Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to effect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security.
MORNING MESSAGE: Citizens Guide To The Budget Battle
OurFuture.org's Robert Borosage: "1. Don’t amputate on a patient still struggling to recover from a stroke ... 2. Don't fall for the hype: The budget deficit isn’t our most debilitating deficit ... 3. If you are going to cut, cut the fat first, not the muscle and bone ... 4. Get the money back from where the money went ... 5. Tax bad practices, don't cut good programs ... 6. Take on the powerful, not the poor ... 7. Focus on the disease, not the symptoms ... 8. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it...."
President's Budget: Bold Investments and Harsh Cuts
President's budget proposal released today. USA Today: "...a $3.7 trillion budget plan for 2012 Monday that would trim Pell college grants and low-income heating aid, raise taxes on upper-income taxpayers and oil companies, and slash $1.1 trillion from the deficit over 10 years."
Major injection of Infrastructure investment. Bloomberg: "The administration wants to spend $53 billion over the next six years on high-speed rail, and proposes spending $15.7 billion to build a nationwide wireless network for emergency workers and to widen access to mobile high-speed Internet. Obama also included his plan for a National Infrastructure Bank, seeding it with $50 billion intended to lure private investment for specific projects."
Huffington Post highlights the cuts: "President Barack Obama, less than two months after signing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans into law, is proposing a budget to congress that attacks programs that assist the working poor, help the needy heat their homes, expand access to graduate-level education and undermine that type of community-based organizations that gave the president his start in Chicago."
Politico emphasizes the paradoxes: "He bets big on education spending — an 11 percent increase next year — while altering the Pell Grant program to try to save the aid levels now allowed for college students from the poorest families. The National Institutes of Health would grow by about $1 billion, even as old anti-poverty programs and heating assistance would be cut. And $62 billion in Medicare savings would be plowed back into paying physicians who care for the elderly."
Shift from subsidizing dirty energy to investing in clean energy. The Hill: "Obama’s budget request will call for eliminating a series of oil industry tax breaks. The Department of Energy estimates that such a repeal will save $3.6 billion in fiscal year 2012 and a total of $46.2 billion during the next decade ... [The budget] will include more than $8 billion for clean energy programs, including money for research and development ... Obama’s budget will call for giving consumers a $7,500 rebate when they purchase an electric vehicle ..."
Support for hiring new teachers. LAT: "He will ask for more spending to train math, science and engineering teachers, kicking off a plan to add 100,000 new teachers to the classroom over the next decade — a tough sell when many new Republicans want to dismantle the Education Department."
Pell program cuts designed not to affect size of grants, but graduate students take debt hit. W. Post: "...the bulk of the savings would come from ending Pell Grants for summer school students and reducing federal loan subsidies for graduate students, whose loans would begin accruing interest before their graduation date ... the savings would be plowed back into Pell Grants [and] maintain a maximum award of $5,550 for more than 9 million participating students."
Cold comfort for grad students. HuffPost: "[The WH budget director's] assurance that students still won't have to start paying back their debt until after they graduate might not offer much comfort to people who emerge from graduate school and face, on average, more than $40,000 in debt, according to FinAid.org. Students pursuing a medical degree can face more than $100,000 in debt."
No attack on Social Security and Medicare, but not off the chopping block either. NYT: "That decision partly reflects ... a White House calculation ... that boldness could backfire — wounding not just a president facing re-election next year but also the prospects for bipartisan agreement ... were Mr. Obama to propose a drastic debt-reduction plan as an invitation to Republicans to join him at the bargaining table — a plan with the kind of far-reaching tax changes and spending cuts for the military, Medicare and Social Security ... he would most likely get an immediate 'no, thanks' from Republican leaders, perhaps poisoning prospects for bipartisan talks for the foreseeable future ..."
Robert Reich hits the President for unnecessary cuts: "President Obama has chosen to fight fire with gasoline [with cuts for] all sorts of programs for poor and working-class Americans, such as heating assistance to low-income people and community-service block grants ... That means the Great Debate starting this week will be set by Republicans: Does Obama cut enough spending?"
Digby criticizes attempt to show sympathy for the budget victims: "...this isn't really about programs President Obama 'cares about' or about how 'tough' it is for him. President Obama will not have to personally worry about these things and neither will his children, so the idea that he 'cares' is just a tiny bit abstract in this context. This is about actual human beings and their ability to survive now and build a decent future."
The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn tries to put President's cuts in perspective: "Is this a good thing? In absolute terms, clearly, the answer is no. The demand for Pell Grants is unusually high right now ... Energy costs for next winter, when the cut in heating assistance would take effect, are likely to be higher than at any time since 2008 ... But everything is relative, and that means judging these cuts alongside both the modest increases you'll find elsewhere in this budget and the much larger increases you saw in previous ones."
Robert Kuttner expresses hope for leadership on infrastructure: "President Obama spoke brave words about a high speed rail system within the reach of 80 percent of Americans within 25 years. This would be an achievement comparable to the great public works of the New Deal. It would revive major industries and supply chains, jump start transportation engineering, increase the efficiency of our economy, and create millions of jobs. But first, we need a politics to support it. That will take more than rhetoric -- it will take real leadership."
W. Post E.J. Dionne see the battle joined over infrastructure and innovation: "House GOP members are fixated not on specific programs or the purposes of government but on how big an arbitrary number measuring their budget cuts should be ... Obama's budget, by contrast, will be a mix of cuts and increases, with the accent on policies oriented toward the future - ones that stress new education and energy initiatives, the need to fix our transportation and technology infrastructures, and the ways in which government can foster research, development and innovation."
Republican Budget: Harsh Cuts For People, Bold Investment For Salmonella
The Republican budget for the current fiscal year is "madness" argues OurFuture.org's Bill Scher: "... I'm pretty sure the American people didn't vote last November for fewer jobs, teachers and cops and more sickness, pollution and hunger ... Where does one begin in this 21-page spreadsheet of cruelty? I suppose the women and children..."
The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn says "Hello E. Coli": "Now we know what life will be like if the House Republicans get their way: Financial aid for college will decline, food-borne illness will spread more easily, Head Start programs will shrink, and Big Bird might be out of business."
NYT's Paul Krugman explains the Republican plan to "eat America’s seed corn": "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."
GOPers defend education cuts for children ... so we don't hurt the children. Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "'No matter how popular sounding these programs are, they jeopardize our children's future,' [said House Budget Chair Paul Ryan.] So, let me get this straight. In order to help protect the interests of our children, we have to cut Head Start, student loans, Title I grants (which help schools with kids who live in poverty), and nutritional aid for pregnant women and women with young children."
GOP leaders struggle to explain border security cuts to conservatives. ThinkProgress' Andrea Nill: "In 2006, current Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) stated that putting millions of undocumented immigrants on a path to legalization without meeting certain border security benchmarks would place 'the cart before the horse.' ... So, it comes as a surprise that Republicans are rallying behind a bundle of sharp spending cuts that include slashing $600 million from border security and immigration enforcement funds..."
Funding to patrol Wall Street under threat. NYT edit board: "...Congress is threatening to deny the S.E.C. the necessary financing to carry out its duties. What makes this even more absurd is that the S.E.C. doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime. Its budget, like that of other financial regulators, is covered by fees assessed on Wall Street firms."
Sen. Majority Leader demands Speaker Boehner take government shutdown "off the table." The Hill quotes: "If he is serious about that, he should completely take a shutdown off the table and tell other Republicans to stop with the threats."
Speaker Boehner may have to divide his party to avoid government shutdown. NYT: "'It gets really interesting on the rebound,” [Dem Rep. Chris] Van Hollen said. If the Senate sends back drastically lower reductions — say, $20 billion — Mr. Boehner could face a choice between gridlock and the need for a bipartisan majority, which would require Democratic support, to offset rebellious Republican conservatives."
Conservative Budget Madness Extends To States
States target health benefits of retired public employees. NYT: "...68 percent of city and county officials surveyed said they were pushing to have retirees assume more of their health costs, while 39 percent said they had eliminated or planned to eliminate retiree health benefits for new hires. In many cases, states and municipalities are not required to negotiate these changes with retirees, and lawsuits challenging the cutbacks as a breach of contractual promises to retirees have resulted in mixed decisions."
Conservative governors keep pushing corporate tax cuts despite massive deficits. Stateline: "In Florida, the state’s more than $3.5 billion budget gap isn’t stopping Governor Rick Scott from pushing $2 billion in business and property-tax cuts ... [Michigan Gov. Rick] Snyder will seek to eliminate a gross receipts tax for businesses and replace it with a flat, 6 percent corporate income tax. He acknowledges the move could cost Michigan $1.5 billion, although he is expected to offset at least some of that loss with other revenue moves, such as eliminating an income tax credit for working families ... In Iowa, where lawmakers are moving to cut pre-kindergarten, the court system and other services, Governor Terry Branstad wants to cut the small business tax rate in half and reduce commercial property taxes by 40 percent over five years..."
Breakfast Sides
China moves ahead of Japan in GDP for #2 slot. NYT: "...while Japan’s economy is now mature and its population quickly aging, China is in the throes of urbanization and industrialization. Still, China’s per-capita income is about $3,600, less than one-tenth that of the United States or Japan."
The stock market is no longer a reflection of the American economy, argues Felix Salmon, in NYT oped: "The number of companies listed on the major domestic exchanges peaked in 1997 at more than 7,000, and it has been falling ever since ... as the number of initial public offerings steadily declines, the stock market is becoming little more than a place for speculators and algorithms to compete over who can trade his way to the most money ... To invest in younger, smaller companies, you increasingly need to be a member of the ultra-rich elite. At risk, then, is the shareholder democracy that America forged, slowly, over the past 50 years."
