In Quick Hits, The Big Hurt calls attention to a question in a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll.
First, from CBS comes a graph of the topline results:
Then, from vanityfair.com comes the breakdown by income:
To balance the federal budget, which of the
following would be the first step you would take?
TOTAL <$50K* $50K-$100K >$100K
Increase taxes on
the wealthy 61% 67% 58% 46%
Cut defense spending 20 20 22 20
Cut Medicare 4 2 5 10
Cut Social Security 3 1 5 6
* Mislabeled >50K in the original.
The results are hardly surprising, as polls have gotten similar results in the past. Indeed, the General Social Survey has long showed that very few people want to cut Medicare or Social Security, while a great number want to increase spending--but this is not the case for military spending. Even after 9/11, most people remained more supportive of Medicare and Social Security spending than they were of military spending. (See tables & charts & brief discussion on the flip.)
But look a little more closely at the internals. Overall, cutting military spending is five times more popular than cutting Medicare. Among those making less than 50K, it's ten times more popular. But among those making over 100K, it's only twice as popular. Once you get into the stratospheric income levels of K-Street lobbyists and others in the influence biz, it's a good bet that the difference vanishes entirely--and that's even before anyone gets paid to advocate for anything.
Some have suggested that Medicare should be means-tested in order to save money. But these polls show that there's already a sharp income-based difference in levels of support as things stand today. Add in means-testing, so that those making over 100K get nothing out of Medicare themselves--or even just substantially less--and the levels of support would certainly erode even further, thus making it even easier for Congress to act against the wishes of the broad majority of the American people.
On the flip: A set of tables & charts, showing just how upside-down the Versailles consensus is from what the American people want.
In the first half of 2010, impassioned speeches denouncing federal red ink were the G.O.P. norm. And concerns about the deficit were the stated reason for Republican opposition to extension of unemployment benefits, or for that matter any proposal to help Americans cope with economic hardship.
But the tone changed during the summer, as B-day - the day when the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy were scheduled to expire - began to approach. My nomination for headline of the year comes from the newspaper Roll Call, on July 18: "McConnell Blasts Deficit Spending, Urges Extension of Tax Cuts."
How did Republican leaders reconcile their purported deep concern about budget deficits with their advocacy of large tax cuts? Was it that old voodoo economics - the belief, refuted by study after study, that tax cuts pay for themselves - making a comeback? No, it was something new and worse.
To be sure, there were renewed claims that tax cuts lead to higher revenue. But 2010 marked the emergence of a new, even more profound level of magical thinking: the belief that deficits created by tax cuts just don't matter. For example, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona - who had denounced President Obama for running deficits - declared that "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans."
It's an easy position to ridicule. After all, if you never have to offset the cost of tax cuts, why not just eliminate taxes altogether?
Why not, indeed? The new GOP position is the reductio adsurbum of the slogan, "We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem." It's a patently absurd claim on the face of it, but one that became GOP common "wisdom" during the campaign, leading Krugman to write a blitz of of op-ed and blog posts back in mid-to-late October, which I summarized in a Nov 1 diary, "Lies & consequences. Economic catastrophe edition.". Perhaps the single most compelling bit of evidence was the following chart from Krugman's "Why Have Deficits Exploded?", which showed that the exact opposite of the GOP claim was true: our problem is indeed a disastrous plunge in revenue, while government spending has increased at a relatively constant rate since a couple of years before the crisis hit:
The above chart represents cold, hard facts. It's what reality-based economics looks like. And Republicans are having none of it. As with global warming denial, Iraq's WMDs, the "success" of torture, or--for a majority of the GOP base--the belief that Obama is Kenyan, not American--they have their lies, their tribal articles of faith, and they're sticking to them. For them, their group cohesion as conservatives matters more than verifiable fact. When their leaders ask, "Who are you going to believe? Me or your lyin' eyes?", for them, the answer is a no-brainer. For us, the hope that Bush's political downfall and disgrace would lead to a return to reality-based politics has been bitterly disappointed, and this is what the descent into pure delusion looks like.
Demos, The Century Foundation and the Economic Policy Institute, in a joint venture, Our Fiscal Security, have just released a new report, "Investing in America's Economy: A Budget Blueprint for Economic Recovery and Fiscal Responsibility." (I'll have more later today about a second progressive proposal, which in part builds on this report.) Not only does it focus on the immediate crisis and the need for economic recovery in the short term, it is also focused on long-term economic growth for the economy as a whole as a key consideration in shaping a long-term sustainable budget policy. (Now, why didn't Obama think of that?) The press release explains:
The Blueprint takes a very different approach from other prominent proposals, specifically prioritizing a strong economic recovery because widespread job creation and robust economic growth are essential to successful deficit reduction.
The plan will produce the following short- and long-term results:
Substantial and sustained increased funding for job creation and investments, especially in the near term;
A budget path that significantly improves the 10-year budget outlook;
A transition from a primary deficit to a primary surplus in 2018, and sustainable debt levels by the end of the decade;
An improvement in the long-term path for public debt, stabilizing debt as a share of the economy beyond 2025;
A solid footing for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the long term; and
A modernized tax code that raises adequate revenue fairly and efficiently.
The Blueprint's budget path boosts funding for near-term job creation, achieves lower deficits in the medium-term and balances the primary federal budget in less than a decade. It does so with the recognition that boosting-rather than cutting-spending on national priorities, including infrastructure, transportation, technology and education, is critical to American prosperity. Unlike the other plans, the Blueprint provides a path to do more than cut the deficit; it has as its overarching goal the creation of a stronger middle class and a fundamentally more robust American economy.
Last night, Heather McGhee, Director of the Washington office of Demos, appeared on Countdown to talk about the plan:
The track record here is pretty consistent -- Reagan was the father of the modern deficit, and no one cared. When Mondale tried to make deficit reduction central to his '84 campaign, he lost 49 states. Clinton was the father of modern deficit reduction, but no one much cared about that, either, and by the time he left office after two terms, much of the country didn't even realize he'd completely eliminated the deficit and had begun paying off the debt. George W. Bush was the most fiscally irresponsible president in American history, but on the long list of Bush's failures, most Americans don't even consider the $5 trillion he added to the debt. Obama has actually reduced the deficit over the last year, but no one actually hears deficit hawks praising him for it.
This history is so clear, it's amazing how uniformly Versailles can ignore. But they do.
Steve went on to argue the obvious (to Americans, that is):
Voters want the economy to grow. They want more jobs. If they actually cared about the deficit, they'd be outraged by the notion of a new round of tax cuts (they're not), and supportive of measures like the Simpson/Bowles plan (they're really not).
And then he went one step further:
It's not altogether clear people even know what the deficit is. For many, it's likely that the deficit is just something that's "bad." Indeed, given that deficit concerns tend to coincide with economic downturns, some folks might see a correlation -- the deficit is high and the economy is bad, they figure, so maybe if the deficit were lower the economy might get better.
All of this is nonsense, of course, but it's worth remembering when various political players suggest policymakers' popularity is riding on deficit reduction. It's not.
There is, of course, strong evidence for this. People really do seem to respond to--even repeat--the meme that since households are cutting back spending, government should do the same, even though macro-economics tells us unequivocally that the opposite is true. Now that even President Obama is spewing this nonsense, it's not likely that ordinary folks are going to get a clue. But even so, the CBS poll figures speak for themselves. It's just not an issue for the vast majority of them.
So why is it an issue for Versailles? Reason number one is that the President is a Democrat.
An idea occurred to me at Netroots Nation, but I let the perfect get in the way of the good, and Dean Baker beat me to it:
The Budget Deficit Chicken Hawks
Most people are familiar with the concept of "chicken hawks." Chicken hawks are the politicians who are anxious to send other people to risk their lives in war, but somehow managed to avoid service when they had the opportunity to fight themselves. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney and former President George W. Bush are the leading members of the chicken hawk society.
It turns out that we have a similar story with budget policy, where there appears to be a large contingent of budget deficit chicken hawks. The deficit hawks have been filling the news lately. These are the folks who are yelling that something terrible will happen if we don't reduce the deficit. Most of them seem to have missed the fact that something terrible is now happening. We have almost 15 million people unemployed and 9 million underemployed, with several million facing the loss of their home in the next few years.
The perfect, of course, would be a list of all the senators and representatives currently calling for "fiscal responsibility" who supported Bush's tax cuts and other forms of profligate spending on the wealthy and well-connected--along with the total amounts they've added to deficit. But since I've already been scooped, and I'm no closer to having the time to do the research, I figured I'd do the next best thing. Okay, would you believe the next-to-the-next best thing? Well, whatever. I figured I'd just do something to help give the deficit chickenhawk meme a little push, and suggest that it's worth pushing a whole lot more.
So here's my suggestion: You know how the GOP just loves to generate absurd tallies of how many "tax increases" some poltician voted for? (If they voted for a bill that cut taxes 10% here, while raising them 1% there, there and there, then they voted for THREE tax increases! And if they voted for cloture, too, then they voted for SIX tax increases!) Well, it would make perfect sense to turn this around and generate a realistic statistic instead, the individual politician's federal deficit and debt. This could be used in all sorts of ways, particularly campaign ads. It would be an extremely useful sort of statistic to generate.
I really don't have the resources to pull this off properly, but I can point to a good place to start, the list of Senators who voted for Bush's 2001 tax cut:
[Note]: If Democrats & progressives practiced hegemonic warfare, the way Republicans & conservatives do, you would be able to recite the contents of the following diary in your sleep. Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, heck, even Chris "The Osmosis Kid" Matthews would have shown you snazzier versions of the charts below a gazillion times alredy.
For conservatives, Ronald Reagan is a god. As well he must be, since gods are not to be questioned, and conservatives are not the questioning kind. Nor is Reagan the sort who stands up to scrutiny well, as I and countless others have pointed out on occasions numberless to man (though perhaps not to women who Google). For one thing, I can just never get over the fact that it's virtually certain he got into office by an act of treason--much like Richard Nixon did--and that Lee Hamilton, the Indiana prototype for Evan Bayh, let him get away with it. But if the political machinations of getting into office are obscure and controversial, the economic record is etched in stone in indisputable, widely available (it's on the internet!) public data. And this week, I just happened to stumble across a website comparing Reagan's record to that of the Clinton-who is, for modern conservatives, an antichrist-like counterpart to Reagan's godhood.
The website was created by a fellow named Patrick Ziegler way back in 2002. The best view for getting the point across is the "Charts and Commentary" view. The charts aren't the best quality in the world (Hey! It was 2002!), but the information they convey is devastating, and the commentary, though brief, makes sure you get the message.
For example, the first graph shows government receipts in billions of dollars:
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire Blogger
President Barack Obama rolled out his highly anticipated federal budget proposal on Thursday, and while the plan represents a dramatic departure from the priorities of the Bush administration, its ultimate impact may be crippled by a counterproductive bank bailout.
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