I am going to highlight and discuss a few things from the president’s press conference today. To start, let’s look at his bottom line. First, the president made this remark: “I will not sign a 30-day or a 60-day or a 90-day extension.” He’s referring to the debt limit. Then he had this exchange:
Q Do you see any path to a deal if they don’t budge on taxes?
THE PRESIDENT: I do not see a path to a deal if they don’t budge, period. I mean, if the basic proposition is “it’s my way or the highway,” then we’re probably not going to get something done because we’ve got divided government. We’ve got Democrats controlling the Senate; we probably are going to need Democratic votes in the House for any package that could possibly pass. And so if, in fact, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are sincere — and I believe they are — that they don’t want to see the U.S. government default, then they’re going to have to compromise just like Democrats are going to have to compromise; just like I have shown myself willing to compromise.
Now, let’s be frank. There are Blue Dogs in the House who might be willing to sign off on cuts to Social Security or Medicare and Medicaid, but not unless they get something on the revenue side in return. And to get more mainstream Democrats to consider such cuts, the Republicans will have to considerably sweeten the deal beyond what they’re offering now. The same can be said about the Senate, which is still under nominal Democratic control. The president sees the same thing that I’ve been seeing. Boehner either fails to produce any bill to increase the debt limit, presents a bill that fails, or he caves in and presents a bill that is almost universally acceptable to Democrats and a small handful of responsible Republicans. Those are his options. The only other option is to ram home some piece of crap bill with majority-Republican support and then fix it in Conference Committee with the Senate to be something that can pass both houses of Congress and that the president will sign. He may try the last option out of sheer desperation and in an effort to buy time. He can’t afford to simply fail to pass anything.
Now, moving on, what I am going to do here is splice together some fragments from different parts of the press conference. What I want to show is that the president wants to do more stimulus, but he can’t do it in the current political environment. He feels that he must tackle the deficit in order to pivot to jobs. Early on in the press conference he noted that the deal he is offering is not what he wants.
With respect to a balanced package, is the package that we’re talking about exactly what I would want? No. I might want more revenues and fewer cuts to programs that benefit middle-class families that are trying to send their kids to college, or benefit all of us because we’re investing more in medical research.
So I make no claims that somehow the position that Speaker Boehner and I discussed reflects 100 percent of what I want. But that’s the point. My point is, is that I’m willing to move in their direction in order to get something done. And that’s what compromise entails. We have a system of government in which everybody has got to give a little bit.
Later on, he answered a question from Sam Stein about why he would cut spending and touch Social Security when the former will exacerbate unemployment and the latter doesn’t impact the deficit. The president defended the Recovery Act as effective Keynesian economics, noting that states are now laying off teachers, cops, and firefighters because they have no more stimulus money. But then he said this:
So my strong preference would be for us to figure out ways that we can continue to provide help across the board. But I’m operating within some political constraints here, because whatever I do has to go through the House of Representatives.
What that means then is, is that among the options that are available to us is, for example, the payroll tax cut, which might not be exactly the kind of program that I would design in order to boost employment but does make a difference because it puts money in the pockets of people who are then spending it at businesses, large and small. That gives them more customers, increases demand, and it gives businesses a greater incentive to hire. And that would be, for example, a component of this overall package.
This answer should be instructive to a lot of progressive critics. The complete answer demonstrates that Obama would strongly prefer to provide more stimulus to the economy. He made the exact kind of intellectual defense of Keynesian economics that everyone from Krugman to Atrios has been begging him to make. But he can’t get the money to do it, and he’s not going to beat a dead horse. He has no choice but to move on and try other things. And he makes this even more clear in his last answer of the day.
We are now in a situation where because the economy has moved slower than we wanted, because of the deficits and debt that result from the recession and the crisis, that taking a approach that costs trillions of dollars is not an option. We don’t have that kind of money right now.
What we can do is to solve this underlying debt and deficit problem for a long period of time so that then we can get back to having a conversation about, all right, since we now have solved this problem, that’s not — no longer what’s hampering economic growth, that’s not feeding business and uncertainty, everybody feels that the ground is stable under our feet, are there some strategies that we could pursue that would really focus on some targeted job growth — infrastructure being a primary example.
I mean, the infrastructure bank that we’ve proposed is relatively small. But could we imagine a project where we’re rebuilding roads and bridges and ports and schools and broadband lines and smart grids, and taking all those construction workers and putting them to work right now? I can imagine a very aggressive program like that that I think the American people would rally around and would be good for the economy not just next year or the year after, but for the next 20 or 30 years.
But we can’t even have that conversation if people feel as if we don’t have our fiscal house in order. So the idea here is let’s act now. Let’s get this problem off the table. And then with some firm footing, with a solid fiscal situation, we will then be in a position to make the kind of investments that I think are going to be necessary to win the future.
Now, Obama is pretty explicitly embracing some right-wing frames about what’s hampering the economy here, but there’s a greater point. He’s saying 1) that he can’t invest trillions to get the economy moving again, and 2) that he can’t even have a conversation about stimulating the economy because of the debt-gorilla in the middle of the room. To be clear, it’s obvious from his earlier answers that he would strongly prefer to do more stimulus. Whether the money’s not there because we can’t afford it or because Congress won’t give it to him is immaterial, as the result is the same. It’s not an option.
There’s a problem with his reasoning here, and naturally everyone leapt on it immediately, including me. The Republicans aren’t going to stop complaining about taxes, debt, and deficits no matter what happens. We could be running a surplus and they’d still be complaining about government spending and taxes (see 2000). But, in fairness, the president is right that the 2010 midterms created a mandate for House Republicans to attack the deficit and the size of government. He has found himself blocked from taking any action unless and until he acknowledges that mandate. He can ignore it as a trumped up crisis, but he can’t move on to other things if he ignores it.
So, here we are. The president is making some tough decisions, and he’s still faced with nothing but intransigence.