Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

And Here We Go Again

subtitle: Will some ever learn?

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Remember the outrage from some quarters on the budget deal Obama negotiated last spring. On how once again he had sold us out. And then a few days pass and some serious folks start running the numbers and what happens oooops. It seems that he actually hadn’t. The Republicans had bought into smoke, mirrors and accounting  tricks. Accounting has never been their strong suit.

So here we are again and this is starting to creep into the saner Democratic/Progressive blogs.

There are no cuts to this years federal budget. For the one that start Oct 2011 there will be a cut of $21 billion. The total budget this year is 3.4 trillion (that includes entitlements). So, if my arithmetic is correct the cut is about 0.6 of 1 percent! If one takes only discretionary spending of $1.3 trillion then the cut is 1.6%. And my guess is that this cut is not to be taken to the actual budget but to the “inflation adjusted budget” which will be up about 3%, so there is probably a net increase planned for the discretionary budget of over 2% and an increase of the entitlement budget of over 5%. So the whole thing is smoke and mirrors. All of the rest of the changes are back loaded to “later” or to “after there is a committee agreement’.. The theatre will continue.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2…

I fully expect this to slowly start sinking in elsewhere and to be ignored. God forbid they should admit an error. They will just move on to the next faux outrage.


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 112 Comments

112 comments

  1. fogiv

    This doesn’t surprise me in the least. As much as the hardcore internet left like to pretend their ‘criticisms’ are based on policy, they aren’t*. What motivates the old, affluent, and pasty white GOSsacks to refer to the President as Dear Leader is often not policy. I’ll let ya’ll decide what does.

    *Not broadbrushing here. I think we all know the gang I’m talking about.  

  2. Strummerson

    and polls suggest that they are a much much much smaller part of “the base,” which is made up of both moderates and progressives together, then they think.  The vast majority of progressives still support Obama.  The vast majority of moderates still like and agree with Obama more than with his competitors.  Shocking that the polls today indicate that while this is supposed to be a Tee Party victory (and I strongly recommend that we adopt that spelling as a habit, for they are more about country club interests than any vision of a robust democracy of enfranchised and productive equal citizens) most TP supporters hate the compromise while most dems actually support it.

    The problem is that Obama has once again played pretty astounding defense.  Here’s where sports analogies break down.  Defense wins championships, but it’s a bad bet for presidencies.  And electoral issues aside, our economy needs Obama to play offense, to push for a more robust keynesian solution.  Austerity will not bring about prosperity.  It will increase the debt load.  Cutting taxes will not create jobs, will not reinvigorate markets, will not increase revenues, will not serve the national interests in this situation and it will also undermine the interests of middle class Americans.  And America, like all modern nation states, stands or falls with its middle class.

    Unfortunately, Obama does not seem to have or want the disposition to do this.  And I reject as valid any response that sounds like “what do you want him to do given the context?”  I don’t know.  He’s our leader.  We need him to lead.  He and his team need to find the way forward that none of us can see.  That’s his job.  But I think that economically, he now has to make the case that his opponents are trying to solve a national and systemic problem with dogmas and slogans based on discredited theories.  There is a real alternative that can work.  He has to make that case.  Electorally, this might be a winner even if he fails.  He cannot run on being the owner of bad compromises that avoided worse outcomes.  He must run with a plan.  He must represent an alternative and convince the electorate that his alternative is not just viable, but necessary.  Chris Matthews pointed out a problematic number this evening: Obama has declared a renewed focus on jobs now 7 times in 3 years.

    He needs to champion a different approach.  We need him to do it more vocally and effectively, both for our economic future and for his electoral prospects.  But I’m relatively convinced he won’t do this.  He might still be reelected, but his reelection will only represent avoidance of something worse.  That will not be good enough.  It’s not about him, after all, it’s about our future.  We need an intervention, not simply a competent manager.  He’s our leader and we need him to lead more aggressively now.  

    And if the most pious of the kossasses cannot see that he’s the captain of our ship and undermining him will only make foundering more likely at this juncture, then fuck ’em.  They are as misguided as the Tee Partiers and the only thing that good about them is that unlike their counterparts they are politically irrelevant.

  4. fogiv

    came across this comment at GOS:

    If this gets like a Third Way Free Republic (41+ / 0-)

    then it’s going to lose a lot of people.

    Look, it’s rational, right now, in fact probably mainstream to say that most Democrats are disappointed in Obama – some Democratic members of Congress have said they are not sure they trust him.

    Obama’s done some good things.  But his embrace of “Third Way” voo-doo economics is disastrous for America, whether its an embrace as a strategic feint or the real thing.

    http://www.dailykos.com/commen…

    In response to the ‘most democrats’ line, I posted the same Gallup poll (83% lib/dem approval) that I dumped upthread here. The response(s):

    I think the word SUPPORT (6+ / 0-)

    shall not be taken too seriously —

    Given the wast emptiness of anything and anyone GOPers – yes — I support Obama — but only because there is nothing that I could support from the GOP.

    In some ways Obama should be entirely grateful to the GOP for being so vile, so nasty

    That regardless of how annoyed I am with Obama — there is NO way that I would vote ever again for anyone that has an R/GOP/Repiblican by their name.

    So – it is my guess that many others feel like this too —- so support does not really mean much.

    and

    Yeah, I’m not sure I get the support polling. (0+ / 0-)

    Everytime I’ve been polled, and I’m asked if I support something, there’s a follow-up to ask whether that support is “somewhat” or “strongly”.  I wouldn’t be surprised that a lot of that support for Obama was “somewhat”, but there are some that think that any support is automatically of the “strongly” category.

    And there you have it: Most Democrats are disappointed.

  5. janicket

    … potentially very good news indeed:

    Drug prices to plummet in wave of expiring patents

    Quite a lot of info at that link, but the first few paragraphs tell the heart of the tale:

    The cost of prescription medicines used by millions of people every day is about to plummet.

    The next 14 months will bring generic versions of seven of the world’s 20 best-selling drugs, including the top two: cholesterol fighter Lipitor and blood thinner Plavix.

    The magnitude of this wave of expiring drugs patents is unprecedented. Between now and 2016, blockbusters with about $255 billion in global annual sales will go off patent, notes EvaluatePharma Ltd., a London research firm. Generic competition will decimate sales of the brand-name drugs and slash the cost to patients and companies that provide health benefits.

    Top drugs getting generic competition by September 2012 are taken by millions every day: Lipitor alone is taken by about 4.3 million Americans and Plavix by 1.4 million. Generic versions of big-selling drugs for blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, depression, high triglycerides, HIV and bipolar disorder also are coming by then.

    The flood of generics will continue for the next decade or so, as about 120 brand-name prescription drugs lose market exclusivity, according to prescription benefits manager Medco Health Solutions Inc.

    Now, how will that affect our economy?  It will suck a metric buttload of money out of health care spending, for starters, thus helping to bend the beloved cost curve.  It should spur — should already have spurred — Big Pharma to feverishly research new drugs to make patented profits on.  Heck, if people can afford to take their medicine as they should, it could help with health care costs by reducing the amount of overall medical care those people need.  At least some of the money now being spent on prescriptions would be freed up to purchase other goods and services.

  6. HappyinVT

    Apparently cuts didn’t go deep enough and there was no revenue in the deal.  Do I stock up on canned goods after all?

  7. John Allen

    This isn’t entirely off-topic, because it has to do with infrastructure spending.

    Broadband access in this country sucks, big time. It’s ridiculous that the country that created the internet has the worst broadband access of any developed country. Forget high-speed rail. Where the hell is our high-speed internet access?

    Comcast raised rates in this area, once again. My cable+internet is now $155 per month. I told the woman at Comca$t that I was going to cancel the cable tv portion of my account as soon as I got my antenna hooked up. She told me that my internet access would go up to $65 per month if I dropped tv service. I told her that was outrageous and that I would be looking into dsl or another alternative. Well, silly me. The only dsl I can get in my area is from AT&T. It’s their slowest access – 1.5mbps. The only other access I could get would be satellite or 4G through t-mobile. They both have constraints on the amount you can download per month and would cost more than what comcast wants. What a sorry state of affairs. Monopolies suck. Where is Teddy Roosevelt when you need him?

     

  9. janicket

    On a story about the GOP Presidential candidates’ predictable blaming of Obama for the S&P downgrade:  Running overwhelmingly against the Republicans and especially the Tea Party zealots as being the ones responsible, not the President (and, spoken of to a lesser degree, not the Democrats).  The usual elephantine apologists are vastly outnumbered.

    One comment I particularly enjoyed:

    Tea Party: “Yes, we had a huge party where everyone thought it was a great idea to burn down the house. Then the whole neighborhood caught on fire and we thought that was awesome, because the neighborhood looked better in 1850. Everyone is mad at what we did? Blame it on the homeowner whose house we torched. If they didn’t have that house we never could have burned down the neighborhood.”

  11. Strummerson

    Check it out, Carmen Reinhardt is arguing for debt forgiveness for lower income Americans: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/…

    David Frum’s comment at: http://www.frumforum.com/anoth…

    Conservative economic commentators often respond to this kind  of thinking with name-calling: “Obama-bot”; “socialist.” I’ve received my share. But let me put this challenge back to the epithet-hurling conservative commentators: If your nostrums can no longer command the support of economists as smart as Carmen Reinhart, Vince Reinhart, John Makin, Bruce Bartlett, etc. – doesn’t that suggest that the problem is less with the smart economists and much more with the nostrums?

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