President Obama

We should all thank the President for refusing to include Social Security cuts in his 2012 budget. But we should not take the President’s decision for granted. Apparently, the White House was prepared to include specific cuts in Social Security benefits in the 2012 budget just to bring Republicans to the table, but a groundswell of progressive opposition helped stop it in its tracks, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The lesson is clear: What we are doing is working. But we are still facing a real threat to Social Security, and a White House whose idea of negotiating is conceding in advance to Republican demands. We must temper our praise for the president now with vigilance for the future. Cuts are not yet dead; we need to keep up the pressure.

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In yet another sign that the White House has taken to championing Social Security, the new budget would add $1 billion in funding for the Social Security Administration to help reduce Social Security’s disability claims backlog.

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In my last two posts I reviewed the deficit reduction aspects of Paul Ryan's Republican response to the SOTU. But Ryan also placed considerable emphasis on the idea of “limited government” in his response. In this post, I want to evaluate what he had to say on this theme. more »

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The question remains as to whether Democrats' 21st century vision will accord an appropriate role for the social insurance programs and protections that helped make America great in the 20th, as the President would like, or follow the oft-repeated Beltway truism that we must “invest, even as we cut,” which is code for investing in infrastructure at the expense of our modest social safety net. Rather than view the President's competitiveness framing as a threat, we progressives must seize it as an opportunity to elevate and expand our social insurance programs, as well as enforce our labor and trade laws. We have a very strong case to make that from both a substantive and a political perspective, America will achieve economic greatness because of a robust social safety net, rather than in spite of one.

Tom Friedman—and nearly every other Washington pundit obsessed with the idea of “cut and invest”—just does not get how basic social insurance actually makes our society stronger and wealthier. The case we progressives need to make emphatically is that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are more relevant to American competitiveness than ever. Compromising on them is compromising on innovation.

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Not the wars. Not greenhouse gasses. Not even the deficit. The issue most important to Americans is jobs.

Despite that, jobs failed to make an appearance in the State of the Union address.

The talk was all about business. Business was doing better. Business needed taxpayers to help pay for research and innovation. Business will get government help to eliminate pesky regulations. more »

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Here's Part Two of my textual analysis of the deficit reduction portion of Paul Ryan's Republican response to the SOTU.

Then the President and his party made matters even worse, by creating a new open-ended health care entitlement. more »

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Many of my recent posts have focused on fairy tales I thought the President would tell in the SOTU and also those that he did tell. more »

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In my last post, I scored the SOTU on the 7 Fairy Tales I discussed previously, and concluded that the President was subscribing to at most two of them, and that he accepted the deficit reduction framing of the Republicans as a basis for negotiat more »

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In "All Together Now: There Is No Deficit/Debt Problem,” I warned against the message calling for deficit reduction that the President would probably deliver in his State of the Union Address. more »

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