Progressive Opinion

washingtonpost.com — A lot of Democrats took one look at the McConnell plan, which would raise the debt ceiling without substantive fiscal concessions, and saw their way out of this mess. But not the White House. What’s come clear in recent weeks is that the Obama administration is much more intent on reaching a major deficit deal, and much less intent on making revenues a major part of it, than most observers assumed.
That’s led them to offer Republicans a deal that is not only much farther to the right than anyone had predicted, but also much farther to the right than most realize. This deal isn’t just a last-ditch effort to save the economy from the damage of a federal default. The White House would far prefer this deal to the McConnell plan, or to the $2 trillion deal that was under consideration during the Biden negotiations. So why are administration officials so committed to striking a deal composed of policies they’ve mostly opposed? Here’s their thinking.

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washingtonpost.com — “Eric, don’t call my bluff.” Those words suggest President Obama has had it up to here with the preening and posturing of Republican “negotiators” who won’t negotiate. Who could blame him? Obama’s frustration came as House Republicans refused to make a simple choice: Either they could give up their patently unfair and unreasonable demand that a deficit-reduction deal include absolutely no new revenue; or they could give up their equally absurd demand that any increase in the debt ceiling be accompanied, dollar for dollar, by budget cuts. That second option would necessarily mean only a modest hike in the ceiling. Hence Obama’s display of presidential pique. Let’s review why the little game Republicans are playing is so dangerous.

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nytimes.com — The game of “spot the contradiction” is just too easy with extremist Republicans; it’s like spotting snowflakes in a blizzard. Congressional Republicans have taken a sensible and important concern — alarm about long-term debt levels, a genuine problem — and turned it into a brittle and urgent ideology. A final puzzle concerns not just the Republican Party but us as a nation. For all their flaws, Congressional Republicans have been stunningly successful in framing the national debate. Instead of discussing a jobs program to deal with the worst downturn in 70 years, we’re debating spending cuts — and most voters say in polls that they’re against raising the debt ceiling. I fear that instead of banishing contradictions, we as a nation may be embracing them.

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blogs.forbes.com — Here’s a picture of a nation in denial about taxes. Almost all of the Republicans in Congress have signed a pledge to never, ever raise taxes. And, over the last decade, we’ve been in a tax cutting frenzy. Significant tax cuts have been enacted almost every year since 2001. There have been no tax increases.
Before we decided that we really didn’t need to pay for government, things were different. Revenues increased when deficits were deemed alarmingly high. Clinton raised taxes in 1993, but so had George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan (on multiple occasions). Back in the olden days, we acknowledged that wars cost money and didn’t think that our children should pay the entire cost, with interest. But that was when we thought policymakers would make policy decisions. Now I’m not so sure. In the Republicans’ view of the world, we just keep adding red bars to that chart, hoping that spending will follow suit before we have a debt crisis.

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huffingtonpost.com — Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has blinked. His proposal late yesterday afternoon to give President Obama the power to raise the Federal Debt Ceiling -- without the previously demanded budget cuts -- is the beginning of the Republican collapse in their stand off with the president and Democrats. The exact terms of surrender have yet to be negotiated, but there is little question that the Republican forces are have begun to break into a full retreat from their demands that they would only vote to increase the debt ceiling if Democrats agreed to a comparable cuts in spending -- with not a dime of increased tax revenue from the wealthy. Why has the battle turned?

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washingtonpost.com — Republicans, to be sure, have long waged a war on government, but only now has it become an apocalyptic and total war. At its root, is the fear and loathing that rank-and-file right-wingers feel toward what their government, and their nation, is inexorably becoming: multiracial, multicultural, cosmopolitan and now headed by a president who personifies those qualities. That America is also downwardly mobile is a challenge for us all, but for the right, the anxiety our economy understandably evokes is augmented by the politics of racial resentment and the fury that the country is no longer only theirs. That’s not a country whose government they want to pay for — and if the apocalypse befalls us, they seem to have concluded, so much the better. Most Americans, thankfully, don’t share the right’s romance with cataclysm.

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washingtonpost.com — President Obama and his team have recently taken to talking about “bigness” with regard to the debt ceiling. Little, however, has been said about applying that desire for “bigness,” for “grand bargains,” to job creation instead of deficit reduction. In the face of two months of stalled job growth, President Obama came to the podium in the Rose Garden not with a pledge to do something big but to offer political niceties. He said he knew “that people in both parties are ready to” roll up their sleeves. On what evidence can he base such a claim? This isn’t a time to give an extremist Republican Party the benefit of the doubt. And it isn’t a time to hope, with fingers crossed, that the frail economic recovery that has sputtered since it began will somehow, suddenly, without any government action, take off. This is a time, whatever the political challenges, to invest in a fight.

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washingtonpost.com — The Bush tax cuts were not supposed to last forever. Alan Greenspan, whose oracular endorsement was perhaps the single most decisive event in their passage, made it very clear that they were a temporary solution to a temporary surplus. Ten years later, there is no surplus. It turned out that our future economic growth wasn’t as bright as had seemed likely in 2001. That, plus $2 trillion in tax cuts and a few trillion more in wars and assorted spending, left us with large and growing deficits. The next step, then, is obvious. The Bush tax cuts were scheduled to expire after 10 years. Congress extended them for two years in 2010. But as we look toward our future deficits, it seems we’ll need to let at least some of the tax cuts expire. Indeed, Greenspan now says we should let all of the Bush tax cuts expire. But the Republican Party refuses to let any of them expire. And forget admitting that tax cuts meant for surpluses don’t mak

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huffingtonpost.com — The success of Social Security has rested on two major pillars. It provides a financial lifeline for millions of seniors, and the sick and disabled. Despite the GOP's con job that it is an entitlement program that must be cut, it isn't and never has been. It is self-supporting, has not added a nickel to the national debt, and has provided a major boost to the economy by pumping up spending. The Social Security "tweak" that Obama reportedly put on the table would change the inflation measure that determines whether recipients get a cost of living boost or not. But the bigger reason for the Democrats' panic and horror at the thought of this or any other change to Social Security is that it would spell even greater destitution for minorities. Nearly forty percent of African-American recipients rely solely on a Social Security check for their income. One out of three African-Americans and Hispanics would sink below the official poverty line without their Social Security payout.

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dailykos.com — There is no fiscal crisis. Everyone should be clear on that. The United States is not bankrupt. Social Security is not about to founder. Wall Street is not on a precipice, the IMF is not standing by demanding massive shifts in our government, and U.S. bonds are not trading 1:1 with Charmin. There is nothing wrong. Nothing except that the Republican Party is prepared to slice the nation's throat to get its way.

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