Category: Bipartisan Wet Dream

Why Simpson Bowles should be DOA

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I’ll just sit here and hold my breath! Scott Lemieux:

The problem is that the deficit is nothing like health care. There’s no political dynamic that locks deficit reduction programs into place. Chait is implicitly referring to the bait-and-switch pulled by the Republicans after the Greenspan commission on Social Security and the 1993 Clinton budget deal, in which deficit reductions were used to finance hugely expansive Republican boondoggles like unnecessary, trillion-dollar wars and upper-class tax cuts.   Nothing in a deal would stop the same thing from happening again.  The best proposals in the report — cutting defense spending and agricultural studies, getting rid of the mortgage deduction, ending the special treatment of capital-gains income — would be the hardest to sustain over time. Legislation that provides direct benefits to concentrated, powerful interests while imposing indirect costs on more diffuse, less powerful interests is the easiest kind of legislation to pass. Moreover, this fact is another reason why S/B isn’t a good starting point for a deal, because the best provisions are the least likely to survive the legislative process. We all know that any bill that phases out the mortgage deduction is DOA.

To put it another way, when Chait concedes that Republicans don’t care about the deficit, we can stop right there, because a deficit-reduction deal requires ongoing cooperation between the parties; legislation that is passed today can be changed next year. This cooperation currently doesn’t exist. Therefore, there’s no reason for Democrats to support a deficit-reduction program that isn’t otherwise worth passing on the merits.

Tip courtesy of Thomas Soldan

Boehner: ‘We do not have an immediate debt crisis’

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

And of course, we also have to give credit to Obama for playing along!

I never thought I’d write these words, but here goes: Thank you, John Boehner. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for finally admitting on national television that all the fiscal cliffs, sequestrations and budget battles you’ve created are, indeed, artificially fabricated by ideologues and self-interested politicians and not the result of some imminent crisis that’s out of our control.

America owes this debt of gratitude to Boehner after he finally came clean on yesterday’s edition of ABC’s “This Week” and admitted that “we do not have an immediate debt crisis.” (His admission was followed up by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who quickly echoed much the same sentiment on CBS’ “Face the Nation”).

In offering up such a stunningly honest admission, the GOP leader has put himself on record as agreeing with President Obama, who has previously acknowledged that demonstrable reality. But the big news here isn’t just about the politics of a Republican House speaker tacitly admitting they agree with a Democratic president. It is also about a bigger admission revealing the fact that the GOP’s fiscal alarmism is not merely some natural reaction to reality, but a calculated means to other ideological ends.

And one they can agree on! Both Obama and the GOP want to shred the safety net. Progress!

If only I had a dollar

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

For every time someone told me Obama would never do this. He was “playing chess” or “boxing the Republicans into a corner.” I think they still don’t believe it. Chumps!

President Barack Obama told Senate Democrats that they should be open to changes in entitlement programs to achieve a long-term budget deal, according to several lawmakers who attended a meeting with him on Capitol Hill today.

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin said Obama told Democrats during the 90-minute meeting that he wanted a broad, bipartisan deficit-reduction deal this year. Harkin said Obama rebuffed his demand, joined by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, for an assurance that Medicare and Social Security benefits would be remain untouched in any “grand bargain” agreement.

“Of course some of us responded ‘yes, but, what is in that grand bargain?’” because “we don’t want to start whacking away at Social Security or Medicare,” Harkin told reporters. “He didn’t make a commitment but he seemed to indicate that, yes, there are other ways of solving the entitlement problems without doing that.”

Obama’s meeting with Senate Democrats marked the start of three days of meetings the president has with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. He holds closed-door meetings tomorrow with House Republicans and on March 14 will meet with Senate Republicans and House Democrats. Obama didn’t make a statement while entering or leaving the meeting.

Asked following the meeting if he could support increasing the eligibility age for Medicare, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin declined to answer directly. Instead he said he liked that Obama “is taking a very pragmatic approach” to entitlements.

“We’re not going to be, as Democrats, changing our core values on Medicare or Social Security,” Manchin said. “But with that, running more efficiently, looking at things that do make sense, I think he’s looking at that.”

Yet another reason why I love charter schools

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

They offer upward mobility to the strangest people!

When Camden’s LEAP Academy University Charter School compelled its new food-service management company to retain the school’s executive chef and give him a $24,000 raise, LEAP also had to pay a $151,428 penalty to its previous vendor, documents show.

Including Michele Pastorello’s new $95,000 salary, LEAP has spent nearly $250,000 this school year to keep him employed as executive chef. The position typically pays about $40,000, according to industry experts.

Pastorello is the live-in boyfriend of LEAP founder and board chairwoman Gloria Bonilla-Santiago. His raise, as well as the fee paid to the previous management company, Aramark, now are under review by the school’s board of trustees.

On Friday, Aramark issued a pointed response to suggestions by LEAP that it was replaced because it was not meeting the school’s nutritional goals.

Bonilla-Santiago has recused herself from votes dealing with the food-service contracts. Through a spokesman, she has declined to be interviewed.

Sequester press conference

~ susie ~ 10 Comments

I feel the same way I used to feel when I saw George W. Bush on my teevee — angry and disgusted:

THE PRESIDENT: Look, we’ve already cut $2.5 trillion in our deficit. Everybody says we need to cut $4 trillion, which means we have to come up with another trillion and a half. The vast majority of economists agree that the problem when it comes to deficits is not discretionary spending. It’s not that we’re spending too much money on education. It’s not that we’re spending too much money on job training, or that we’re spending too much money rebuilding our roads and our bridges. We’re not.

The problem that we have is a long-term problem in terms of our health care costs and programs like Medicare. And what I’ve said very specifically, very detailed is that I’m prepared to take on the problem where it exists — on entitlements — and do some things that my own party really doesn’t like — if it’s part of a broader package of sensible deficit reduction. So the deal that I’ve put forward over the last two years, the deal that I put forward as recently as December is still on the table. I am prepared to do hard things and to push my Democratic friends to do hard things.

If you missed it, he threw progressive Dems under the bus, too: People who “don’t want any cuts at all in anything.”

Call your congress critter. Ask them to vote to the “Cancel The Sequester” bill in the House, and tell them you don’t support any cuts at all in Social Security and Medicare.