Would The Budget Be Any Different If A Mainstream Republican Were President?

This wasn't exactly subtle

President Obama is not a reactionary; he's a mainstream career politician who's happens, for obvious historical reasons, to be on Team Blue. As with just about everything he does, his budget proposal has disappointed progressives and enraged rightists. "Reactions on the left to Obama's proposed budget," wrote Greg Sargent yesterday, "can be roughly broken down into two camps. There is the camp that says he has needlessly capitulated to the GOP's anti-government rhetoric and has effectively ceded the game to the GOP by throwing in the towel on the very idea that stimulus spending is necessary for job creation... [and the other is that] "Obama is cleverly reframing a battle with built-in advantages for the GOP." This Facebook entry from Texas reactionary John Cornyn also seems to indicate that some of the worst of the corporate shills inside the idiotic Democratic big tent could be siding with Republicans.


Paul Krugman is nothing like professional bank industry whore Erskine Bowles. In a short piece yesterday, The Great Abdication, Krugman puts into words the muffled frustrations of the loyal Democratic voters who propelled Obama into the White House and gave-- temporarily, of course-- massive majorities to Democrats in both Houses of Congress, since rescinded because of Democrats dancing to Republican tunes. Big Business and corporate interests have figured out that if they can push the GOP ever further right, craven Democratic careerists will move along in the same general direction, making every option a winning one for the ruling elites. Krugman writes that Obama has effectively given up on the idea that the government can do anything to create jobs in a depressed economy. In effect, although without saying so explicitly, the Obama administration has accepted the Republican claim that stimulus failed, and should never be tried again."

What’s extraordinary about all this is that stimulus can’t have failed, because it never happened. Once you take state and local cutbacks into account, there was no surge of government spending. Here’s total (all levels) government spending over the past 10 years:


Looking at this graph, if you didn’t know there had been a “massive” stimulus, would you even have suspected that there had been any stimulus at all?

And yet the failure of the stimulus that never happened has become conventional wisdom-- which is what I feared would happen, two years ago, when I was tearing my hair out over the inadequacy of the original plan... Fiscal policy didn’t fail; it wasn’t tried.

Obama's budget is treacherous ground for committed liberals and trusted tribunes for legitimate rights of working people and others who can't afford to hire K Street lobbyists. Arizona Congressman Raúl Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus handled it diplomatically while staying true to his beliefs and those of his constituents:

“The president’s proposed budget makes significant cuts to several important federal efforts. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) would see funding drop from $5.1 billion to $2.5 billion, which has rightly prompted concerns about why families struggling to keep warm in winter are being asked to shoulder more financial burden than Wall Street executives. Cutting dirty energy subsidies has to be a priority. Are we going to continue paying oil and gas companies to charge poor families more for winter heating than they can afford?

The president’s commitment to funding education is admirably highlighted in this proposal. However, other valuable programs such as community development block grants are being gutted. Nickel and diming our way to economic recovery, especially on the backs of working Americans who did nothing to cause our economic problems, is not the right way to go. Rather than slashing LIHEAP and community grants, which didn’t cause this recession and generate more in economic activity than they cost, we have to look at the kinds of structural decisions that we’ve put off for too long. Reining in our military expenditures cannot wait forever. Setting appropriate tax levels for the top two percent of earners, who got a break in last year’s tax package when Republicans filibustered a Democratic middle class tax cut bill, has to happen if we’re serious about fiscal responsibility.

We need to take a hard look not just at this year’s numbers or next year’s numbers, but at our entire approach to budgeting. Ending federal payouts to oil, coal and timber companies who only use them to line executives’ pockets is an excellent way to start. We need to look at common sense ways to raise revenue for the public good and save money over the long term, not just cut assistance for low income families until there’s nothing left.”

Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change was also speaking for ordinary working families when he summed up Obama's budget proposal cuts as "harmful to state budgets and families."

“While we understand the need to cut federal spending, the president’s proposed budget calling for cuts to safety net programs and a spending freeze is the wrong course of action. Massive cuts to discretionary spending will gut critical safety net programs that help ease the pain of unemployment and underemployment and will put states already struggling to deliver basic services even more in a bind.

“Americans continue to struggle with high unemployment, a rate that remains in the double digits for communities of color. The only sound way to get our economy back on track is to focus on job creation. We need additional revenue by immediately repealing tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent and a sincere effort to close corporate tax loopholes to pay for needed investments in our crumbling infrastructure, create jobs, provide vital federal programs for families and aid for struggling states and local governments.”