Obama destroyed Chained CPI and I don't understand why we're not celebrating [View all]
How do the Republicans get their bullshit legislation passed? Let's look at the Individual Mandate. Championed by Republican think tanks for DECADES, it was never discussed in the media and was never placed in the spotlight. Republicans waited until the Affordable Care Act negotiations were behind closed doors and insisted that it be the payment driver. Without it negotiations were a no-go, regardless of what some revisionists want to claim.
Now let's look at Chained CPI. That is exactly what Republicans were hoping to do again. Get Obama's budget out, take their time attacking it for being extremist socialism, wait until they got behind closed doors, and slide in the Chained CPI.
Instead, Obama destroyed Chained CPI.
He put it in his own budget, knowing full well that budget had a 0% chance of being passed, and loudly proclaimed it a painful but necessary compromise that Republicans insisted on.
The day that budget came out I shouted with glee. Chained CPI was now in the spotlight. Everyone was talking about it. Democrats were on TV bashing it for it's immorality and bad economics. Tea Party Republicans (much to the horror of their aristocrat masters) were bashing it because they're too stupid to do anything else. Even the media couldn't find anyone to play devil's advocate on it and so couldn't play their usual false equivalency game.
Obama did the one thing all the moralizing by Bernie Sanders and all the rational economic preaching by Paul Krugman couldn't do: he got the entire US talking about Chained CPI. It's now dead, and Republicans can't touch it with a 10-foot poll.
It was win/win/lose for him.
Win because he got Chained CPI in the spotlight.
Win because he got to talk about raising revenues in comparison.
Lose because some Democrats decided that, instead of helping destroy Chained CPI, they'd rather undermine Obama and the Democrats by pushing some ridiculous narrative that Obama WANTED Chained CPI and he put it in for his Wall Street masters.
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