The usual suspects:
We can do better, America.
Paul Begala thinks it’s a shame that sequestration cuts can’t be limited to states which take in more federal money than they pay in taxes and are represented by politicians who refuse to pay for the spending that their constituents demand (and have come to expect):
“This could be fun. Oklahoma so hates Obama’s big spending that every single county in the state voted for Mitt Romney. Oklahoma has twice the percentage of federal employees than the U.S. average, and Okies get $1.35 back from Washington for each dollar they pay in taxes. So close the massive FAA center in Oklahoma City. Move it to Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district, where they love big government. Two years ago I made a similar argument about Kentucky, calling on Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul to put the Bluegrass State in detox for its addiction to local pork. No such luck. But perhaps the principle can apply to the sequester: enforce it only in states whose elected representatives won’t support the taxes needed to fund the spending they want.” — A pox on one of their houses
Some facts:
Mother Jones: Even as Republicans gripe about deficit spending, their states get 30 cents more federal spending per tax dollar than their Democratic neighbors:
It’s no secret: The federal budget is expanding faster than tax revenues, a trend that’s been fueled by the rapid growth of entitlement programs and exacerbated by the recession. As a recent New York Times article documents, even as fiscally conservative lawmakers complain about deficit spending, their constituents don’t want to give up the Social Security checks, Medicare benefits, and earned income tax credits that provide a safety net for the struggling middle class.
This gap between political perception and fiscal reality is also reflected in the distribution of tax dollars at the state level: Most politically “red” states are financially in the red when it comes to how much money they receive from Washington compared with what their residents pay in taxes.
A look at 2010 Census and IRS data reveals that the 50 states and the District of Columbia, on average, received $1.29 in federal spending for every federal tax dollar they paid. That means that some states are getting a lot more than they put in, and vice versa. The states that contributed more in taxes than they got back in spending were more likely to have voted for Obama in 2008 and were more likely to be largely urban. (There are some clear exceptions: For instance, New Mexico, a rural, Democratic state, gets more federal money per tax dollar than any other state.)
Added to that is “the world’s least surprising chart” from Brad Plummer:
A new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that most Americans like the idea of cutting federal spending in the abstract — they just can’t agree on any specific areas they’d actually like to cut…
[...] Foreign aid is far and away the most popular suggestion for the chopping block, but even here, it’s a close call — 48 percent of respondents said cut it, 49 percent said keep it the same or increase it. (Foreign aid makes up less than 1 percent of the federal budget.) In no other spending area is there majority support for cuts.
The tide has turned… and it’s turned away from career war profiteers in Congress:
Think Progress: A new poll released by the Hill newspaper has found that more voters favor slashing military spending versus cutting spending on domestic programs like Medicare and Social Security in order to reduce the debt and deficit.
Voters are tired of funding the GOP’s Forever Wars and think there should be spending cuts — but they think the cuts should be to all those other programs and services they personally don’t like or use (like foreign aid — only 1% of the budget). And while everyone in the country continues to subsidize the red states’ appetite for federal cheese, red state conservatives will continue to tell themselves that they deserve more federal cheese than blue states (or that it’s not federal cheese – it’s freedom cheese!). So we’ll see how long Teapublicans can hold out on their belief that only Democratic states and Democrats will be ‘hurt’ by the sequester.
Source: questionall
Want to see how much your state will lose with sequestration cuts? Go here.
Charles Johnson reflects on the apparent, unfortunate takeaway from the three-day Republican retreat:
Yes, the bigwigs of the GOP got together in Charlotte last week and decided that nothing’s wrong, they just need to stop saying dumb things. Victory is within their grasp, if they can just find the right shoe polish.
[...] But the party’s main problem, dozens of Republican National Committee members argued in interviews over three days this week, is who delivers its message and how, not the message itself. Overwhelmingly they insisted that substantive policy changes aren’t the answer to last year’s losses.
“It’s not the platform of the party that’s the issue,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said Friday after being easily reelected to a second, two-year term. “In many cases, it’s how we communicate about it. It is a couple dumb things that people have said.”
A slide presented during a closed-press strategy session said that Mitt Romney might be president if he had won fewer than 400,000 more votes in key swing states.
“We don’t need a new pair of shoes; we just need to shine our shoes,” said West Virginia national committeewoman Melody Potter.
Right, Melody. Polish that turd. Steve Benen catches the first shiny GOP talking point:
Last week, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) complained that the Obama administration intends to “annihilate the Republican Party. And let me tell you, I do believe that is their goal — to just shove us in the dustbin of history.” [...] On “Meet the Press” yesterday, Ryan told David Gregory that he believes President Obama is “thinking more of a political conquest than political compromise.”
Benen calls bullshit:
Whether you love Barack Obama, hate him, or occasionally change your mind about him, the guy is an even-keeled, technocratic Democrat, who’s spent four years pursuing a fairly moderate agenda, endorsing and utilizing Republican ideas, appointing Republicans to his cabinet, and expressing a willingness to compromise on practically everything.
If “conquest” is on the president’s to-do list, he’s hidden it extremely well.
Indeed, the inescapable reaction to the Boehner/Ryan pity party is that they’re engaging in projection — it’s Republicans who’ve tried to delegitimize Obama. It’s the right that wants to annihilate its rivals. It’s the GOP that’s rejected compromise at every turn, launching a scorched-earth campaign to destroy Obama’s presidency as best they can.
John Boehner and Paul Ryan aren’t describing the folks they see in the White House, they’re describing the folks they see at their own caucus meetings.
[...] As I argued the other day, in most respects, the Boehner/Ryan line has it backwards — the president would be quite pleased, actually, if the radicalized Republican Party was brought back to the American mainstream, and stood ready to work constructively with other policymakers (i.e., Democrats) on finding solutions to public policy challenges.
That’s not an agenda based on conquest; it’s the opposite.
It certainly wasn’t the Democratic leadership who decided their top priority (for four long years, during one of the worst economic periods in U.S. history, which THEY created during the prior eight years) would be to make a Republican POTUS a one-term president.
If I were a Republican base voter, I think I’d demand that my elected representatives stopped treating me like I was a complete idiot. Of course, I’d have to stop acting like one first.
Suzy Khimm explains the five deadlines we face in the next 3-4 months, now that the debt ceiling fight has been pushed out to May (if the GOP House bill is passed in the Senate):
In theory, a sweeping budget agreement would render nearly all of these deadlines moot. But Congress and the White House have failed time and again to pull that off, making it more likely that we’ll muddle through from deadline to deadline. Here’s what happens when:
Feb. 4: The president is required by law to release a 2014 budget on the first Monday of February. The White House has already said that its budget will be late, citing delays because of the fiscal cliff negotiations, and it’s likely to hold off until congressional Democrats can agree on what budget offer they want to make. But the president will likely lay down some markers the following week, in his Feb. 12 State of the Union speech.
March 1: The sequester is scheduled to take effect, as the Jan 1. fiscal cliff deal only replaced the automatic spending cuts for two months. Senate Democrats have agreed to put out a budget resolution for 2014 by this date as well, per House Republicans’ request. But this is just a blueprint that will still have to be reconciled with the House’s own budget. That means that Congress will have to find another short-term fix for the sequester cuts if it wants to keep it from taking effect.
March 27: The short-term budget funding the government’s discretionary spending expires, as Congress only passed a six-month Continuing Resolution in late September 2012. The spending levels have already set by the 2011 debt-ceiling deal, which placed strict caps on spending. But both President Obama and Republicans have agreed to further discretionary cuts, reopening those caps. If Congress still hasn’t come to a budget deal, the GOP could use the CR as a point of leverage to extract cuts, threatening to shut down the government unless their demands are met.
April 15: Both the House and the Senate will be required to adopt a budget resolution for fiscal year 2014. If they don’t, then legislators will have their pay put into escrow beginning April 16 until one is passed. However, regardless of what happens, any withheld pay will be given to legislators at the end of the current Congress because of the 27th amendment.
May 19: The three-month suspension of the debt-ceiling expires, which means that we risk breaching the debt limit unless Congress acts again. However, it appears that the Treasury Department would once again be able to use “extraordinary measures” to buy a few weeks more time, which means that May 19 wouldn’t be a drop-dead date.
Steve Benen points out the deadline that, with the track record of this Congress, will surely be missed: ”…if Congress doesn’t deal with automatic sequestration cuts before March 1 — just 36 days away — the result is a scenario that neither side wants to see: painfully deep cuts that would undermine both the economy and the military. [...]
In theory, it’s not too hard to imagine a bipartisan deal: half the money could be found through new revenue via tax reform, half could come by way of spending cuts. The problem, of course, is that GOP leaders continue to insist that any agreement be 100% cuts, 0% revenue.
“There’s not a single Republican vote” for more revenue, said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
No, of course not. That would be sensible.
In the House, the picture is similar.
“They already got their revenues,” [House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan] said. “So what, we’ll roll over and they get more revenues? That’s not how it works. In the spirit of bipartisan compromise, they’ve gotten revenue increases already. We’ve yet to get anything as a result of it.”
That Paul Ryan just doesn’t have a very good memory. In 2011, there was a big debt-ceiling agreement in which President Obama accepted over $1 trillion in spending cuts. “We’ve yet to get anything”? House Speaker John Boehner boasted in 2011, “I got 98% of what I wanted.”
And Benen asks the most important question of all: “If the 2011 agreement included cuts, and the 2012 deal featured revenue, is it really so outrageous to think a 2013 compromise should be balanced and include a combination of both?”
It shouldn’t be this difficult for adults to negotiate and find bipartisan solutions to problems facing the entire country. But here’s where we can most easily observe the effects of gerrymandered congressional districts in action: a entire nation held hostage to the whims and fantasies of conservative white, rural, Bible-thumping, gun-clutching, red state ‘Mericans — a shrinking minority! — who elect the most ideologically extreme candidates from their little slice of Teabagistan. Combine these people with the Establishment Republicans, who are the defenders of Power and Wealth, and it’s no surprise the GOP is in chronic gridlock.
John Boehner would be doing the entire nation a service to bypass the Hastert Rule and work around his mess of a caucus on all these deadlines and any other important issues facing this Congress.
Liars, phonies, cheats, and hypocrites — and that’s on a good day:
MOAR GUNS!
The Podpeople of Dumbfckistan
What’s the Washington Post say about it? BOTH SIDES DO IT: Shame on the witless Democrats for not anticipating that Republicans, given the chance, would resort to dirty tricks. And shame on Republicans for continuing their campaign to transform the General Assembly into a nasty, underhanded clone of Congress.
McConnell’s totally fair and completely rational negotiation strategy so far:
Josh Marshall: “Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reiterated his position this morning: Government will shutdown unless President makes dramatic cuts to Medicare and Social Security. In other words, big cuts to key social insurance programs are not only the price of avoiding what would likely be a catastrophic government shutdown (a real one, not like what we had back in the 90s). But Democrats must also shield Republicans from the political consequences of cutting these programs by cutting them on the Republicans behalf.”
And that’s what Democrats have to negotiate with. Wouldn’t it be great if any Republican in the House or the Senate was willing to state exactly what they want to cut in the SS or Medicare programs? That will never happen though — too many elderly, white Social Security recipients / Fox “news” viewers vote Republican.
“Something has gone terribly wrong when the biggest threat to our American economy is the American Congress.” – Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia
First Read: “Regardless of what happens today, the 112th Congress is going to wind up as the least popular and least productive Congress (in terms of legislation becoming law) in the modern era. For starters, Congress’ approval rating the last time the NBC/WSJ poll measured it (in August 2012) was just 12%, and a whopping 82% disapproved of Congress — the highest percentage in the history of our NBC/WSJ poll. In addition, just 219 bills have been passed into law — the lowest number since Congress began tracking this number in the 1940s. (And many of these bills were naming courthouses or post offices.) The previous low was 333 in the 104th Congress (1995-1996).”
“Throughout its history, of course, Congress has always been a dysfunctional place; in fact, the Founding Fathers ensured it that way (with the federal government’s checks and balances). But this particular Congress, which comes to an end on Jan. 3, has been uniquely dysfunctional. Just consider: the current fiscal-cliff debate, the debt-ceiling standoff of 2011 that resulted in an S&P credit downgrade, the Super Committee’s failure, the near government shutdown in the spring of 2011, the defeat of the U.N. Disabilities treaty, etc. With the debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, and the near government shutdown, it’s hard not to conclude that Congress has been an active player in the sluggishness of the U.S. economy.”
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The 112th Congress — which finally comes to an end on Thursday — is officially, and by all quantifiable means known to man, and without any exaggeration, the worst. If John Boehner and Mitch McConnell were to stand up to give thanks for this ‘award,’ Oscar-style, they would have to first embrace each other before wiping their eyes and listing: the teaparty and American fundagelicals, Grover Norquist, every Fox “news” host and co-host, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, every House Republican who bravely collected a paycheck while refusing to work, war criminals like Dick Cheney, billionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, and professional and semi-professional grifters like Karl Rove and Sarah Palin.
Tonight, let’s all raise our glasses to toast an end to this malarkey.
McConnell called Biden into the negotiations yesterday, even though Biden has offered nothing different from Reid:
McConnell and Biden, who served in the Senate together for 23 years, are closing in on an agreement that would hike tax rates for families who earn more than $450,000, and individuals who make more than $400,000, according to sources familiar with talks.
The vice president and the Senate minority leader only began talking Sunday, after negotiations between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and McConnell sputtered.
Sources close to the talks said a deal is now more likely to come together but cautioned that obstacles remain, including how Speaker John Boehner and House Republican leaders react to any tentative agreement.
“The leader and the VP continued their discussion late into the evening and will continue to work toward a solution. More info as it becomes available,” a McConnell spokesman said.
Yesterday McConnell dropped one of his party’s demands — chained CPI:
Earlier in the day, negotiations between Reid and McConnell suffered a “major setback” after Republicans demanded the inclusion of a new method for calculating entitlement benefits as part of the cliff package, according to Democrats.
The provision, known as “chained CPI,” is opposed by many liberals because it would result in lower payments for Social Security beneficiaries.
[...] On the Senate floor early on Sunday, Reid ruled out any cuts to Social Security as part of any cliff agreement.
And what if we do go over the cliff?
Democrats later left a closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting on Sunday afternoon united, with many prepared to go over the cliff if no amenable deal is reached.
“The world won’t end — remember Y2K?” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). “If this thing goes on, all of a sudden, the people find out there’s a lot of revenue coming into the government — and we have a sequester that we can deal with in January and February, and I think we will. I think then perhaps — then Republicans won’t have to vote to raise taxes, we’ll all be voting to cut taxes.”
You know what? Finally we have a united Democratic Caucus willing to stand up to the Republicans. That’s a pretty good way to start a new year.
“…by all accounts, the Reid/McConnell agreement, if it exists, will not be a sweeping deal along the lines of a grand bargain. It would instead focus primarily on tax rates — the $400,000 income threshold increasingly appears to be a precondition for the GOP — extended unemployment insurance, the Medicare “doc fix,” the alternative minimum tax, the estate tax, and a series of tax incentives for businesses and families, many of which were included in the Recovery Act.
The Senate plan would not, if all goes according to plan, deal with the sequester, the existing payroll tax break, or the debt ceiling. Why not? Because Republicans still hope to continue work on a larger (grander) debt-reduction deal in the new year.
In other words, even if there’s unexpected progress today and tomorrow on Capitol Hill, some deadlines will go unmet and the stage will be set for yet another self-inflicted crisis in a couple of months.
While we wait to see if/when a Senate plan comes together, there is a contingency plan — apparently Democrats have a Plan B of their own — in the event McConnell and Reid can’t reach an agreement (or the Senate rejects their deal). On Monday, if all else fails, Reid will bring a simple package to the floor: lower rates on income up to $250,000 and extended jobless aid. That’s it. If Senate Republicans kill it, the deadlines will pass and Democrats will try again in 2013. If the Senate passes it and the House balks, we’ll see the same outcome.
Obama and Reid seem to like their chances: GOP officials don’t want their final act of this Congress to be a vote against middle-class tax breaks, and complete failure would almost certainly give Democrats leverage in the new year anyway.”
Reuters: Obama said he was “modestly optimistic” that an agreement could be found that would prevent taxes going up for almost all working Americans.
If things cannot be worked out in the Senate, Obama said he wanted both chambers in Congress to vote on a plan of his that would increase taxes only for households earning more than $250,000 a year.
The plan would also extend unemployment insurance for about 2 million Americans and set up a framework for a larger deficit reduction deal next year.
“The hour for immediate action is here. It is now. We’re now at the point where in just four days, every American’s tax rates are scheduled to go up by law. Every American’s paycheck will get considerably smaller. And that would be the wrong thing to do,” Obama told reporters.
He was speaking after an hour-long meeting in the White House with the two Senate leaders plus their counterparts in the House, Republican Speaker John Boehner and Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
A total of $600 billion in tax hikes and cuts to government spending will start kicking in on Tuesday if politicians cannot reach a deal, which could push the U.S. economy into a recession.
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The President’s Weekly Address: Congress must protect the Middle Class from income tax hike –
…
In part:
“For the past couple months, I’ve been working with people in both parties — with the help of business leaders and ordinary Americans — to come together around a plan to grow the economy and shrink our deficits.
It’s a balanced plan — one that would protect the middle class, cut spending in a responsible way, and ask the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more. And I’ll keep working with anybody who’s serious about getting a comprehensive plan like this done — because it’s the right thing to do for our economic growth.
In just a couple days, the law says that every American’s tax rates are going up. Every American’s paycheck will get a lot smaller. And that would be the wrong thing to do for our economy. It would hurt middle-class families, and it would hurt the businesses that depend on your spending.
Congress can prevent it from happening if they act now.
Leaders in Congress are working on a way to prevent this tax hike on the middle class, and I believe we may be able to reach an agreement that can pass both houses in time.
But if an agreement isn’t reached on time, then I’ll urge the Senate to hold an up-or-down vote on a basic package that protects the middle class from an income tax hike, extends vital unemployment insurance for Americans looking for a job, and lays the groundwork for future progress on more economic growth and deficit reduction.” …
The Washington Post: “President Obama summoned congressional leaders to a Friday summit at the White House in a last-ditch effort to protect taxpayers, unemployed workers and the fragile U.S. recovery from severe austerity measures set to hit in just four days. The White House said Obama and Vice President Biden would host the four senior lawmakers — Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — at the Oval Office meeting Friday at 3 p.m. EST.”
Steve Benen answers questions about White House negotiations today:
What is it, exactly, these folks have to talk about?
Putting aside all the posturing, press releases, and finger pointing, the fact remains that nothing has changed except the calendar. Republicans still don’t intend to compromise, don’t want to present specific ideas to further their own goals, and don’t intend to act until the president negotiates with himself, coming up with a plan filled with preemptive concessions, predicated on guesses as to what GOP officials might find acceptable.
So what’s the point of today’s White House chat?
I suspect one of two scenarios is true:
1. Participants have been very quietly working out the details of a compromise, and today’s meeting is about sealing the deal while working out a legislative strategy. They’re closer than is publicly known, and today, they’ll try to work out the final details.
2. Everyone knows failure is inevitable, and there’s no way a deal can be reached with Republican extremists, especially with so little time remaining, so today’s meeting is motivated by theatrics — they’ll go through the motions so no one can say they didn’t at least try to sit in a room and talk to one another.
If I were a betting man, I’d put money on the latter.
I have a third question: did Democrats plan to go over the cliff all along?
Source: sandandglass
“40 Republicans senators thought it would be wrong to spend $1 billion on a bill to reintegrate veterans into the domestic workforce, partly because of the amount of money we had already gladly spent on wars that made them veterans in the first place.”
From The Denver Post:
Let’s all work to make this Mitch McConnell’s — the Senate Minority Leader’s — last term. What has he contributed towards the good of the country or to the American people? Nothing — he had only one goal in four years:
This is a man who CLEARLY needs a new career. He’s obviously not in it for public service, even though he’s been parked in the Senate since 1985.
He comes up for re-election again in 2014.
via: liberalsarecool
Maybe now it’s time to actually work and earn their paychecks?
“The gamble was that by denying Obama any support, they would render his presidency wholly partisan at best, and a dysfunctional failure at worst. They would increase their own chances of denying him a second term, and that their return to power would allow them to claim a full and absolute break with the past. They shoved all their chips onto tonight’s election. When the networks called it at 11:15 pm, the totality of the right’s failure was clear. And because they bid up the stakes as high as they could, their loss was unusually devastating.”
