Use That Mandate Or Lose It

If repugs had taken the White House and the Senate, you know damn well they'd use that mandate to destroy the last vestiges of the Great Society, the New Deal and the Enlightenment. 

Hello, Galtian Paradise; good-bye Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, disaster assistance, public education, national parks, toll-free highways, clean water, safe food, consumer protection and the minimum wage, just for starters.

So if for nothing other than pure self-defense, President Obama and congressional Democrats should use the mandate voters gave them on Tuesday to expand, strengthen and entrench the liberal policies that hold this nation together.

Digby:

If I had my way, he'd take Robert Reich's advice: 

When the applause among Democrats and recriminations among Republicans begin to quiet down -- probably within the next few days -- the president will have to make some big decisions. The biggest is on the economy.

His victory and the pending "fiscal cliff" give him an opportunity to recast the economic debate. Our central challenge, he should say, is not to reduce the budget deficit. It's to create more good jobs, grow the economy, and widen the circle of prosperity.

The deficit is a problem only in proportion to the overall size of the economy. If the economy grows faster than its current 2 percent annualized rate, the deficit shrinks in proportion. Tax receipts grow, and the deficit becomes more manageable.

But if economic growth slows -- as it will, if taxes are raised on the middle class and if government spending is reduced when unemployment is still high -- the deficit becomes larger in proportion. That's the austerity trap Europe finds itself in. We don't want to go there...

The way to ensure continued growth is to continue the president's payroll tax cut and extend the Bush tax cuts for income under $250,000, and continue government spending.

The way to increase growth is to permanently exempt the first $20,000 of income from the payroll tax and make up for lost revenues by raising the ceiling on income subject to it (that ceiling is now $110,100). And increase government spending -- especially on critical public investments like education, job training, and infrastructure.

President Obama can define his mandate however he chooses. And he knows by now that he will never win over the right no matter what he does. So he should probably be aware of this:

A long string of lawmakers who supported the Bowles-Simpson plan — which would slash Social Security and Medicare benefits while lowering corporate taxes — went down in flames last night.

In fact, almost every candidate who was personally endorsed by the authors of the plan was defeated.

Remember: The "fiscal cliff" is a con job. Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. What the economy needs is more spending, not less.

Krugman:

David Dayen makes a very good point, which I missed: during the Hofstra debate, in which questions were posed by members of the public rather than the Beltway elite, there wasn’t a single question about the deficit. Not one. The public really doesn’t care.

And you know what? Neither do financial markets, which continue to lend to the U.S. government at incredibly low rates.

Meanwhile, the results from austerity are in — and it’s now clear that the adverse economic impacts of austerity in a depressed economy are much worse than the elite imagined (although Keynesian economists knew better), and are in fact so severe that austerity is largely self-defeating, having little impact on the budget deficit even in the short run because reduced revenue takes away much of the initial savings. Once you take long-run effects into account, austerity is almost surely self-defeating.

Yet deficit fever, with demands for spending cuts right away, has dominated policy discussion for almost three years, with all the Very Serious People believing that by pounding on this issue they were demonstrating their Very Seriousness.

 Fuck the deficit. People got no money. People got no jobs.