The Era of Big Government is Over. Stage One: Denial.

Deficit hawks and the games they play

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

For 30 years,

In other words: since Reagan. Since the demise of Keynesianism as a serious economic philosophy. Since conservatives found their identity.

conservative ideologues

Keep in mind for future reference that he is implying that being an ideologue is somehow a negative.

have played moderate deficit hawks

[null set]

for suckers.

You'd think this might endow

I’m going to snicker quietly to myself, but I’m not going to make a penis joke. That’s the high road, people.

those middle-of-the-road deficit-busters

Again, [null set].

with a touch of humility.

I’m not entirely sure what point he’s trying to make here. Is it that the right has been tricking centrists into supporting deficit reduction that they already support? And that because of this Blofeldian deceit, that the centrists should then project modesty and meekness?

Fat chance.

Don’t act like your logical contortions make sense.

They stick with their self-righteous moralism, pretending to be bipartisan and beyond ideology.

Remember when he thought that being ideological was bad? Now, apparently not being ideological is bad. Quite a swing for two sentences.

In fact, they make the problem they want to solve worse by continuing to empower the tax-cuts-in-every-season conservatives.

Finally! A fair point! Not a good point, mind you, but a fair one. Dionne believes that lowering taxes significantly decreases revenues and accordingly increases the deficit. It’s woefully simplistic, economically myopic, and completely misdiagnoses the cause of the deficit, but let’s roll with it.

It's thus satisfying to see President Obama ignore the willfully naive who are wailing over deficits.

Is the assertion here that deficits aren’t a problem, that deficits aren’t an immediate problem, or that it’s satisfying to see the country’s leader pretend a problem isn’t there?

He knows that new revenue will have to play a big role in deficit reduction.

Read: we need tax increases.

He also knows that House Republicans are pretending we can cut our way out of this mess and would demagogue any general tax increases.

Of course, you can cut your way out of any deficit. Just stop spending. This is all theoretical, of course. The point is, the theoretical construct for cutting spending to eliminate a deficit is far more sound than the theoretical construct for growing revenues to implausible percentages of GDP while maintaining strong economic growth.

So he has proposed some serious spending cuts

[null set]

and some modest revenue increases

Read: new taxes.

to keep things stable as he embarks on a long struggle to move our dysfunctional budget politics to a better place.

He’s not even sort of doing that. He’s ducking for cover and hoping the issue goes away on its own.

This annoys his deficit-obsessed critics,

Again, is the assertion that the deficit isn’t a big deal, because you just praised the President for spending cuts and revenue increases.

by which I mean just about everyone who says he should simply embrace the proposals of the Bowles-Simpson commission.

It’s a good starting point.

Obama should smile, let them rage and go about his business.

What business? This is the job. This is, quite frankly, the most important part of the job. Without financial stability, we can’t fund essential functions of the government, like national defense and basic infrastructure maintenance. (Funding for a painting of Henry Ford in cow’s blood does not qualify as essential functions of the government.) He can’t go about his business because this is his business. This is what conservatives mean when we say that he’s not up for the job. Apparently, as Dionne displays, it’s not unique to President Obama. The progressive ideology is simply not suited to address the challenges that we are currently facing.

Let's look at history.

Excellent idea.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he won big tax cuts coupled with big increases in military spending.

::Swoon::

The tax cuts and a severe recession tanked government revenue.

Mostly the recession.

Unlike today's conservatives, Reagan at least acknowledged mathematical reality and signed some tax increases.

These were largely simplifications of existing tax code.

But these were insufficient, and it fell first to George H.W. Bush - the last truly fiscally responsible Republican - and then to Bill Clinton to restore budgetary sanity.

It didn’t hurt that we had won the Cold War by that point, and that the economy went gangbusters—based on nothing related to federal policy—for about twenty years starting after the recession of the early eighties. This was accelerated by outsourcing (opposed by Democrats), and budgetary policies and welfare reform put in place by Republican congresses and erroneously credited to Clinton.

But the conservatives who dug the hole

Why is it that the deficit wasn’t a big issue when GW Bush left office?

did nothing to get us out of it. On the contrary, they denounced the first President Bush for raising taxes,

First, I was six, so don’t put that on me. Second, the objection was less about the taxes and more about the blatant disregard for his word. Republicans don’t believe blindly that there should be no taxes to finance the government. Nor do we believe that reductions in taxes will always increase federal revenues (we actually understand the Laffer Curve.) Quite simply, we are a reactionary counterbalance to the certainty that liberals will promote policies that advocate tax increases on an already woefully overtaxed society.

and every Republican voted against Clinton's economic plan.

He had one?

For their bravery in supporting tax increases in 1993, Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994.

Which is when the policies that propelled to the boom of the late-90s were crafted. Kind of like how the Republican legislators of today are cleaning up the mess from the “brave” members who voted in favor of Obamacare.

By the end of the Clinton years, we had a handsome surplus.

Let’s not get carried away; it was a surplus, but not a particularly large or sustainable one.

In came the second President Bush who, with Republicans in Congress, declared the surplus too big.

No, they declared that taxes were too high. They were, and still are. There is a good argument to be made that the structural problems that we currently have in our economy were there in the 2000 crash, but that President Bush’s tax cuts and a policy that allowed the free market to course-correct shortened a very bad recession. Regardless, deficits always increase in recessions because revenues always dip. Spending is never as reactionary.

It was one problem they worked very hard to solve. Two tax cuts and two wars later,

We were attacked. One of these wars is universally agreed to be absolutely essential. The second was essential based on faulty intelligence. Even with that faulty intelligence, it still proved to be a good idea.

we were plunged into deficits - again. And the economic downturn that started on Bush 43's watch made everything worse, cutting revenue

Revenue is taxes, FYI.

and requiring more deficit spending to get the economy moving.

Spending DOES NOT get the economy moving!

Where were the moderate deficit hawks in all this?

I keep telling you, moderation is incompatible with being a deficit hawk.

They have a very bad habit. When conservatives blow up our fiscal position with their tax cuts, the deficit hawks are silent - or, at best, mumble a few words of mild reproach to have something on the record - and let the budget wreckage happen. Quite a few in their ranks (yes, including some Democrats) actually supported the Bush tax cuts.

And bless their little hearts for cowing to political pressure to do the right thing.

But when it's the progressives' turn in power,

We vote our leaders into power. It’s not a second-grade class election where everyone gets a turn by virtue of simply being there.

the deficit hawks become ferocious.

That’s more a cumulative effect. Having a national debt that is the size of our GDP is a terrible thing. We are on the precipice of having our debt rating downgraded, which will immediately increase the cost of servicing our debt by increasing the required rate for US bondholders. Our deficit has risen to roughly 10% of GDP (up from a Bush-era average just shy of 2%). The reason that there is alarm is because this is pretty goddamn scary.

They denounce liberals if they do not move immediately to address the shortfall left by conservatives.

Well to be fair, we denounce liberals for sport. It doesn’t mean we’re not right to gasp in horror at the easily predictable (and, frankly, widely expected) results of Obama’s spend-happy policies.

Thus, conservatives get to govern as they wish. Liberals are labeled as irresponsible

Can I make an editing suggestion? Let’s just keep it as “Liberals are irresponsible” and leave it at that.

unless they abandon their own agenda and devote their every moment in power to cutting the deficit.

Except that President Obama has spent precisely none of his moments in power to cutting the deficit. NONE MOMENTS!

It's a game for chumps. The conservatives play it brilliantly.

It’s not really a game. The country is broke.

By winning their tax cuts and slashing government revenue, they constrain what liberals can do whenever they get back into power.

That’s limited government, and it’s why conservatism is a movement that has always been predicated on strong presidential leadership. Liberals have unwittingly given astonishing power to the executive branch to regulate, to interpret broadly written laws, and to spend vast reams of freshly minted greenbacks We simply need a leader to wield it with the strength to dismantle the bureaucratic machine.

How do we know our difficulties stem primarily from a shortage of revenue?

We don’t. In fact, we know precisely the opposite.

Consider what would happen if we allowed all the tax cuts scheduled to expire in 2012, including the ones enacted under Bush, to go away.

Dr. Peter Venkman: This [government] is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.

Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?

Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.

Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.

Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!

Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...

Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!

Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Mayor: All right, all right! I get the point!

Okay, that’s from Ghostbusters in case you suck as a person and couldn’t already tell.

That would produce nearly as much deficit reduction over the next decade - roughly $4 trillion - as all the maneuvers of the Bowles-Simpson commission put together.

Of course, that assumes completely unrealistic revenue projections and economic circumstances, but by all means, let’s leave the serious matter of the federal budget to nincompoops living in a fantasy world.

If you want to be serious about closing the deficit, ending the Bush tax cuts is a good place to start.

Why? If you give the government more money, they’re just going to spend it on useless programs. This happened here in Illinois. Right after a massive “one-time” increase in the income tax to pay off the state’s debts, the governor proposed a budget that increased spending.

The commission's work showed just how effective conservatives have been. By saying they will never, ever, ever raise taxes,

To be fair, the commission had numerous tax increases, most of which I object to.

conservatives intimidate moderates into making concession after concession.

Is the argument here that raising taxes in a recession is a moderate position? I’m pretty sure that’s not why we had a 60+ seat swing in November.

In the end, the Senate conservatives on the commission - but not the House conservatives - supported some mild tax increases. But Bowles-Simpson proposed about twice as much in spending cuts as in revenue increases. You would think that moderates could at least hold out for a 50-50 split. But no, they'll do anything to win over a few conservatives.

Is it just me, or is it starting to get uncomfortable how stridently he’s arguing that we should give more money and power to the federal government?

As a result, any conservative who supports even the smallest tax increase is hailed as courageous.

This is completely counterintuitive to what you’ve been trying to say for about 3 pages of drivel. Conservatives that support tax increases should be roundly condemned.

Any liberal who proposes moderate spending cuts is condemned as a gutless coward unless he or she also supports slashing Social Security and Medicare. What's "moderate" or "balanced" about this?

Not sure. It’s completely un-tethered to reality, if that’s what you’re asking.

I hope Obama has the spine to keep calling the bluff of the deficit hawks until they get serious about changing the politics of deficit reduction. We can't afford another 30 years of fiscal evasion.

Are you out of your mind? We can’t afford another 2 years of fiscal evasion. We’re poised to need to raise the debt ceiling in about a month, and I have serious doubts that Republicans are going to go along without a budget that actually addresses cuts to the bloated federal bureaucracy and ever-increasing siphon of the private sector. Moody’s has been warning us about dropping our credit rating for two years, but the warnings have been fast and furious recently. Having the national debt surpass GDP is a colossal milestone—one that Greece and Ireland reached not so long ago.

If the asinine idea that we can tax our way out of debt persists, we’re going to have to move from the politics of a deficit to the politics of default.

Truth and Preaching; Falsehood and Blaspheming

Well this is going to be fun. Deprived for neigh on four days of the prattling sycophancy and screeching disdain that I have become accustomed to, I have branched out to more reliable outlets of leftist thinking: The Huffington Post. Screeching and prattling abound.

The Big Lie

This is a particularly audacious title. This “Big Lie”—which I capitalize in deference to an assumed specificity—now has quite the billing to live up to. Besides simply being a Big Lie, it is The Big Lie. I’m expecting the solution to all of our political problems.

By Robert Reich

Published: Huffington Post, January 3, 2011

Republicans are telling Americans a big lie,

What? You can’t just backtrack like that. I was promised The Big Lie: the singular Big Lie that belies all of our social upheaval. I was promised a diagnosis for the loose thread that we continue to pull to unweave the proverbial sweater. Now he’s telling me that it’s just a lie? It’s not the lie. It’s not even a specific lie. It is just a lie as mundane as any other lie, like parents loving their children equally or Nancy Pelosi professing that she’s never had plastic surgery.

and Obama and the Democrats are letting them.

You know Obama; always coddling Republicans.

The Big Lie

Now it’s The Big Lie again? Make up your fucking mind.

is that our economic problems are due to a government that's too large, and therefore the solution is to shrink it.

Why is this a lie?

Reich slightly misstates the conservative position, which those on the other side of the aisle confuse as the Republican position, so I’ll clarify:

Our economic problems are due to regulations tinkering with the free markets. They were compounded in magnitude by poor judgment on behalf of private corporations, which exacerbated the natural downturn in the business cycle. By expanding the government, we have ensured that unsound economic circumstances like this will continue. By propping up corporations that have made bad decisions, we have enshrined moral hazard and progressed very far down a path of consolidating all of the economy’s risk within the federal government. Without invoking established mechanisms to address market failure, we have eliminated the incentive for risk-averse behavior. These incursions into the free market system are neither morally justified nor productive to their stated goals.

The truth is our economic problems stem from the biggest concentration of income and wealth at the top since 1928,

Why is this the truth?

This is somewhat baffling to me. The depression started in the late 20’s, but not until 1929. The actual data that I searched for (42 seconds, thank you, Google) showed that 1916 was more inequitable with regards to the top 1% of wage earners. Similarly, 1935 was the highest year for the top 10% of wage earners. So why choose a minor peak in 1928 before a precipitous fall? Because there wasn’t a peak in 1929. All of this is, of course, irrelevant to social equality, because income and wealth are inherently different things, but then, I’m arguing data against a flippant off-hander from a political hack, so I’ll simply say: state your sources. FYI, mine comes from Berkeley: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/berkeleysympo2.pdf (Further disclaimer, I only looked at the graphs. There’s no point to Google if I still have to read through a 20 page economics paper.)

combined with stagnant incomes for most of the rest of us.

Two issues: 1) As a member of the ruling class elite, Robert Reich is decidedly not the “rest of us,” with regards to income or any other relevant characteristic. The attempt at camaraderie rings false. 2) The metrics showing stagnation in the lower classes are specifically designed to be support an income inequality skew. How? Because success is what distinguishes the upper-class from—to borrow Reich’s forced attempt at a connection—“the rest of us,” is income. Of course the lower class has stagnant incomes; any precipitous rise in the outliers that skew the averages would be assimilated into the upper class. Similarly, formerly high-wealth individuals (think failed sole-proprietors) skew the figures at the low end of the spectrum, because their downward trend gets caught in the lower bucket, because individuals are constantly shuffled between the high and the low income classes. The relevant metrics, which Mr. Reich blithely ignores, involve class fluidity, which is still very high in the United States.

The result: Americans no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full capacity.

Production, not spending, stimulates the American economy. (That’s a bit misleading, as production, not spending, stimulates any economy, but I prefer to permit digressions into my own jingoistic fervor.)

Since the debt bubble burst, most Americans have had to reduce their spending; they need to repay their debts, can't borrow as before, and must save for retirement.

As though these were  not pertinent issues before the recession. We’ve been hearing for decades that Americans don’t save enough, haven’t funded their retirement, and generally embraced high-risk behavior that jeopardized credit-worthiness.

The short-term solution is for government to counteract this shortfall

No! The shortfall is a natural course-correction for an economy that hasn’t been purely capitalistic in far too long.

by spending more, not less. The long-term solution is to spread the benefits of economic growth more widely

Economic classes dispassionately examine means of distributing resources. There’s the market, which is usually given a little gold star as the optimal means to distribute resources, but there are other means examined: command, force, lottery, personal characteristics, or first-come first-serve.

Keep in mind that when someone advocates tweeking the market, he is advocating the use of one of these methods. All of these methods are brutal and arbitrary. None of these methods is moral.

(for example, through a more progressive income tax, a larger EITC, an exemption on the first $20K of income from payroll taxes and application of payroll taxes to incomes over $250K,

Why $20K of exempted income? Why a tax increase on incomes over $250K? What part of this isn’t arbitrary?

stronger unions, and more and better investments in education and infrastructure.)

How the hell do unions promote economic growth in the short term? Stronger unions make companies less profitable and depress hiring. Increasing regulations on fluidity in the labor market discourages firms from taking on new people. Unions are notoriously inflexible and hobble a company’s agility in the marketplace. Nothing that unions do promotes short-term economic health or hiring. There’s a legitimate argument that strong unions promote economic well-being long-term by making exploitation of the labor force more difficult. In abstract, it makes sense. That said, this is more of a bone thrown to a key political constituency as opposed to reasoned economic policy.

But instead of telling the truth,

Again, why is this “the truth?” Is this an economic argument or a sermon?

Obama has legitimized the Big Lie

Again, WHY is this a lie, let along the “Big Lie.”

by freezing non-defense discretionary spending, freezing federal pay, touting his deficit commission co-chairs' recommended $3 of spending cuts for every dollar of tax increase, and agreeing to extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

The American people did that by forcing the President’s hand. The progressive agenda has failed, and the American people are thirsty for a return to conservative values. These weren’t Obama’s ideas; he had to be dragged to them.

Will Obama stand up to the Big Lie? Will he use his State of the Union address to rebut it

He might, if you would take the time to even attempt to rebut it right now.

and tell the truth? Maybe, but so far there's no evidence.

How is it that progressives whine so much? No president in recent history has been as successful at enacting his agenda as President Obama. In his mind, however, it’s a cruel trick of history that it isn’t succeeding.

In his weekly address yesterday,

Which only journalists, lobbyists, and political insiders listen to.

the president restated his "commitment" for 2011 "to do everything I can to make sure our economy is growing, creating jobs, and strengthening our middle class."

That is, before he headed out to the back nine.

He added that it's important "to look ahead -- not just to this year, but to the next 10 years, and the next 20 years"

It’s hard to believe that a political insider can’t recognize fluff from a presidential address. Maybe he has a word count he has to hit before Arianna’s check clears.

to find ways to stimulate the economy through innovation. And that it is critical that the U.S. discover ways to "out-compete other countries around the world."

Novel concept: we can out-compete by actually allowing competition. The United States is officially one of the most business unfriendly places in the industrialized world. How do we keep the American Dream alive when a gluttonous leviathan insists on ransacking our surpluses?

Become more innovative? Out-compete? Who or what is he talking about? Big American corporations are innovating like mad all over the world, with research and development centers in China and India.

::Sit back and waits for author to acknowledge the manifestly obvious point that I just so eloquently made::

And their profits are soaring.

Swing and a miss.

They're sitting on almost $1 trillion of cash.

Does anyone else get the feeling the Reich feels that it is their patriotic duty to be unprofitable?

But they won't create jobs in America because there's not enough demand here to justify them.

Demand for what? Jobs? There’s plenty of demand for jobs. The reason is because taxes and regulations overseas are far friendlier, even when political officials are corrupt.

In the Republican address in response, U.S. Senator-elect Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) restated the Big Lie. "The American people sent us to Congress with clear instructions: make government smaller, not bigger,"

That’s a statistically provable truth, The American people sent conservatives like Ayotte to congress in droves to rebuke the progressive Big Government agenda. If you didn’t hear that message loud and clear, you have to have ear muffs on.

she said. Deficit reduction "isn't a Republican problem or a Democrat problem -- it's an American problem that will require tough decision-making from both parties."

I can understand the argument that the deficit is not an immediate problem, but I can find no conceivable way to square the idea that a deficit out-pacing economic growth isn’t going to be a problem eventually. If I were a liberal, I’d compare deficit hawks to premillennial dispensationalists from Revival-era America who thought they could, through intensive study of scripture, mathematically calculate the time of Christ’s second coming. But then, you have to explain premillennialism and everyone gets bogged down in a theological analogy.

And the way to shrink the deficit is to cut government.

There are two ways to reduce a deficit: increase revenues or cut costs. Since federal revenues have been a roughly constant 18.5% of GDP since, well, practically forever, any dispassionate observer will conclude that the only area in which politics can impact the deficit is spending cuts.

The extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts over the next two years, she said, was an "important first step" to jump-start the economy. Starting Wednesday, when the 112th Congress convenes with a Republican majority in the House, we'll be hearing far more of the Big Lie.

How do tax cuts hurt the economy. The only rational argument against tax cuts has been that they impact the deficit. While Republicans have been playing defense against charges of deficit hypocrisy by arguing that it doesn’t really impact the deficit that much, or that the benefits out-weighed the costs, (both valid arguments) no one has put the progressive counter-argument’s feet to the fire:

If you don’t see a problem with federal deficits—indeed, if you deride deficit alarmism “The Big Lie,” foisted upon us by anti-governmental lunatics on the right-wing fringe—then how do you argue against the provable economic stimulus of tax cuts by raging that it will add to the deficit?

George Orwell once explained that when a public is stressed and confused, a Big Lie told repeatedly can become the accepted truth.

Generally, this is meant to apply to those who merely assert an opinion, rather than those who convincingly argue it. I have asked repeatedly, why is what you call “The Big Lie” a lie. Why is it what you call “the truth” the truth? The failure to address these basic rebukes is the very nature of an assertion. These citations Reich includes for peripheral support serve only to undercut a rant based only on assertion.

Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that "the size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed" and that members of the public are "more easily prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones."

Does a guy named Reich quoting Mein Kampf perturb anyone else?

Only the president has the bully pulpit.

Excellent point. With the monumental power afforded the President of the United States, how did this “Big Lie” come into being? How was it disseminated? How has it not been rebuked?

But will he use it to tell the Big Truth?

Was that supposed to be the reveal? He finally calls “the truth” “the Big Truth,” lending weight to my original thesis that this man does not understand proper nouns. “The Big Lebowski”. That’s a proper Noun. BigGovernment.com: proper noun, even if the rules for websites are a little screwy. “Deficit spending is unfairly demonized and income redistribution is the key to economic growth” is not a proper noun. 

The Fightin' Dems: "Before going into battle, one must always first prepare a well manicured white flag"

Obama's dangerous debt compromises

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

As I was passing through security at Boston's Logan International Airport

A hellhole, truly. Why is it that Boston is such a terrible place? Right; one-party Democrat rule in both the city and the state.

on Tuesday night, a TSA worker discovered a penny in one of the bins that had just been screened.

He picked up the coin, turned to a colleague and said with a grim smile: "This is your Obama bonus."

First it was the traveler’s Obama stimulus. That’s trickle-down sarcasm, right there.

Which made me wonder: Is President Obama's strategy of offering preemptive concessions destined to make enemies of his potential friends in the electorate without winning over any of his adversaries?

Why should he treat the Republicans any differently than he treats Iran or North Korea?

The idea of freezing the pay of federal workers could be a sensible part of a larger, long-term deal

Which is to say, Obama needs to keep the most obvious deficit-reducing ideas in his back-pocket to push through the crazy ideologically-driven ones. I get the logic of that argument, but to—in the same breath—accuse Republicans of being mindlessly partisan (wait for it) reeks of hypocrisy.

that would combine spending reductions with tax increases.

Great, so we agree. Republicans want spending reductions. Democrats want tax increases in a recession.

It's an obvious element in any negotiation. But Obama simply threw in the federal workers in exchange for - well, as best I can tell, nothing.

Here’s what he got in exchange [speculation]: Republicans agreed not to demand a 10% reduction in federal workers compensation like they should.

And in the short term, shouldn't jobs and rising incomes be a higher priority than austerity?

Jesus, this isn’t even economics, it’s basic arithmetic. By freezing federal workers pay, budgetary constraints no longer demand lay-offs (or, alternately, allow for increased hiring). The problem that Dionne is, in his wonderous stupidity, skating around is that wage reductions (or, in some cases a decrease in the rate of growth of wages) tends to negatively impact morale, which is why the labor supply tends to be price inelastic. Yes, I do feel bad enough for Dionne to make his own argument for him.

Worse, every signal out of the White House is that it is prepared to cave to Republican demands for a temporary extension of all the Bush tax cuts,

Can I take a few moments to praise the faux-Republicans going along with this laudable measure? Thank you, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski. You’ve given me a reason to believe that you’re not completely hopeless.

including those for millionaires who are in rather less need of additional income than security workers at Logan or nurses at government hospitals.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, eh Karl Marx?

The dance toward a capitulation

Also called “The Macarena.”

on the tax cuts was perfectly timed for the release of the fiscal plan put forward by the chairs of the deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Bowles and Simpson are having trouble winning broad commission support for their plan. And in truth, how can anyone take a deficit-reduction proposal seriously when the main order of business in Congress is to make sure we widen the deficit by keeping all of the Bush tax cuts?

People who understand that

1)    Regardless of the highest marginal income tax rate, federal tax revenues have been remarkably consistent at approximately 18.5% of GDP and

2)    Lower taxes markedly reduce the capital financing hurdles to new businesses and business expansions that drive growth and

3)    Economic growth is essential for getting out of this debt.

What we are witnessing here is the political power that comes from the Republican Party's single-minded focus on high-end tax cuts

Well, that and winning massive electoral gains less than a month ago. What was that old Obama mantra? Oh yes. “Elections have consequences.”

and the strategic incoherence of a Democratic Party that is confused and divided - and not getting much help from its president.

Most people are a little dazed just after

Obama seems to have decided that showing how conciliatory he can be is more important than making clear where he stands.

To be fair, this is par for the course for the President. He has made a very successful career out of obfuscating his positions on seemingly simple items. This is largely because whenever he does take a principled stand—Cambridge police, Shirley Sherrod—he ends up with egg on his face. This is largely because his instincts on just about everything are dead wrong.

The administration's strategy is rooted in a fear of what Republicans are willing to do, which only strengthens the GOP's bargaining position.

Is Dionne advocating brinksmanship for the Democrats here, because that’s what it sounds like.

The president figures that congressional Republicans would be quite happy to let taxes on the middle class rise on Jan. 1 if that's the price of continuing to fight for the tax cuts for the rich.

Where is that “rich” line again?

In a game of chicken, Republicans are willing to gamble - even if the economy would take a hit.

So you acknowledge that increased taxes lead to economic stagnation—an surprising revelation from a man advocating increased taxes.

Lacking confidence that Senate Democrats would hold together and force the Republicans to vote to kill the middle-class tax cuts,

Which they wouldn’t, both because they’re too shell-shocked from last month and because they’ve lost the messaging to the Republicans. The American people rightly perceive this skirmish as between those who want to maintain the tax cuts (Republicans) and those who want to increase taxes (Democrats).

Obama is trying to get what he can in exchange for the extension.

He's right to fight for a restoration of unemployment compensation for about 2 million Americans whose benefits have expired,

Malarkey! (Jesus, I’m old.) The reason that we’re hopelessly indebted is because the federal government decided that it was their right and duty—surely as the founders intended—to subsidize moral hazard regardless of the cost. We simply can not continue to pay people to contribute nothing to the economy.

and for other stimulative measures.

Which have proven conclusively to be anything but stimulative.

And, yes, the Senate should ratify the New START treaty with Russia before the end of the year –

Why? Putin can wait for the people who were actually elected to take up this issue.

though what does it say about us as a country when the president has to offer a tax-cut payoff to get a key foreign policy initiative through?

Well, it says to me that E.J. Dionne doesn’t really understand what qualifies as a “key foreign policy initiative.” Is anyone really worried about Russia having a very lot of nuclear weapons versus a lot of nuclear weapons? Plus, Obama has framed this as part of a goal for a nuclear free world, which is just asinine.

As for Bowles and Simpson, they put some good ideas on the table (taxing capital gains at the same rate as other income,

I agree.

for example, and taking a run at cutting military expenditures)

I agree again, but it is telling that the first two things a liberal could come up with that are good ideas to cut the deficit are raising taxes and cutting the military.

and some not-so-good ones (raising the Social Security retirement age,

Sacred Cow #1

capping government expenditures at 21 percent of GDP

Yes, cutting or capping spending by government would be an absolutely batty way to reduce the government’s problem with overspending.

at a time when the population is aging and government will inevitably have to pick up more of our health-care costs).

…To each according to their need.

But the commission now seems a sideshow in a Washington circus where Republicans set the agenda in the main ring.

This is generally to be expected after MASSIVE ELECTORAL LANDSLIDES.

Obama's party is in this end-of-session fix because neither he nor congressional Democrats could agree on what to do about the Bush tax cuts when they held the initiative - and now Democrats have no idea where Obama will go next.

Agreed. The Democrats feared that voting to raise taxes in a massive recession would send voters to the Republican Party in flocks. So they conspired to come up with other ways to send voters to the Republican Party in flocks.

The best gloss on all this is that the president is engaged in a holding action aimed at getting out of this lame-duck period with something to show for his efforts

A “Runner-Up” ribbon?

and a chance to regroup. But he will soon have to decide whether he wants to be a negotiator or a leader.

As though the two are mutually exclusive.

You have to hope

I must do no such thing!

at least that he doesn't want to spend the rest of his term issuing apologies to Mitch McConnell and John Boehner.

As a staunch supporter of drastically limited executive rights, I steadfastly disagree. Anything that diminishes the power of the presidency is okay with me, even if that means bowing to Republican leaders like he does to Saudi Kings or Japanese emperors.

Recession-proofing Government

Today's Object of Ridicule and Scorn is Barack Obama for that prime time turd. Second place goes to Bob Herbert for this pearl from the New York Times.

UNFAZED BY REALITY By Bob Herbert

Imagine that you’ve got the gas pedal to the floor (or almost to the floor) as you try to get your vehicle to the top of a mountain, where the road will level off. You’ve made real progress, but the vehicle is straining and wheezing. 

I’m having a really hard time relating to this hypothetical; I don’t drive a hybrid.