Now that we’ve all had time to absorb President Obama’s deficit reduction message, I wonder if the left- and right-wingers were listening to the same speech that I heard.
I expected hyper-partisanship in the reactions. That’s the norm these days.
But the left-wingers (much to my surprise) embraced this speech as an inspirational, transcendent moment in the Obama presidency that refuted tax cuts as an economic tool and rejected Republican policies going back to Ronald Reagan.
Huh?
On the right, they trashed the speech as unpresidential, as well as harsh and petulant in its criticism of Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan.
What?
I heard a reasoned, low-key address, not a serving of red meat to fire up the ideologues on the left or the right. By my count, this speech had one applause line.
So, let’s knock off the nonsense.
Bipartisan/non-partisan groups, while not necessarily applauding the Obama address, saluted the president for setting the framework for a balanced approach.
At The Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz said Obama’s “eat-your-peas speech” was lacking in specifics, except on taxing the rich and rejecting the Republicans’ voucher program for Medicare.
“But when it came to his blueprint for slashing the deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years,” Kurtz said, “Obama painted in the broadest strokes. He would cut Pentagon spending (he didn’t say how), while protecting medical research, clean energy, new airports, job training and on and on. He would cut spending on prescription drugs through negotiations and slow Medicare spending through an independent commission. Good luck with that.”
Prior to the Obama speech, liberals and conservatives had taken up their positions. The lefties implied that very little needs to be undertaken to shore up the budget while the nation is still recovering from the Great Recession.
They were nearly apoplectic when the media focused on Ryan’s plan and called it courageous, if not politically unrealistic.
In a blog the other day with a too-cute headline, “Saving Privatizing Ryan,” liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman objected while reading this fairly vanilla summary in the rival Washington Post: The Republican plan would cut spending on domestic programs while protecting the military and preserving George W. Bush-era tax cuts that disproportionately benefit high earners.
“Um, no,” Krugman said. “It proposes huge additional tax cuts for high earners, over and above the Bush tax cuts — $2.9 trillion worth just over the next decade.”
Then he added this: “My best guess here is that the press corps shies away, consciously or unconsciously, from giving the stark truth about this joke of a plan; after all the praise … it’s hard either to report that knowledgeable people consider the plan a total fraud, or even to be frank about the plan’s extreme features.”
Ah, yes … so objective.
In a separate piece in the Post, also written pre-speech, by Robert Samuelson, he raises the specter that Congress is trying to make big decisions while dealing with a “suicidal” America. Essentially, Samuelson points out that polls show taxpayers want a free lunch – services at current levels, and less (or stable) taxes.
It’s human nature to want more for less. But lawmakers would be wise to accept the fact that most Americans are not well-versed in public policy. And the coming budget debates will require the most wonkish, nuts-and-bolts policy discussions that Washington has seen in years.
Here’s Samuelson: “We in America have created suicidal government … by suicidal, I mean that government has promised more than it can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have.
“But government can’t easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Government’s very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest.”
Then, Samuelson offers some stats that have the blood boiling for Tea Partiers across the nation.
“Few Americans realize the extent of their dependency. The Census Bureau reports that in 2009 almost half (46.2 percent) of the 300 million Americans received at least one federal benefit: 46.5 million, Social Security; 42.6 million, Medicare; 42.4 million, Medicaid; 36.1 million, food stamps; 3.2 million, veterans’ benefits; 12.4 million, housing subsidies.
“The census list doesn’t include tax breaks. Counting those, perhaps three-quarters or more of Americans receive some sizable government benefit. For example, about 22 percent of taxpayers benefit from the home mortgage interest deduction, and a whopping 43 percent from the preferential treatment of employer-provided health insurance, says the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.”
At this point, Samuelson warns that government’s urge to be all things to all people has taken its toll.
“The consequence is political overload: The system can no longer make choices, especially unpleasant choices, for the good of the nation as a whole. Public opinion is hopelessly muddled. Polls by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago consistently show Americans want more spending for education (74 percent), health care (60 percent), Social Security (57 percent) and, indeed, almost everything.
“By the same polls, between half and two-thirds of Americans regularly feel their taxes are too high. In 2010, a paltry 2 percent thought them too low. Big budget deficits follow logically. But of course, most Americans want those trimmed, too.
“The trouble is that, despite superficial support for “deficit reduction” or “tax reform,” few Americans would surrender their own benefits, subsidies and tax breaks — a precondition for success.”
