It seems to me that Matt Yglesias is trying to be too clever by half. His argument appears to boil down to the idea that the spin was better when we argued that we could live with the Sequester rather than that it would be a disaster. Whether that is true or not, it says nothing about the merits. Is the Sequester better than nothing? Obviously, it is not. The economy is on the mend and starting to gather strength. The Sequester will slow economic growth, create chaos, and needlessly ruin hundreds of thousands of people’s lives. As long as it persists, it is evidence that our political system is dysfunctional on a grand scale. If Yglesias is trying to head-fake the Republicans with some kind of double reverse psychological jujitsu, he isn’t taking into account that the new Republican Party doesn’t care as much about military spending as the old one. Not only are they willing to slash Pentagon spending in a stupid and irresponsible way, but they are likely to agree to future cutting done in a sane and responsible way. If Yglesias is actually serious that we can live with the Sequester and that it is preferable to simple repeal, he should be stripped of his job, his health insurance, and his housing, and be forced to live in a box for a month.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
23 Comments
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
he always comes up with bullshyt like this.
very comfortably ensconsed wherever the hell he is
with absolutely no fucking clue about the reality of life without a paycheck
One of the commenters at this old haunt(TP? .. The Atlantic?) used to always call MY a trust-fund scumbag because of stuff like this, and his general love of neo-liberalism.
I used to do something similar at wherever he was before the Prospect.
Though is the economy getting stronger? I thought last quarter the economy only grew .1% which is less than previous.
It is, only in contrast to the sorts of entitlement cuts the GOP really like to do.
But as he put it, his is a pretty weak argument.
So, when does the GOP House capitulate and when does the President release the FY 2014 budget?
My guess is the FY 2014 budget will contain more austerity in bulk. I don’t think that the President and his economic team grasp Keynes’s argument. And there are enough scared Democrats in the House to make austerity the norm for a while.
There are a lot of items on the Pentagon side that can only be dealt with through cancellation of contracts, and whatever penalties exist in those contracts. That means that the sequester puts pressure on operations that are outside of those contracts or involves negotiated delays in work and payments under those contracts. A lot of the civilian discretionary spending doesn’t work this way; there is more flexibility in where to cut or delay.
The fact remains that cutting will not end the deficit. Only restoration of economic growth among people who actually pay taxes will. Yglesias, like Woodward, is just another distracting sideshow while we wait for Congress to show a pulse.
Bloomberg reported on my commute home today that Obama is meeting with GOP leaders right now and is offering a combo of “revenue enhancements” and entitlement cuts as an alternative to the sequester.
Looks to me that we are going to go the way of Greece, but as a self-inflected wound since, unlike Greece, we control our currency and thus have no need of austerity except to make the 1% richer through deflation.
“Too clever by half” is sort of Slate’s raison d’etre.
Did Michael Kinsley bake that in?
I get what Mattie’s saying. To cut defense spending so drastically is a big plus. It’s something we’re not going to get in any other way. (I differ with his assertion that Repubs would agree to these cuts absent the sequester.) The rest of the spending cuts, while idiotic, can be ironed out over time, reallocating funds where they’re most needed.
Ideal, no. But we could have done a lot worse. Obama cut a good deal. It will be much more painful for Republicans than Democrats to live with these cuts. McCain is in mourning.
Looks like most of the Defense cuts will come out of the hides of loyal civil servants, not the wasteful weapon systems, because God knows we have to keep those CEO bonus’ coming.
Yes, to get them to scream and shout and stomp their feet and call their Congresscritter. In fairly short order, this will all get rejiggered. I just hope the defense cuts mostly stick. There’s a good chance they will given that Republicans have pretty much capitulated on the point.
We are now entering a time delay from the Summer of Austerity, (fuck this “sequester” label) when this sort of disastrous fiscal policy was being bandied about by “conservatives” as economically helpful. With the recent data from Europe, it is now crystal clear that austerity is contractionary and harmful. Of course, the average Teaturd favored austerity just out of hatred for the gub’mint, and they threatened to cause a default unless massive spending cuts were enacted.
Obama’s decision to go along with Repub austerity in 2011 will now be seen as one of the crucial decisions in his presidency. Did he have to do it in order to win re-election? Would it have been (politically) better for the insane TeaTurd movement to have forced default and be accurately seen as nihilist chaos-creators before the 2012 election? Did Obama understand that the Great Repub Gerymander of 2010 had rendered House Repubs immune from electoral defeat? These questions will have to be thrashed out.
The Obama theory likely was that the Repubs ultimately wouldn’t allow such deep cuts to the military. And to the extent the strategy was attractive to progressives, this was the reason. We can, of course, in theory restore funding to all the non-military programs now being defunded, and return these agencies to functionality. But most likely our national paralysis will not ever allow that and feeble gub’mint will now be our nation’s fate.
It should be noted that Repubs are not caving, and likely will not cave. They appear not to care about the cuts to the military and are ecstatic over cuts to all other demonic agencies, like EPA. This was the miscalculation. “Conservative” Repubs hate the EPA more than they love their imperial soldiery and bloated weapon system boondoggles.
As I observed a couple days ago, the nation is now on the path back to the Gilded Age, to the days of 1909, when billionaire monopolists ruled the country, and there was no central gub’mint enforcing anything, including food safety. This has been the goal of the corporate/plutocrats for decades and it is now coming to fruition as a result of decisions in the summer of 2011. The GOoP now doesn’t need to vote to cut anything, the cuts are all being done for them, automatically, quarter after quarter.
The agencies of the federal gub’mint are being slowly and systematically dismantled, after a decade of already ruinous cuts under Cheney. These agencies likely will never return to effectiveness. The days of a competent central gub’mint policing plutocrat schemes and misdeeds, ala the 70s, is receding ever deeper into the past.
And to add to this excellent comment (and Booman’s excellent OP), we should think about the long-term politics of this as well. There’s been a temptation on the left to say, “well, entitlements and other programs for those most in need were spared”, and to figure that, in conjunction with the first significant defense cuts we’ve seen in a long term, that makes this a better deal for the left than for the right. But in fact, the functions being savaged are things very much needed by the broad middle class. Human nature being what it is, it’s a major political loser to tax people to help the poor if the taxpayers see very little in the way of services for themselves in return for their tax dollars. This is the same phenomenon that makes proposals for means-testing of programs like SS and Medicare so dangerous in the long run. People end up saying, if I’m not getting anything out of the deal then I might as well vote for more tax cuts. That’s hardly admirable, but it’s reality.
I disagree. If you look at the larger, strategic picture, the sequester opens the door to large, important military spending cuts. At the same time, the Republicans are not going to be able to resist the closing of indefensible tax loopholes forever. So this can be part of the way the overall budget imbalance gets fixed.
I believe Ed Kilgore has a cogent answer to this.
I think Kilgore’s off base because reallocating defense spending will be a hell of a lot easier than cutting it. This is the kind of defense cut we would never have gotten but for the sequester. From a strategic point of view, long term this is very good for Democrats.
I disagree. If you look at the larger, strategic picture, the sequester opens the door to large, important military spending cuts. At the same time, the Republicans are not going to be able to resist the closing of indefensible tax loopholes forever. Add in reforms that constrain health care inflation and we’ve gone a very long way toward fixing our budget problems.
But But you don’t understand. This is 11 dimensional chess and anyway it’s the best that Obama could get and your just a Liberal crybaby that wants ponies. And Obama is the greatest President ever and leaps tall buildings with a single bound. And heals the sick and raises the dead.
That was sarcasm in case you wondered.
People whose lives will be directly impacted by these cuts already live challenged lives. But it’s good to recognize that survival responses will emerge. WalMart may find themselves with more labor organizing for unions; the Union organizers may find more workers knocking at their door to ask for membership. Much like when Carnegie’s steel workers were pushed beyond their limits, the workers’ ultimate response is to band together.
Hell hath no fury like a Meals on Wheels senior recipient who is denied. Any politician who underestimates the power of a senior does so at his own peril.
I hope you are right, but I fear you are wrong.
I guess I’m slow but it’s really hitting me how the massive media campaign to make public debt our gravest national threat is directly comparable to the massive propaganda campaign about the pants wetting threat of islamic terrorism. Same venue, same people.
And the same basic group of people push the same kind of holier than thou horror stories about the chosen enemy. About how we face the very serious responsibility of slaying islamic terrorism by spending trillions to shred flesh in the middle east, or how we face the very serious responsibility of controlling debt by reducing living standard of the 47%.
Bad news for the President. This sentiment seems to be growing because of his Grand Bargain talk.
I am just wondering, if taking $85 Billion out of the economy has the same multiplier effect (x3) so it is the same of taking $255 Billion dollars out of the economy.
Is it just me, or has Iggles gotten worse as time has gone on? I don’t remember him being such a nasty neoliberal POS. I mean, sure, he’s always been a neoliberal, but this bad? He didn’t seem like such a douche nozzle at ThinkProgress.