GOP Fantasies About Entitlements

WASH POST GREG SARGENT

Politico has a big reported story that claims Obama is searching for a grand bargain involving entitlements and new revenues because he “has no choice.” The basic idea is that, by refusing to deal on the sequester, Republicans have boxed Obama into a position where he must come to the table with entitlement cuts, or be stuck with the sequester cuts.
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 I don’t know how to be any clearer than this, but here goes: Entitlement reforms are on the table. The President’s offer includes Chained CPI for Social Security and means testing for Medicare has also been floated. As for the suggestion that Republicans have drawn a “firm line” against any new revenues from closing loopholes, this gets us back to the most basic fact about the fiscal battle, which is this: There is no conceivable scenario under which Republicans will get serious entitlement cuts without agreeing to new revenues. None.

The President and Senate Dems will never agree to a package that only cuts entitlements. There’s a simple reason for this: From the point of view of Democrats, the sequester cuts are preferable to replacing them with entitlement cuts. There is no imaginable scenario under which Dems would agree to replace the sequester only with entitlement cuts. Such a thing could never be sold to rank and file Democratic officials, let alone to the base.
The Politico piece portrays Obama as having no option other than a grand bargain to avoid both the political backlash from sequester cuts and the showdown over the debt ceiling that could come next month. That may be true, but the flip side of this is that Republicans have no option for avoiding these things other than reaching a deal. And the deal must contain new revenues, because Democrats would prefer to live with the sequester than replace it only with entitlement cuts.

The basic dynamic here is simple for both parties. Either a deal is reached involving new revenues and entitlement cuts, or the sequester continues indefinitely. And it needs to be restated that the sequester is not a good option for Republicans, either, despite all the triumphalism about it. They risk taking the blame for the economic damage it does (Obama does, too, but he’s not up for reelection, and they are), and it doesn’t give them the entitlement cuts they claim to want. Giving Obama more flexibility over the sequester doesn’t really solve anything, either: The magnitude of cuts remains the same, and nothing happens with entitlements. What’s more, it seems that even some Republican officials are realizing that being the party of deep austerity and crisis-to-crisis governing (such as would happen with another debt ceiling fight) is not sustainable over the long term.

[WASHINGTON POST   By obsessing with zeroes on the budget spreadsheet, we send a not-so-subtle signal that the focus of our country is on the phony economy of Washington, instead of the real economy out here in Charlotte and Shreveport and Cheyenne,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who,... is mentioned as a 2016 presidential candidate, said in a speech before the Republican National Committee in January. He added: “A debate about which party can better manage the federal government is a very small and short-sighted debate.”
Jindal, his advisers argue, is not saying that Sen. Paul Ryan’s plan to limit federal spending is a bad thing — rather that the focus needs to be first and foremost on how Republicans can grow the economy rather than shrink the government.
Jindal isn’t the only conservative voice raising questions about the philosophical underpinnings of the Ryan budget.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who praised the first and second editions of Ryan’s budget, was critical of version 3.0, writing:

“Modest deficits are perfectly compatible with fiscal responsibility, and restructuring the biggest drivers of our long-term debt is a much more important conservative goal than holding revenues and outlays equal in the year 2023. What’s more, the quest for perfect balance leaves the House G.O.P. officially committed to a weird, all-pain version of Obamanomics — in which, for instance, we keep the president’s tax increases and Medicare cuts while eliminating his health care law’s assistance to the uninsured.”.]

 WASH POST GREG SARGENT (Cont'd)

The most important fact about the situation — the central fact about it — is that there’s no route to a resolution that doesn’t involve a new cuts/revenues compromise of some kind. As Noam Scheiber detailed  , there is a route to that compromise, albeit a difficult one, that could be viable even if GOP leaders hold out against it. I don’t necessarily think Republicans will agree to new revenues because they actually care about the deficit or about entitlement reform, but it is conceivable that some non-leadership GOP officials may break away and do so simply because the alternative for the GOP, over time, looks a lot worse.

DEPRESSING SCENARIO FOR REBOOBLICANS

WASHINGTON POST Greg Sargent

...Democrats will proceed in the sequester battle,...to wait Republicans out in hopes that they’ll cave in the end. Democrats are hoping that the sequester deepens the divide between defense hawks and spending hawks in a way that makes the GOP position untenable over time.
As Brian Beutler explains:

The most important factor in this fight is probably the reality that Obama doesn’t have to face voters again and thus is willing to veto sequestration replacement bills if they’re composed of spending cuts alone. Congressional Democrats are fully aware of this, too, and that creates a powerful incentive for them to hold the line.
So sequestration will begin. Obama won’t cave. And then the tension sequestration was intended to create — and in fact has created — between defense hawks and the rest of the GOP will intensify and actually splinter the party. ...[Or so we hope.]
 

 I’d only add that Democrats have literally no incentive to do anything other than follow this course. After all, there’s no reason for them to agree to any package of cuts to replace the sequester, since no package of cuts is preferable to them. What’s more, the current public opinion environment favors Democrats on not one, but on two levels. The public overwhelmingly favors the Democrats’ approach to bringing down the deficit — through a mix of spending cuts and new taxes on the wealthy — so Dems are already favored to win the basic policy argument that will unfold and be dramatized for voters throughout the month of March. Democrats will be arguing that we should replace the cuts with something voters actually want. Republicans can only continue to argue for more spending cuts to replace the sequester — which will only deepen the public’s identification of Republicans as the party of the sequester cuts in the first place.

More broadly, this will unfold in an environment in which general opinion about Obama is far more favorable than it is about Republicans. The [most recent]  Pew poll ... finds that an astonishing 62 percent of Americans think the GOP is out of touch with the American people, versus only 46 percent who think that about Dems — a 16 point gap.

It remains unclear how many Republican officials will break with the leadership in the spending/defense divide. Justin Green makes the case that this divide is overstated and that the spending hawks have broad dominance within the GOP. That said, defense hawks like Lindsey Graham and John McCain have now signaled an openness to new revenues. If they mount a very public campaign (including the Sunday shows) to pressure their leadership to accept new revenues, it’s conceivable that divide could deepen....

Ultimately, what will be decisive is how public opinion plays out through March. The current environment suggests Republicans have a lot more work to do to shift the basic dynamic in their favor than Dems do.

False equivalence pundits are part of the problem

“Are you willing to have teachers laid off, or kids not have access to Head Start, or deeper cuts in student loan programs just because you want to protect a special tax interest loophole that the vast majority of Americans don’t benefit from? That’s the choice. That’s the question.” (KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS)

WASHINGTON POST Greg Sargent

The battle over the sequester has sparked a corollary argument over the proper role of pundits in assigning blame in political standoffs of this type. A number of us have argued that the facts plainly reveal that Republicans are far more to blame than Obama and Democrats for the current crisis. The GOP’s explicit position is that no compromise solution of any kind is acceptable — this must be resolved only with 100% of the concessions being made by Democrats — which means any compromise Dems put forth is by definition a nonstarter at the outset.
Analysts reluctant to embrace this conclusion — an affliction I’ve called the “centrist dodge” — have adopted several techniques. One is to pretend Dems haven’t offered any compromise solution, when in fact they have. A second is to argue that, okay, Dems have offered a compromise while Republicans haven’t, but Dems haven’t gone far enough towards the middle ground, so both sides are still to blame for the impasse. (The problem with this dodge is that it fails to acknowledge that Republicans themselves have openly stated that there is no distance to which Dems could go to win GOP cooperation, short of giving them everything they want.)

We’re now seeing a third technique appear: Acknowledge that Republicans are the uncompromising party, but assert that it’s ultimately on the President to figure out a way to either force Republicans to drop their intransigence or to otherwise “lead” them out if it.
Case in point: David Brooks. Last week Brooks was widely criticized for a “pox on both house” column in which he based his entire argument on the falsehood that Obama has no plan. Brooks repented for his error, and today he offers a good faith effort to describe what he’d like Obama to do to change things. It boils down to this:

My dream Obama wouldn’t be just one gladiator in the zero-sum budget wars. He’d transform the sequester fight by changing the categories that undergird it. He’d possess the primary ingredient of political greatness: imagination. The great presidents, like Teddy Roosevelt, see situations differently. They ask different questions. History pivots around their terms.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the prescriptions Brooks offers would really change the current dynamic, but at bottom, the suggestion that it’s all on the president to figure out a way to persuade Republicans to drop their intransigence is still a dodge. The idea that the President can necessarily bend Congress to his will is indeed a “dream.” It doesn’t reckon with the most fundamental question at the heart of all of this: What if there is nothing whatsoever that can be done by the president or anyone else to break the GOP out of its no-compromising stance? This isn’t an unreasonable reading of the situation; it’s what Republicans themselves have confirmed, publicly and on the record — they will not concede a penny in new revenues, no matter what. And if this is the case — if the fundamental problem is that Republicans really do prefer the sequester to any compromise — isn’t it incumbent on commentators to explain this clearly and forthrightly to their readers?

As Josh Marshall puts it:

Over the last few days, as it’s become increasingly clear that the sequester cuts probably really will happen, the big name pundits are coming forward and complaining that President Obama needs to step forward and ‘exercise leadership’ and solve the problem.
It’s all similar to what we saw in the fiscal cliff negotiations. Official Washington is accustomed to having a Democratic safety net — not cash transfers for those who fall through the cracks of the market economy — but that Democrats will come in and solve crises created by GOP government by crisis. When the Democrats or the Democrats’ party leader — in this case, the President — won’t do that, everyone freaks out.

The argument now is basically that the president is the father who must make his problem children behave. Only this is worse than just a dodge. Lots and lots of people are going to get hurt by the sequester. Anyone who helps deflect blame from Republicans — in the full knowledge that they are the primary obstacle to the compromise we need to prevent serious damage from being done to the country — is unwittingly helping to enable their intransigence.



* GOP won’t accept any compromise solution: Last night, Lindsey Graham [above] turned heads when he said on CNN that he’s willing to accept $600 billion in new revenues along with spending cuts to avert the sequester. This perfectly illustrates what I noted above: After all, no GOP leaders agree with Graham; meanwhile, Democratic leaders do agree with Graham that a mix is the best way to go.

* Another poll finds GOP will take blame for sequester: A new Post poll finds that 45 percent of Americans will blame Congressional Republicans if and when the sequester hits, versus only 32 percent who will blame Obama. Strikingly, 52 percent of moderates will blame Republicans; only 24 percent will blame Obama.

A lot of this is probably driven by the fact that Obama’s general standing with the public is far better; the question is whether that dynamic will hold as the cuts kick in over time.

* Americans think sequester will damage economy, military: Also key from the new Post poll: 60 percent think it will have a “major effect” on the economy, and 62 percent think the effect will be “negative.” Fifty five percent say it will have a “major effect” on the military.

* Don’t bite on the GOP’s sequester ruse, Dems: As expected, Republicans are laying plans to “offer” a proposal to the administration that would allow agency heads to have discretion over where the sequester cuts are allotted. Senator Tim Kaine gets at the irony underlying this proposal:

“These guys bash the president nonstop.Then they are going to take the power of the purse and say, ‘We are so unable to do our job we are going to give you complete flexibility to do it’?”

As I’ve noted before, his alternative would transfer ownership of the cuts to Obama, and would create a false sense that they are not all that threatening, allowing Republicans to evade some political responsibility for them — even as it doesn’t do much of anything to mitigate the actual damage they would do.

* Yes, sequester would mean major cuts to government: Glenn Kessler explains why the claim that the sequester would cut “only” 2.5 percent out of the government, which is widely cited by Republicans, is completely misleading, and why the cuts will be far bigger in practice. While Kessler also finds that there are problems with the White House’s predictions of doom, it is overwhelmingly clear that the sequester has the potential to do deep and serious damage.



* Virginia residents increasingly anxious about sequester: The Post has a nicely reported piece digging into one Virginia community’s increasing anxiety about the coming cuts. This is only a glimpse of what may be to come when the cuts actually begin to make their impact felt. What this article really drives home is that, as much as people hate government in the abstract, when specific programs are threatened people suddenly love government spending.