Posts tagged obama
The 2012 White House Budget Proposal. Who Will Survive In America?
Sigh. This is truly depressing.
In lieu of the doc, we’ve given you a handy data viz for the spending allocations. It’s illuminating.
So what’s the big deal? We reprint Jon Cohn in full…..
President Obama on Monday will release his budget request for the 2012 fiscal year. As you read commentary on it—or, if you’re as nerdy as I am, as you read the document itself—keep in mind that this is the first budget request he’ll be producing since the Republicans took over one house of Congress. It’s a huge difference and not merely in the obvious ways.
Obama’s previous budgets were the president’s way of signaling, to members of his own party, what initiatives he intended to pursue and roughly what resources he expected Congress to give him. He could expect some negotiation and pushback, from liberals on some issues and from centrists on others. But mostly he could count upon Congress, which Democrats controlled, to follow him.
The Republican House, of course, will do no such thing. They have their own, very different priorities and their own, very different ideas about how to pay for them. Accordingly, Obama’s budget is more of an opening bid in a tough, rancorous negotiation. That means you should evaluate the document as a signal of political strategy, not simply a statement of policy priorities. And that makes it tougher to judge.
Between the administration’s recent statements and a series of calculated leaks, we have a pretty good idea of what Obama is trying to do. He’s going to call for spending more money on education and other public investments, but he’ll also endorse enough cuts to keep overall non-defense discretionary spending at last year’s levels. Elementary and secondary school education, for example, should get a boost. But Pell Grants, for low-income college students, are going to take a hit, albeit a carefully crafted one.* There will be more money for building high-speed rail but less for helping low-income families pay their heating bills.
Is this a good thing? In absolute terms, clearly, the answer is no. The demand for Pell Grants is unusually high right now; among other things, cash-strapped states are raising tuitions at state schools just as cash-strapped students and families have fewer resources to pay them. Energy costs for next winter, when the cut in heating assistance would take effect, are likely to be higher than at any time since 2008. Unless the economic recovery quickens very suddenly, plenty of people will struggle to pay those heating bills. And those are just two examples of program reductions that will leave needy Americans even more needy.
But everything is relative, and that means judging these cuts alongside both the modest increases you’ll find elsewhere in this budget and the much larger increases you saw in previous ones. Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, will spend the next few days dissecting the Obama spending request and, as he does, he will likely find plenty not to like. But, during an interview, he also put disappointments in context:
I think [Obama’s] record is very strong — major expansions in refundable tax credits for the working poor, major expansion of student financial aid for low-income students so that more of them can go to and complete college, and of course, major health reform that will extend coverage to 32 million uninsured people. This is the most impressive record of any president since LBJ.
Obama’s spending request looks even better when you consider what the Republicans would do if left to their own devices. They haven’t committed themselves to a 2012 budget just yet. But they’ve said they want a far deeper freeze than Obama’s, reducing non-defense discretionary spending to what it was in 2008. On Friday, they offered a preview of that vision when they announced their proposal for how to finance government for the remainder of the current fiscal year.
They want far more severe cuts to Pell Grants and home heating assistance, plus reductions to such essential services as food inspections and the elimination of programs like Americorps. They also want to reduce spending on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infant, and Children. That initiative, known as WIC, provides nutritional assistance to expectant mothers and newborns. As Paul Krugman notes, that cut will hurt today and tomorrow, since kids who grow up malnourished are more likely to have problems later in life.
The most important question about Obama’s budget, then, is how well it positions him and his allies in the coming debate over these sorts of priorities.
You could make a case that, by embracing the Republican narrative on the size of government and calling for a five-year budget freeze at present levels, Obama has effectively bid too low in the negotiation over federal spending—that he’s committed himself, and the country, to less government than it needs. (It’s happened before!) Or you could make the case that, by making “tough” proposals to cut programs he supports, he’s establishing the credibility with voters that he needs in order to marginalize the Republicans and to preserve more spending than might otherwise be possible. (It’s happened before!)
I really don’t know which argument is right. I’m not a political strategist and, besides, not even the political strategists can be sure about this sort of thing. But I know I’ll be hoping that Obama prevails in the coming standoff with House Republicans, even though a victory would still leave the government perilously underfunded.
*The details of Obama’s Pell Grant proposal are complicated and worth an item of their own, which I’ll try to write shortly.
So on the one hand, Obama makes a political calculation, cuts spending on things people NEED (like higher ed grants, food inspectors, heating oil for the poor). On the other, the GOP stands for nihilism.
Who will survive in America? Besides the rich?
#letthemeatcake #whowillsurviveinamerica
The most revealing moment in either Republican response, though, came from Ryan, who, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, implicitly threatened another government shutdown, or catastrophic fiscal meltdown, if the House majority doesn’t get its way. “The president is now urging Congress to increase the debt limit,” he said with distaste, referring to the vote required possibly as soon as March to allow the Treasury to keep paying its bills. Should the House majority hold that vote hostage to its vision of the budget, it will throw the markets into turmoil and upend our still-embryonic recovery.
It tells you all you need to know about Ryan’s tilt to the right that, for all his professed disapproval of increasing the debt limit during an Obama administration, he voted to do so twice himself during the gushing deficits of the Bush years. Funny he didn’t mention that Tuesday night. It tells you all you need to know about the G.O.P.’s overall tilt to the right that not just the Tea Party is making barely veiled threats to play dangerous political games with the debt limit. Mitch McConnell and Cantor did so last weekend, as have a plethora of potential 2012 presidential candidates, from Tim Pawlenty to Gingrich. The Bachmann-Beck-Palin tail is now firmly wagging the Republican dog.
More on the State of the Union- Visualizations
It seems that today is SOTU day. Here’s some more. With infographics!
From NYT, a great chart. Click chart/link for the full version…
Patterns of Speech: 75 Years of the State of the Union Addresses
In 2010, President Obama was the first modern president to use the words “bubble,” “supermajority” and “obesity” in a State of the Union speech. But other words have a longer history. Below, a historical look at the number of times presidents have used selected words in their State of the Union addresses (or analogous speeches) from 1934 to 2011.
And here’s a full word cloud from last night (h/t Klein). Enjoy.
Washington Post has a great interactive graphic visualizing the options (and outcomes) of allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire or extending them. Enjoy.
Bush-era tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 are set to expire at the end of the year, and lawmakers are battling over whether to extend any or all of them before November’s congressional elections. Most Republicans want to extend all of the cuts, saying that any increase in taxes will hold back the economic recovery. Obama and Democratic leaders are proposing to extend many of the cuts but say tax breaks for top earners should expire to help pare down growing national deficits. Each plan would affect average tax rates for income groups differently.
The Economic Crisis: Lessons Unlearned
Thomas Frank signs off from the WSJ Opinion page. Needless to say, I’m disappointed. A pretty stinging assessment of the last 2 years. 50 hot ones, comin’ at ya.
This is my last weekly column for the Wall Street Journal, and writing it has naturally put me in mind of my first efforts in this space, back in the summer of 2008.
Those were the days when economic disaster was beginning to unfold; it hit a crescendo in September of that year when Wall Street teetered and the government came to the rescue with a TARP.
By November, the nation’s mood had soured enough that a senator from Illinois won the presidency even though he appeared to defy political convention in countless ways. And all the while, the front pages overflowed with shocking tales of the corruption of the old order, the gross venality of the subprime lenders, the sabotage of the regulators, and the manufacture of poisonous triple-A securities.
It was an awful time, but for someone in my situation there was also—please pardon the expression—hope to go along with the disaster. We were descending further into the worst recession I had ever seen, but at least we were finally going to be done with the farcical intellectual and political consensus of the preceding decades.
Never again, I thought, would journalists fall over one another to flatter CEOs, nor would pundits build careers by finding clever ways to equate the workings of markets to democracy itself. Management theorists would cease to be public intellectuals, and the political advice of stock pickers would henceforth be treated like the toxic sewage it clearly was.
“The market god has failed,” I wrote in this space in February 2009, and I thought its flop augured not only a massive reconfiguring of the relationship between investment banks and the rest of society but a complete overturning of the comfortable assumptions of the pundit class.
At first, there were reasons to believe such a thing might come to pass. Alan Greenspan’s famous October, 2008, confession of “shocked disbelief” at the lenders’ lapses sounded like a turning point to me, and it felt equally momentous when Richard Posner, a famous proponent of the Chicago school of economics, allowed that deregulation had gone “too far.”
But those were intellectuals, bound by a different code than politicians and pundits. Elsewhere, things scarcely changed at all. Yes, that new president and his partisans in Congress managed to pass an enormous health-care bill, but only after making sure that the big institutional players were on board and that the new law followed a business-friendly prototype. Then, a halfhearted stab at re-regulating Wall Street, and the audacity tank was just about dry.
As the right howled “socialism,” President Obama took pains to demonstrate his loyalty to the exhausted free-market faith. On trade issues and matters of economic staffing, he loudly signalled continuity with the discredited past. On the all-important issue of regulatory misbehavior—a natural for good-government types—he has done virtually nothing.
The real audacity has all been on the other side. Many Republicans chose to respond to the crisis not by renouncing the consensus faith of the last 30 years but by doubling down on it, calling for more deregulation, more war on government.
That they have partially succeeded with such a strategy in these years of financial crisis, mine disasters, and oil spills is testimony to their political brilliance—and to Democratic dysfunction. As is the burgeoning populist movement that now stands beside the GOP, transforming anger over unemployment into anger over the auto bailout and the good pensions enjoyed by public workers.
Where I most expected changes, though, was in the world of professional punditry, which had largely failed to raise questions about the disaster as it loomed. Today it’s two years on, and nobody has changed the water in the fish tank, as a friend of mine likes to say. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times still burbles about theories of creativity that were management clichés 10 years ago. The Washington Post prosecutes its undeclared war on Social Security by having former TARP czar Neel Kashkari explain why banks had to be bailed out but “entitlements must be cut.” The need to balance the federal budget is almost universally thought to be urgent. And bipartisanship still intoxicates the pundit mind with its awesome majesty.
On Wall Street, the road to hell is still lined with bonuses. And Washington feels the same as ever. The prosperous, well-educated people still tote their yoga mats around town, line up outside the special cupcake shops, and listen to NPR talk show hosts welcome the next generation of boring centrists into the glorious circle of the right-thinking. The lobbyists still gather at the tasteful restaurants du jour, doing their work on behalf of the forgotten men of the uppermost one percent.
As for me, it’s two cans of beer and the escape chute to terra firma. Goodbye and good luck.
Obama: America’s Venture Capitalist in Chief
Via NYT Dealbook/Bloomberg BusinessWeek:
Obscured by political battles over health care and financial regulation, President Barack Obama has “turned the government into the chief financier of a manufacturing base for clean-energy technology,” Bloomberg Businessweek wrote. The comment by Businessweek was published Thursday, the same day the Obama administration made a $1 billion pledge to fund the capture of carbon emissions from a coal-fired Ameren Corporation power plant in Illinois.
By the end of 2011, the White House plans to channel more than $50 billion to thousands of clean-technology companies through tax credits, low-interest guaranteed loans, and grants, making Mr. Obama the nation’s “Clean Energy Venture Capitalist in Chief,” as Businessweek sees it.
Your Friday afternoon whimsy/cool photos. These are pretty powerful. Some are pretty graphic.
This past month, much of the attention focused on Afghanistan centered on the release of thousands of classified documents from the war effort by WikiLeaks. While the consensus appears to be that nothing significantly new was revealed by the release, the picture painted by the documents remains rather bleak. NATO and the United States now have 143,000 troops in Afghanistan, set to peak at 150,000 in coming weeks as they take a counter-insurgency offensive into the insurgents’ southern strongholds. Taliban control remains difficult to dislodge, and once removed from an area, Taliban forces often return once larger forces leave a region, especially in rural areas where local government presence remains small. Collected here are images of the country and conflict over the past month, part of an ongoing monthly series on Afghanistan. (47 photos total)
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