The 2012 White House Budget Proposal. Who Will Survive In America?

Sigh. This is truly depressing.

You can get a full look at the White House’s 2012 Budget proposal here. Usually we put it on Scribd, but their site is broken. Besides, it’s a 216 pager. Not exactly light reading.

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.

Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above

Great article from Sunday’s frontpage. Yes, Sunday. We’ve been busier than you can possibly fathom. Excerpt below (along with embedded chart). Click photo or text linke for full piece. Enjoy…

From left: Shannon Palmer, Japanese/Irish; Vasco Mateus, Portuguese/African-American/Haitian; Laura Wood, black/white.More Photos »

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — In another time or place, the game of “What Are You?” that was played one night last fall at the University of Maryland might have been mean, or menacing: Laura Wood’s peers were picking apart her every feature in an effort to guess her race.

“How many mixtures do you have?” one young man asked above the chatter of about 50 students. With her tan skin and curly brown hair, Ms. Wood’s ancestry could have spanned the globe.

“I’m mixed with two things,” she said politely.

“Are you mulatto?” asked Paul Skym, another student, using a word once tinged with shame that is enjoying a comeback in some young circles. When Ms. Wood confirmed that she is indeed black and white, Mr. Skym, who is Asian and white, boasted, “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” in affirmation of their mutual mixed lineage.

Then the group of friends — formally, the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association — erupted into laughter and cheers, a routine show of their mixed-race pride.

The crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States, and they are only the vanguard: the country is in the midst of a demographic shift driven by immigration and intermarriage.

One in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities, according to data from 2008 and 2009 that was analyzed by the Pew Research Center. Multiracial and multiethnic Americans (usually grouped together as “mixed race”) are one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups. And experts expect the racial results of the 2010 census, which will start to be released next month, to show the trend continuing or accelerating.

Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity. Ask Michelle López-Mullins, a 20-year-old junior and the president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, how she marks her race on forms like the census, and she says, “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”

They are also using the strength in their growing numbers to affirm roots that were once portrayed as tragic or pitiable.

“I think it’s really important to acknowledge who you are and everything that makes you that,” said Ms. Wood, the 19-year-old vice president of the group. “If someone tries to call me black I say, ‘yes — and white.’ People have the right not to acknowledge everything, but don’t do it because society tells you that you can’t.”

No one knows quite how the growth of the multiracial population will change the country. Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.

Pessimists say that a more powerful multiracial movement will lead to more stratification and come at the expense of the number and influence of other minority groups, particularly African-Americans.

And some sociologists say that grouping all multiracial people together glosses over differences in circumstances between someone who is, say, black and Latino, and someone who is Asian and white. (Among interracial couples, white-Asian pairings tend to be better educated and have higher incomes, according to Reynolds Farley, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.)

Along those lines, it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.

Prof. Rainier Spencer, director of the Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author of “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix,” says he believes that there is too much “emotional investment” in the notion of multiracialism as a panacea for the nation’s age-old divisions. “The mixed-race identity is not a transcendence of race, it’s a new tribe,” he said. “A new Balkanization of race.”

But for many of the University of Maryland students, that is not the point. They are asserting their freedom to identify as they choose.

“All society is trying to tear you apart and make you pick a side,” Ms. Wood said.

Who Is Marrying Whom

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.