http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/01/house_republican_williamsburg_retreat_gop_leaders_decided_that_they_had.html
This puzzles me at first. After running for the last two election cycles on the desperate need to balance the budget, the House Republicans, after some loose talk about letting the debt ceiling grind the government to a halt, seem to be backing off from that fight. It appears that maybe the news from the 2012 election is starting to sink in? It appears that maybe Republicans talk a good line about balancing the budget, but in reality, are not really interested in getting blamed for the pain that it would cause?
I have mixed feelings on this. On one level, any time Republicans humiliate themselves it tends to delight me. But it made me nervous when the fiscal cliff crisis ended with a can-kicking exercise, and now we are giving that same can another kick.
I see several problems. One problem is that the Republican Party now seems rather sharply divided between a mainstream and a Tea Party radical minority, and it seems increasingly difficult to get the two groups to vote for the same thing. The result of this is that the supposed House Majority- the Republican Party- no longer constitutes a majority in practical terms.
The other problem is of course that the fiscal problems of the USA are not imaginary, they are real. They are long term rather than short term, but of course, that just means that time is not on our side if we continue to ignore them in terms of action. The military budget needs to be cut. But Medicare and Social Security in time will need some cuts as well- and there is really no stomach for those cuts in EITHER political party, because legislators seem to feel that they will lose their jobs after casting those tough votes.
Gatherites know me as a crazy liberal. Yes, I accept that global warming is real. Yes, I am okay with gay marriage- because it is not going to damage my hetero marriage. Yes, I am not a fan of assault weapon sales. But I happen to feel that liberals have to be realistic about the USA budget. Especially now, when Republicans seem to be increasingly unrealistic about it. Tax and spend policies, in my mind, are not as damaging to our fiscal health as spend-but-don't-tax policies (which describes where Republicans are now).
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Comments: 5
I wish that the Republicans had taken the offer made by Obama back in 2011 in that debt ceiling crisis mess, the one that ended in the credit downgrade. That offer would have taken a 4 trillion bite out of the deficit. But Republicans insisted it was not enough. Now they are agonizing about so much less in cuts.
On SS demographics, it's ironic to recall that it was caused by the Post WW II "Baby-Boom" which was nearly 70 years ago. Wars have long-term inplications.
What this does, assuming it gets through Congress as stands, is put the next debt ceiling deadline into the same time period as the other major budget battles. They know that there will spending cuts so they want to be able to say that they held that horrible spendthrift in the WH to cuts and maybe, sort of, it was because they traded raising the debt ceiling for cuts. Even though the two are completely independent - the debt ceiling is about paying for obligations Congress already approved (but the tea party wants to renege on), while the budget is about how much to spend on future programs.
Unfortunately it isn't likely that Republicans will be honest about the budget debate. Rather than standing up and explaining to the public why we should spend more on defense than the next 14 counties combined, they will scream that Obama is trying to destroy America's might because he wants to stop buying weapons that the Pentagon doesn't want (but Congress will keep in the budget because some powerful Congressman on the appropriations committee has the factory for it in his district).
Both parties need to be able to stand up and argue why they want to spend money on putting food in the mouths of undernourished children vs the pockets of defense contractors. Whoever can convince the majority of the American people that their program deserves funding gets it. It's a lot more complicated than it sounds - there may be good reasons to fund a jet fighter and no good reason to fund school lunches - which is why neither party really wants to have to do that. And why Congress is so irresponsible.