Ezra Klein: "The budget deals of Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Obama, in one chart "

Ezra Klein:

There are two ways to read the current stalemate in the debt-ceiling negotiations. There’s David Brooks’s take, which is that watching Republicans pass up “the deal of the century” should leave conservatives convinced there’s something wrong with the GOP. But you can also read it the opposite way: Democrats control the White House and the Senate, Obama is the most popular national political figure, a balanced approach to deficit reduction outpolls plans made entirely of spending cuts, and yet Democrats are still offering recalcitrant Republicans the deal of the century rather than taking to the ramparts. What’s wrong with them?
(SNIP)
It’s safe to say at this point that the White House is starting to get the credit it wants for working hard to find a compromise even as Republicans work hard to resist one. But that’s not a triumph of messaging. It is, if anything, an understatement based on the White House’s willingness to give congressional Republicans a much more lopsided deal than Reagan, Bush or Clinton presided over. Republicans might be fools for passing on it, but if and when they finally say “yes,” a lot of Democrats are going to be wondering whether the Democrats were suckers for offering it. MORE...

Bernie Sanders on the Debt Limit, Budget Talks and the GOP (video)

sandersforsenate, video (04:59).

Chuck Schumer on the Federal Budget: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (video)

raulism, video (04:57):

Senator Charles Schumer talks about the recent federal budget at the CBID (Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats) awards ceremony.

Howie P.S.: Posted in honor of my Brooklyn-born father and my wife and daughter who are visiting colleges in New York this week.

(Updated) "Today, progressives have an opportunity not just to fight benefit cuts -- but also to go 'on offense' against the Republicans."

UPDATE: "Only McDermott opposes budget compromise" (seattlepi.com):

Seven of Washington’s nine House members voted Thursday to approve the shutdown-averting budget compromise hammered out between the White House and GOP House leaders.

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., voted against it. Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., has been absent from the House: The congressman’s 91-year-old mother died early this week from pancreatic cancer.

The deal passed the House of a 260-167 vote. Fifty-nine Republicans bolted and voted against the agreement negotiated by their leaders: Votes from 81 Democratic supporters were crucial to passage.

“I supported this budget compromise because it takes a balanced approach towards tackling our debt and deficit problem while preserving our economic progress and critical job creation efforts,” said Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash.

The funding plan reduces federal agency budgets by $38 billion for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year. MORE...

BOLD PROGRESSIVES.ORG:

This week, President Obama gave a powerful speech -- one that MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called "unexpectedly satisfying."

He made the case for raising taxes on the rich and even cutting military spending. He also dismissed Republican plans to privatize Medicare. All of this deserves genuine praise.

However, the president did not take off the table all Medicare and Medicaid benefit cuts that would hurt grandparents, the disabled, and kids. Maddow said the strong parts of Obama's speech must be "matched by equal resoluteness in practice when the battles heat up." We agree -- and we'll keep pushing him to oppose all benefit cuts.

Today, progressives have an opportunity not just to fight benefit cuts -- but also to go "on offense" against the Republicans.

A last-minute House vote has been scheduled this morning on the "People's Budget" proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It protects Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- and eliminates the deficit by ending the wars, taxing the rich, saving money with a public health insurance option, and making corporations like GE pay their fair share.

(Are you saying "wow!" right now? Us too!)

Please call Representative Jim McDermott right now in support the "People's Budget." Click here for the number and a script.

Taibbi: "This is what welfare for the rich looks like."

Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone):

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we're broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year's retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy. MORE...

Taibbi: "Tax Cuts for the Rich on the Backs of the Middle Class; or, Paul Ryan Has Balls"

Matt Taibbi:

Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.
(SNIP)
No matter what, Ryan’s gambit, ultimately, is all about trying to get middle-class voters to swallow paying for tax cuts for rich people. It takes chutzpah to try such a thing, but having a lot of balls is not the same as having courage. MORE...

Howie P.S.: The Rude Pundit lives up to his name, commenting on Ryan's "budget":

Paul Ryan's budget is not a serious document. It is, instead, a few pages of dried ejaculate on paper. It is a wishlist out of every conservative wet dream, and, as such, it is ballsy just how brazen it is. If nothing else, you can't say in the future that Republicans didn't warn us. Ryan's plan, his "Road Map," sets the bar so low that it pretty much guarantees that Democrats will be negotiating away many of the programs they worked on for decades and then declare victory because they didn't give in to everything Republicans wanted. MORE...

H/t to Shaun.

bloggingheads.tv: Ari Berman and Ben Smith (video)

bloggingheads.tv with video (33:22):

Ari: Obama’s overly nuanced message on the budget is failing (03:37)
Has the White House lost faith in liberalism? (04:08)
Jim Messina, Obama’s controversial new campaign manager (08:43)
Debating those journalistic gems known as “beat sweeteners” (04:19)
Jon Huntsman, prog rocker and improbable GOP nominee (05:36)
How Michele Bachmann could upend the primaries (03:02)

Rep. McDermott: "GOP Cuts To Anti-Poverty Programs Are ‘Morally Wrong’ And ‘Fiscally Stupid’ " (with video)

Pat Garofalo (Think Progress) with video (01:34):

On two levels [the cuts are] wrong. One is they’re wrong morally. We need to take care of women and children and WIC program is very important for childrens’ health and healthy babies and for healthy mothers. But on a second level it’s fiscally stupid, because if you don’t feed kids, if you don’t feed mothers and get them up to speed, they deliver a low birth-weight baby that then you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars dealing with in the premie units of hospitals. MORE...

WATCH: "250,000 turn out for anti-budget cut march in London" (with video)

Chris in Paris comments on AMERICAblog:

There's definitely something in the air this year. People all over the world have had enough of the extremist policies where only a small group of people prosper.

Howie P.S.: The above was in response to a story in GuardianUK, "Anti-cuts march draws hundreds of thousands as police battle rioters," with video (12:37). I haven't looked out my window today, but I haven't seen much stateside on this scale, except for MAYBE the action in Madison.

"Scapegoating Social Spending" (cartoon)

Khalil Bendib-OtherWords.org, cartoon (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE).

Congress is about to slaughter social spending but leave a lot of sacred cows alone.

Howie P.S.: About Khalil Bendib:

Largely utilizing the internet, Bendib now distributes his political cartoons independently to alternative media outlets outside of the corporate mainstream media. By August 2007, when his first book, "Mission Accomplished: Wicked Cartoons by America's Most Wanted Political Cartoonist," was published, Bendib's cartoons had appeared in more than 1,700 small and mid-sized newspapers. MORE...

"Five Progressive Deficit Reduction Ideas That Both Obama And The House Republicans Failed To Endorse"

ThinkProgress:

1. Rein In The Military Budget: Neither the president’s budget or the House CR cuts the overall level of defense spending. In fact, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s request for the Pentagon budget is a whopping $553 billion — “the largest request ever” by the Pentagon and the largest adjusted for inflation since World War II. CAP Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb has laid out $1 trillion in defense reductions that can be made over the next 10 years by phasing out outdated programs and resizing our military. This comes out to roughly $100 billion a year, which is approximately how much funding is being proposed to be cut from the Pell Grant program.

2. Reduce Or Eliminate Subsidies To Big Agribusiness: The federal government “paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009.” “Just ten percent of America’s largest and richest farms collect almost three-fourths” of these subsidies. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) has proposed — as a part of her progressive deficit reduction plan — a fifty percent cut in federal direct support for agriculture, which would save $7.5 billion in 2015.

3. Reduce Or Eliminate Wasteful Tax Expenditures: The CAP paper “Cracking the Code: A Closer Look at Tax Expenditure Spending” notes that “special credits, deductions, exclusions, exemptions, and preferential tax rates provide more than $1 trillion in subsidies intended to support public objectives,” yet are ineffective and should be reduced or eliminated. Eliminating this tax expenditure could save $100 billion, for example.

4. Enact A Financial Transactions Tax: A “0.25 percent tax on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other Wall Street financial instruments” would do little to nothing to reduce commerce or productivity but would generate “between $50 billion and $150 billion annually,” according to a CAP analysis.

5. Empower Medicare To Negotiate For Lower Drug Prices: One of the main drivers of the growing U.S. budget deficit is health care costs. While there are a number of things that can be done to streamline the efficiency of our health care system, like introducing a public option or even moving towards a Medicare-for-all system, one policy option that would be very simple to enact and would not require any sort of increased spending or expansion of government would be to simply allow Medicare to use its bulk purchasing power to negotiate with drugmakers for lower prices. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) estimates that doing this could save as much as $156 billion over 10 years. MORE...

"Liberals break into two clear camps on Obama's budget"

Greg Sargent(Plum Line):

Reactions on the left to Obama's proposed budget can be rougly broken down into two camps. There is the camp that says he has needlessly capitulated to the GOP's anti-government rhetoric and has effectively ceded the game to the GOP by throwing in the towel on the very idea that stimulus spending is necessary for job creation.

Paul Krugman, for instance, reacts to the Obama budget this way:

The important thing, I think, is that he has effectively given up on the idea that the government can do anything to create jobs in a depressed economy. In effect, although without saying so explicitly, the Obama administration has accepted the Republican claim that stimulus failed, and should never be tried again.

Ari Berman sounds a similar note, arguing: "The president is playing on the GOP's turf. The debate is over cuts vs. cuts. At a time of 9 percent unemployment, neither party is laying out a roadmap for how to put people back to work and lift the country out of its economic morass."

In the second camp are those who argue Obama is cleverly reframing a battle with built-in advantages for the GOP. Jonathan Chait:

I actually see the administration's budget gambit as a subtle attempt to change peoples' minds. The administration is loudly publicizing the fact that it's cutting programs it thinks are necessary. The message, sometimes made explicit, is that the budget actually does not contain a lot of waste. It's filled with programs that have survived many previous rounds of belt-tightening for a reason. If you want to cut the budget, you have to cut useful and necessary things.

I don't think that this will have a big effect. But I do think Obama is trying, in a passive-aggressive way, to do what liberals have demanded. He's explaining to the public that the free-ride view of budget cutting -- we can cut our way out of the deficit by eliminating waste and spending that only benefits foreigners -- is wrong. MORE...

Robert Reich: "The Obama Budget: And Why the Coming Debate Over Spending Cuts Has Nothing to Do With Reviving the Economy"

Robert Reich:

President Obama has chosen to fight fire with gasoline.

Republicans want America to believe the economy is still lousy because government is too big, and the way to revive the economy is to cut federal spending. Today (Sunday) Republican Speaker John Boehner even refused to rule out a government shut-down if Republicans don’t get the spending cuts they want.

Today (Monday) Obama pours gas on the Republican flame by proposing a 2012 federal budget that cuts the federal deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. About $400 billion of this will come from a five-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending – including all sorts of programs for poor and working-class Americans, such as heating assistance to low-income people and community-service block grants. Most of the rest from additional spending cuts, such as grants to states for water treatment plants and other environmental projects and higher interest charges on federal loans to graduate students. MORE...

Paul Krugman on "the difference between Republicans and Democrats"

Paul Krugman:

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.

It could be worse — the GOP proposal is — but it’s hardly something to cheer about.

Howie P.S.: The headline is courtesy of Glenn Greenwald.

"Obama's Big Budget Cut Proposals Target The Poor"

Arthur Delaney (HuffPo):

As Democrats and Republicans wrangle over fiscal austerity and the shape of the 2012 federal budget, the White House is targeting programs in the $4 trillion budget that benefit low-income Americans.

It's a sop to moderates and conservatives, and it's likely to infuriate voters who put President Barack Obama in the White House.

In the past week, the Obama administration has signaled that it will propose significant cuts to community service block grants and an energy assistance program that helps poor people stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
(SNIP)
Community service block grants, which fund community organizers in poor neighborhoods, are also facing cuts. During the 2008 campaign, Obama emphasized that his own resume included a stint as a community organizer. White House budget director Jacob Lew said in a New York Times op-ed Sunday that Obama would propose cleaving block-grant allocations to $350 million from $700 million.

"These are grassroots groups working in poor communities, dedicated to empowering those living there and helping them with some of life's basic necessities," Lew wrote. "These are the kinds of programs that President Obama worked with when he was a community organizer, so this cut is not easy for him."

David Bradley, director of the National Community Action Foundation, that works with Congress and local governments on behalf of programs for low-income people, said he was surprised that the president, a former community organizer, would go after programs that represent such a tiny part of the massive federal budget.

"The question is why? Why pick on this program? It makes a statement, particularly when you're able to say, 'Here's a program I really care about,'" Bradley said. "Once the Obama administration throws a poverty program in the water, it starts a feeding frenzy."

Bradley said the the White House has thrown chum into the waters swirling around the budget-cut debate. He said the Obama administration's move simply emboldened Republicans to propose even deeper cuts to the same programs. MORE...

Howie P.S.: Here's another highlight from the article:

With mounting evidence that the White House is willing to sacrifice low-income assistance as it jockeys for position in budget and election battles, it may be hard this time around to convince congressional Democrats to support the proposed block grant or LIHEAP cuts. The 11 Democratic members of Congress from Massachusetts sent Obama a letter on Monday opposing cuts to the block grants.

And one prominent Democrat has already voiced his displeasure with the LIHEAP proposal.

"I understand that difficult cuts have to be made," Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter to the White House on Wednesday. "But in the middle of a brutal, even historic, New England winter, home heating assistance is more critical than ever to the health and welfare of millions of Americans, especially senior citizens. I request that the administration preserve LIHEAP funding at least to the Fiscal Year 2010 funding at $5.1 billion when it submits its FY12 budget proposal to Congress."