasible. I know it can't pass a GOP House. But that kind of talk is what would happen if Democrats approached the budget the way Republicans do.

If that were the case, Democrats would make a great show of trying to raise taxes on the rich right now, even if the increases didn't take effect for two years. They'd do this to make the point that it's fiscally responsible -- and they'd do it to please their base. But Democrats just don't do politics the way Republicans do.

Digby sees more proof that Obama has no understanding, much less empathy, for the people suffering under his budget priorities:

And this isn't really about programs President Obama "cares about" or about how "tough" it is for him. President Obama will not have to personally worry about these things and neither will his children, so the idea that he "cares" is just a tiny bit abstract in this context. This is about actual human beings and their ability to survive now and build a decent future.

The main problem with all this, of course, is that he willingly signed a tax cut extension for the wealthiest people on the planet just two months ago even as they are making money hand over fist as it is, so any talk about "shared sacrifice" rings just a little bit hollow now. If he wants to be honest about this and admit that he's catering to spoiled plutocrats and Wall Street Demi-Gods because he truly believes that he needs to sacrifice ordinary Americans on the alter of their egos, that's one thing. But blowing smoke about how this hurts him just as much as the college kid who has to drop out in a terrible labor market --- but he's willing to make the sacrifice and so should we --- well, it is too cynically cheap for words.

SNIP

Update: I am watching Obama's pal the "savvy businessman" Jamie Dimond on Fareed Zakaria right now whine and snivel like a tired toddler about how unfair everyone is to rich bankers and I want to put my foot through the TV. He makes weepy John Boehner look like Clint Eastwood in "Hang 'Em High" by comparison. The fact that the world economy was brought low by people with such spoiled character and mediocre intellect is not surprising. But it's truly stunning that they are still calling the shots. We desperately need political leadership that has the imagination and guts to confront these people instead of kowtowing to them or we are truly doomed.

We are looking at the complete dismantling of not just the social safety net and the middle-class economy, but the very principle that an honest day's work deserves an honest day's pay.

Obama's play-budget is an abomination because it fails utterly to put the brakes on our headline rush to a lords-and-serfs economy.