I am in substantial agreement with Markos’s assessment of the battlefield over budget cuts. In particular, I agree that the Republican Party (writ large) can be described as psychopathically unconcerned with the welfare of our economy and our credit rating. Their avowed willingness to default on our debts if they don’t get their way has a credible smell. However, I think their unity and resolve has been shattered, and that it will be shattered further still by the president’s inauguration and State of the Union speeches.
It’s important that we judge things from a realistic perspective. The president has consistently and persistently called for shared sacrifice and a balanced approach to solving our budgetary challenges. He has never suggested that there could be no cuts in Medicare or Social Security benefits anymore than he has suggested that there could be no cuts to NASA or Head Start or the budget of the Commerce Department. What he has said is that he is not going to ask the vulnerable to pay before he asks the most affluent. He has said that he won’t let the middle class and the poor shoulder the whole burden on their own. He has said that any cuts must be matched in new revenues coming from people who can most afford to contribute. The principles are based on fairness and balance. Everyone should sacrifice something, but those with the most to give should give the most.
These principles are sound, but they are also a reflection of political reality. The Republicans retain a significant amount of power and they cannot simply be steamrolled. What they are asking for is so insane that they appear to be afraid of articulating it in clear legislative language, but that doesn’t mean that they can simply be ignored. That is why I do not fully agree with Markos that the Democrats will only agree to concessions if they want to agree to concessions.
As we go forward, it is important that the president stand firm in his complete refusal to discuss the debt ceiling. But, while he is doing that, he must also be working with the Republicans on redoing the Sequester in a way that helps the GOP get to ‘yes.’ And when I say ‘get to yes,’ I am referring to the same (or a similar) group of Republicans who just voted with the Democrats on the Fiscal Cliff. That group is our new governing coalition, and they must be nourished and tended to with care. We will need them if we are going to have any hope of passing comprehensive immigration reform or anything on climate change or anything on assault rifles and ammunition. The cleavage in the Republican Party has been created and it must be maintained and (if possible) strengthened. This is the only way that the country can be governed throughout the remainder of this decade.
It is going to require a lot of finesse and hand-holding. The temptation to let the country go to hell just to prove how bad the Republicans really are is quite strong. Markos knows this:
…to be clear, I don’t doubt Obama’s motivations. I don’t believe he wants people to suffer. What I doubt is his resolve in the face of economic terrorism. Because remember—if he does the right thing and stand (sic) up to Republicans, we’ll all feel better, and the long-term results will be far better, but the short-term pain could be brutal and hurt lots and lots of people.
Whether Republicans take the blame for that or not is immaterial to the fact that lots of people will suffer. Republicans don’t give a shit about that. We do, and Republicans know that and will use that against us.
Because they’re psychopaths.
I just humbly suggest that there is a third way between letting the Republicans destroy the economy and capitulating to their demands. The president just demonstrated the third way on the Fiscal Cliff, and he will do it again in two months. But it will involve the Democrats doing things that they would rather not do.
It will involve maintaining a split in the GOP, which means working with The Lesser Crazy.
It’s the best that we can do.
That group is our new governing coalition, and they must be nourished and tended to with care. We will need them if we are going to have any hope of passing comprehensive immigration reform or anything on climate change or anything on assault rifles and ammunition.
Good luck!! If any bills, besides absolutely necessary stuff, pass that aren’t a complete cock-up I’ll be surprised.
Whether it happens or not will be the measure of this president’s greatness.
The Lesser Crazy
That’s good. I’m going to use that in my parlance.
He can begin, I think, by strongly courting the Republicans who are pissed that the Sandy aid didn’t go through smoothly. Then add the folks who voted on the Fiscal Cliff deal. Good. But how are bills going to get to the floor for those folks to vote on if Boehner holds onto the Hastert Rule? I know that was broken with the Cliff deal. But will he do it again without a crisis upon us?
Well, I believe we are headed for another crisis. This time, it’s a real one.
But will two go-rounds of Republican “realists” stepping in at the last moment to avert disaster train the caucus to think differently and perhaps with some degree of self-preservation? The problem is that they are too safe in their seats. We have no choice but to try to change that.
I’m curious what you mean when you say we’re headed for another crisis and “[t]his time, it’s a real one.”
What sort of crisis are you thinking of?
(I assume you don’t mean the debt ceiling or something like that, because that, just like the fiscal cliff, isn’t a real crisis.)
Oh, the debt ceiling is as serious as a heart attack.
Only if Obama is willing to let it be. The trillion dollar coin is perfectly legal and the markets would adjust after a brief hiccup.
Will you give it a rest with the platinum coin? That is dumbest thing I’ve ever heard not uttered by Orly Taitz.
A plain reading of the law says you’re wrong. Besides, even the threat of it is a useful bargaining chip. so no, this is not going to go away.
Not only is it not dumb, it’s the law. Assuming the debt limit is not raised, come February Congress will have passed laws requiring the President to spend money in excess of taxes, and provided one, and only one way to obtain the balance – platinum coinage. And on top of that, coining money is a power specifically granted to Congress in the Constitution. Coining monies the economy needs was a specific, intentional purpose of the Founding Fathers when they wrote up the Constitution.
If Obama does not create adequate platinum coinage come February, he’ll be breaking the law, ignoring the Constitution, and causing great hardship to the country. If some Tea Party President similarly refused to borrow money in spite of the law, we’d be calling for his impeachment, and rightly so.
Read Article I Section 8 of the Constitution and see who has the power to mint coins, Hint: It’s not the Executive branch. Treasury on;y mints coins and prints paper money because Congress has authorized it. Congress also authorizes the denomination and design of the coins and bills.
The Constitution specifies that Congress writes the laws and the President executes them. Congress can’t actually do anything itself. Congress has written laws requiring the President to spend in certain amounts and legislated various ways for him to obtain the monies, including taxes, borrowing, and coinage. The coinage power is quite specifically unlimited – the Treasury can mint any amount of platinum in any denomination. The power ultimately comes from Congress, but it has been delegated to the Executive, just like with anything else that the government ever does.
Can we be honest for a moment?
Congress quite clearly provided for a commemorative coin program designed to please coin collectors. The Treasury Secretary can mint platinum coins that will appeal to these collectors. They can be $5 or $50 or maybe even $100.
Congress had no intention of giving the Treasury the right to print money. Their failure to designate a cap on the potential value of the coins and their failure to specify that the Treasury cannot mint coins for the purpose of doing a swap with the Fed is clearly a matter of lack of imagination, and not by design.
The president could take advantage of this lack of imagination, but it is unlikely that he would convince the courts that he was acting legally.
Perhaps there is a way this could work. The president could promise not to do it in return for the GOP giving up the statutory debt ceiling limit. But to argue that it would be a reasonable (and legal) interpretation of the law would be absurd.
Congress didn’t intend for the US to welsh on its obligations when it created the debt limit 100 years ago. Laws do not necessarily accomplish the goals of their authors. Whatever they intended, they did write a law allowing the executive unlimited coinage. There’s nothing whatsoever in the statute that restricts coinage to commemorative purposes. If they want to restrict it, they have to amend the law.
Incidentally, the ridiculous part of the whole printing and coinage business is not that the Treasury can coin platinum, it’s that it can’t just print money. Printing and coining money is a basic function of government. The elaborate charade of printing via T-bill auctions and complicated interbank transfers is presented as “normal” but it’s just an elaborate way to give bankers control of the money supply level. The value of money rests on the authority of the government, not the Federal Reserve. It’s just absurd for the US government to handcuff itself so that a small very wealthy group can manipulate the money supply for their benefit and even more absurd that the whole situation is presented as normal. The Treasury being able to coin platinum as needed is the one normal part of the entire situation.
you are quite clearly begging the question.
You say it’s legal. I say, I doubt it.
The law isn’t decided by what it accidentally allows. It is decided by judges who are unlikely to agree with your interpretation of the law.
If a law, as written, doesn’t accomplish what the writers intended, they have to modify it. Judges will normally follow the law as written, even in the face of direct requests from the drafters to interpret it otherwise. For example, here’s a case of a badly written tort deform law in Connecticut.
Can you name any examples where a judge took a clearly written law and amended it because the drafters didn’t like what it said?
Read up on legislative intent:
If you go read the commentary surrounding the introduction and passage of the bill, it’s clear that they thought it had no budgetary consequences and was purely a minor detail added for coin collectors.
My god. Somebody just used the phrase “begging the question” correctly on the internet. I don’t think I’ve seen this done in the context of a political discussion board, ever.
Thanks for that, needed the giggle.
Will you give it a rest with the platinum coin? That is dumbest thing I’ve ever heard not uttered by Orly Taitz.
I call this type of thinking “Political Alchemy.” Take a pinch of this language, add a spoonful of that power, give it a twist, and presto! You’ve solved a political program without politics, and there’s nothing the opposition can do about it!
Barath, how would you have President Obama handle the upcoming debt ceiling situation?
I think it’s tricky because it will be fairly coincidental in time to the sequester. How do you think he could/would handle those things separately?
Man is not a wolf to man.
Man is an ant to man.
When Mr. Blandings builds his dream house he never thinks of the impact on the ant population already using the ground it will be built on.
If you asked him whether he realized building would disrupt the lives of many thousands of ants, likely causing deaths among them also in the thousands, he would look at you with a genuinely puzzled expression, shrug, and say, “Yeah? So?”
It’s not that Blandings is a sadist or hates ants or for any reason wishes them harm or actually aims to harm them.
He is not hunting them as a wolf hunts his prey.
They’re just not on his radar when he makes his choices.
Nor will he put them there unless actively made to do.
Man is an ant to man.
LOL, ants will win in the end. As one who lives in an area with the biggest anthills outside of Africa I can tell you that they take great delight when their hill is disrupted to regroup and invade. Perhaps your observation is more relevant than you intended!
“Perhaps your observation is more relevant than you intended!”
No, I don’t think so.
OK, in all fairness, as one who relies on SSD and Medicare as well as Mrs.X, I can attest to cuts to medicare over a 25 year period. Just because there is no congressional action that doesn’t mean there aren’t rule changes that affect recipients. In that 25+ years I’ve seen what was covered shrink while the likes of Goldman Sachs, BOA, GE, et. ceterta get a walk. Frankly I’m sick of it, and now to be told AGAIN, there has to be cuts, is not acceptable, especially after the 205 billion dollar giveaway in the fiscal cliff deal. It has to stop somewhere.
Now is a good time.
I accept the political realities, but it should be clearly understood that the “shared sacrifice” business, from a policy standpoint, is economically irrational bullshit. Budget cutting- indeed, deficit cutting- any time before the job market has fully recovered is in fact insane. And self-defeating, because most of the deficit is caused by the poor economic performance. See under: Europe.
In that respect Obama is just wrong and probably doesn’t understand that he’s wrong (again, see under: Europe). He should be saying that the political realities force him to compromise, but making it very clear that the compromise is in fact bad policy. Instead he continually reinforces crazy conservative economic memes. This has done and will do real damage.
Agreed, and I’m really weary of the “shared sacrifice” meme, when historically that sacrifice has been going on unevenly for decades for certain great portions of our citizens.
It’s time for Bill Gates, the Waltons, the Koch’s, and Mitt Romney to share. But they just made out fine.
I wince every time I hear the words “shared sacrifice” coming out of his mouth.
Don’t know about the President, but looking at this little graph tells me about all I need to know about who has been doing the sacrificing for the last 30-plus years.
The facts remains:
95% of Americans have family annual incomes of less than $311,000;
4/5ths of American families have an annual income under $50,000.
That is a super majority and the laws should be written to reflect that simple irrefutable fact.
Pat Schroeder said while in the House years ago:
“You measure a government by how few people need to be helped.”
We have a bad government and we always until we quit pretending the middleclass is every American family with an annual income somewhere between $11,000 and $450,000.
We have government of the people, by the professional (and hereditary) politicians, for the plutocrats.
A realistic perspective would not reduce itself to the array of powers in the Congress but also account for the human implications of policy.
Nothing shows how isolated from real American life the Congress is than the nature of this debate and the media framing of it. Regardless or what happens, members of Congress and their staffs will still have their jobs, salaries, health care benefits, pensions, and the lucrative possibility of working on K Street or for various DC think tanks.
The continued self-portrayal of Democrats as victims to the GOP because a minority of Democrats have sold out their constituents is realistically what is at issue. True there a number of those folks are not in the 113th Congress, But out of nowhere new folks come to take their place. Hello Carl Levin and friends.
Realism says that a lot of Americans are going to get hurt, not helped by the 113th Congress. And that the GOP is not the sole problem. And typically realism is always counterpoised against principle when a principled stand on the budget issues would get the economy moving and rapidly lower the deficit without hurting so many people. And actually helping people.
“Because remember–if he does the right thing and stand (sic) up to Republicans, we’ll all feel better, and the long-term results will be far better, but the short-term pain could be brutal and hurt lots and lots of people.”
Isn’t that the crux of the constant bad-mouthing of this President from the “more-liberal-than-thou” crowd? They want the President to “stick it to” Republicans and be as petty and mean-spirited as they are towards liberals because it would make them “feel better”. They want him to practice the politics of spite for spite’s sake.
The President isn’t George W. Bush. Bush’s greatest failing is that he always acted as the “President Of Those That Voted For Him.” President Obama fully comprehends that he’s the leader of the ENTIRE COUNTRY, not just those that voted for him. And acts accordingly. And some liberals simply can’t stand this.
Perhaps you missed the part about “the long-term results will be far better”. That means far better for exactly the people you and I are worried about.
Maybe it would be best to define “short-term”. A week or two is one thing, but for families who need these things to survive even a week is too long and a month or more is catastrophic.
I just think it’s easier to tell struggling families to just “hold-on”, but that doesn’t make it right to do so, IMHO
A big difference between us and them is we’re not willing to kill the country to make a political point. It is a weakness in the current politics as war scenarios. That means we won’t get as much out of the negotiations that we otherwise might if we were willing to kill the country like the Republicans obviously are willing to do.