Krugman: Eat The Future

[ProSense]

Eat The Future

By PAUL KRUGMAN

On Friday, House Republicans unveiled their proposal for immediate cuts in federal spending. Uncharacteristically, they failed to accompany the release with a catchy slogan. So I’d like to propose one: Eat the Future.

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If you didn’t understand that logic, you might be puzzled by many items in the House G.O.P. proposal. Why cut a billion dollars from a highly successful program that provides supplemental nutrition to pregnant mothers, infants, and young children? Why cut $648 million from nuclear nonproliferation activities? (One terrorist nuke, assembled from stray ex-Soviet fissile material, can ruin your whole day.) Why cut $578 million from the I.R.S. enforcement budget? (Letting tax cheats run wild doesn’t exactly serve the cause of deficit reduction.)

Once you understand the imperatives Republicans face, however, it all makes sense. By slashing future-oriented programs, they can deliver the instant spending cuts Tea Partiers demand, without imposing too much immediate pain on voters. And as for the future costs — a population damaged by childhood malnutrition, an increased chance of terrorist attacks, a revenue system undermined by widespread tax evasion — well, tomorrow is another day.

In a better world, politicians would talk to voters as if they were adults. They would explain that discretionary spending has little to do with the long-run imbalance between spending and revenues. They would then explain that solving that long-run problem requires two main things: reining in health-care costs and, realistically, increasing taxes to pay for the programs that Americans really want.

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[Blue_Tires]

1. ttt

[Proud Liberal Dem]

2. Yet President Obama seems to be the main villian here

for cutting LIHEAP. Curiously, the outrage about the horrible things he was supposed to do about Social Security seems to have died down..............

Hopefully, the Democrats can find a way to juggle the budget to restore some of the LIHEAP funding. Nothing is a done deal yet.

[WolfoftheWild]

3. for every failed outrage a new one springs up in its place

[ThomCat]

4. Not the first time Obama has been found carrying water

for Republicans, unfortunately. :(

If we had a spine and didn't cave in to every republican proposal so damned fast then he wouldn't have to spend all his time defending and implementing those republican proposals. Maybe we could get some actual Democratic Ideas implemented.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

5. Which Republican proposal(s) is he caving to now?

If he's embraced the Ryan "Roadmap"- in part of in full, I sure haven't heard it. :shrug:

[ThomCat]

6. He is embracing the entire republican framing that job-building is

off the table, and the austerity cuts have to come from the programs that help poor people, instead of from corporate subsidies and giveaways.

He is accepting the framing that "everyone has to make sacrifices to save the economy" while making it clear that this only means poor people. At the same time he has lowered taxes on rich people, extended record low tax levels for rich people, and made sure that rich people will not be making any sacrifices.

This is absolutely caving in.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

7. I thought that oil subsidies were being cut in his budget?

Were those taken out? :shrug: Republicans are in favor of that?

[ThomCat]

8. That is the only corporate subsidy he has proposed

cutting, and he has proposed cutting that in both of the past 2 years too, but dropped it both times. So it is expected that he will drop that this year too.

So a request to cut oil subsidies doesn't count for much if we are pretty certain he is going to drop it soon.

That makes it a PR move, not a real policy move.

If he actually pushed for the cut in oil subsidies, and defended the cut so that it had a chance to survive debate, that would be a different story entirely. But he hasn't defended it yet. :(

[sofa king]

9. It's all a PR move, man.

Not a single line of any of this proposed legislation will make it past consideration in Senate committees.

The President can pretend to compromise all he wants, hold his populist position in the center, and count on Senate Democrats to hold the line for him. They, in turn, get to take the role of the responsible adults at the table while the Republicans in the House continue to throw food at the folding card table in the kitchen.

In the meantime, the mandate for 2012 becomes clear: toss these Republican lunatics out before they find something else they can take from you to make their bosses richer.

500 electoral vote reelection, control of the House, and three to five pickups in the Senate. In return for your temporary outrage over an imaginary shift in policy.

[ThomCat]

10. If that was true, we would expect him to propose

a budget that offers far more populist protections than this. That is what would get the most Public Relations bang from all the people who are hurting from this bad economy. This proposed budget does nothing to get a good reaction from anyone. Being slightly less mercenary than the Republicans only takes you so far in the polls.

[sofa king]

11. Why would you expect him to propose that and get his butt kicked over it?

He's doing exactly what he did to snooker the Republicans into giving away the next election in the first place: he's letting them run wild, leading them into his trap, and only once its sprung will he "compromise" with them by allowing those fools to sign off on his plan. The plan of the guy from the other party, who doesn't have a vote in Congress.

The next six months are going to be a circus of Republican gaffes and outrageous legislation, but it's critically important to remember that none of it is going to pass, and as long as we can hold our tempers, the President and the Dems are going to come out so far ahead the Republican horizon is going to have to search clear past 2014 for a chance at getting out of the high-chair.

[WatsonT]

12. Often times the president does get the blame

for budgets he proposes and legislature he signs off on.

Crazy I know, but for some reason people seem to think he has some sort of political power.