Back in December, Alex Seitz-Wald had a good piece in Salon on the up and downsides of Chained CPI. It’s notable that (with caveats) many progressive people and organizations have endorsed Chained CPI, including Paul Krugman, the Center for American Progress, and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. The caveats are critically important, as is the political context in which this decision is being made. Paul Krugman, for example, would never endorse Chained CPI unless all the realistic alternatives were worse. The administration is probably thinking along the same lines.
“While this is not the President’s ideal deficit reduction plan, and there are particular proposals in this plan like the CPI change that were key Republican requests and not the President’s preferred approach, this is a compromise proposal built on common ground and the President felt it was important to make it clear that the offer still stands,” one senior administration official told The Hill…
“The president has made clear that he is willing to compromise and do tough things to reduce the deficit, but only in the context of a package like this one that has balance and includes revenues from the wealthiest Americans and that is designed to promote economic growth,” the administration official said. “That means that the things like CPI that Republican Leaders have pushed hard for will only be accepted if Congressional Republicans are willing to do more on revenues.”
This cat has been out of the bag for a long time. If you’ve been reading this blog then you know that I told you that Chained CPI would be part of any eventual deal. And I told you that it was least bad thing the president could give the Republicans. So, please, don’t go nuts with the Obama is Hitler stuff. The Republicans probably still won’t take the deal, even if their leadership asks them to. That is because they are crazy.
But, if they do, it will mean the Tea Party fever has broken and we can haz function again.
Yeah, I find some of these reactions pretty frustrating. There’s a distinction between policy that’s actually good (and CPI chaining is pretty far from it) and policy that’s the least bad among the politically available options (and CPI chaining may well qualify). Also, there seems to be the idea that Social Security benefits have been sacrosanct throughout the program’s history, and that just isn’t so.
Of course, there seems to be a weird shared belief among a lot of progressive activists, “centrist” pundits and journalists, and Republican legislators that the Republicans in Congress lack both political power and agency. If only it were so.
It’s notable that (with caveats) many progressive people and organizations have endorsed Chained CPI, including Paul Krugman,
And not one of them rely on Social Security…….
well, the caveats apply directly to people who literally “depend” on Social Security.
Krugman may have endorsed chained CPI in the past, but not in December 2012. I’d sure like to see some recent citations where Krugman’s fully supportive of chained CPI, and please: no cherry-picking.
Krugman didn’t support it on April 5th 2013. Quite the opposite.
Maybe I’m missing it, but I can’t find any support for this from CAP either.
[citation needed], Booman.
I don’t EVER remember Kruggers supporting chained CPI. And if he did, I would be willing to bet i was extremely conditional.
Tea Party fever won’t break because it’s not just a Tea Party tactic. The GOP has had the strategy to shut down the federal government from the first day of Obama’s first term. Having succeeded in doing that, and having captured total power is several more states, the GOP is currently pursuing a “states rights” strategy of of undoing as much federal law as possible as fast as possible on the state level while continuing to paralyze the federal government.
If they get the “Grand Bargain”, it will be “thank you very much” and continuation of paralysis. This is something that IMO the Obama administration and Congression Democrats get very wrong. The argument might have been sensible in 2010 but the GOP has adapted.
I’m not freaked out. I’m so far beyond being freaked out. I’m just watching gradually diminishing scenery from a rapidly downward-moving handbasket. And collective wimpery in the Democratic Party. It is a huge betrayal of voters.
So instead the Democrats should leave the immediate federal spending cuts from sequestration in place, and lose 700,000 jobs over the course of the next year?
Yes. All the alternatives are worse.
Not to mention that, that’s what’s going to happen like it or not, because the Republicans will not deal. Which makes proposing something politically damaging that isn’t going to happen an even stupider thing for Obama to do.
I’ve said that in this negotiation situation, the first side to make an offer to break the stalemate loses. Guess what? The White House should have let the pressure on the Republicans continue to build.
No, the Dems should simply demand the sequester be repealed. Let the Republicans try to defend the turd in the punch bowl. The recent Congressional preference polls were showing that if the Republicans stuck to the policy of sticking it to the American people they were facing a real chance of losing the House, gerrymander notwithstanding. They’d give in on the sequester, either by compromise before the election or being a minority caucus afterwards.
Now they are not going to give in on the sequester because they will be able to run on “saving Social Security”. Their odds of keeping the House improved tremendously because the real threat to Republican power is the elderly who they are trying to *%^ over realizing it. Only that will deliver the landslide that will push them out of control of the House.
Absolutely.
Tea Party fever won’t fucking break until they’re pounded into the ground and defeated, relentlessly, at the ballot box. This encourages Tea Party Fever. The “least bad option” is to do nothing. Fuck the president.
And none of this crap that “Boehner demanded it.” No. Paul Ryan’s own budget does not include it. This is a concession that Obama is making FREELY.
Of course Ryan’s budget doesn’t include CPI chaining. It’s a tax increase.
Interesting, considering I heard endlessly how Boehner was the one who first brought this up as a concession, not Obama. Funny how now chained-CPI is now a concession REPUBLICANS are making because it’s a “tax increase.”
No, it’s a deal where the Democrats exchange SS benefit cuts for higher taxes. Since Boehner was entertaining tax increases during the 2011 negotiations, this wasn’t a noteworthy item then. But they’re sure not going to figure in a Ryan budget.
Link to the earliest I’ve ever come across of Obama talking about cuts to SocSec — video from April of 2006.
Via DCblogger at Corrente in Run, Don’t Walk, to your Senators’ and Rep’s District Office.
Earliest I’d seen before (transcript on interview) was May 2007. Obama has had SocSec in the crosshairs for quite awhile.
Reading Sargent for their thinking: “Which is worse? Sequester, or entitlements?”
You created it, dammit. You admit you WANTED it to force entitlements. Blah bla blah debt ceiling blah blah blah. He’s wanted it since 2009.
Fuck Obama. Just fuck the bastard. No more Democratic votes. Take away my ID if you want. Fuck the CEO-loving bastard. He’s the real granny starver.
Come on, you know that doesn’t work. The Tea Party showed how to get things done; push your ideas relentlessly within the context of one of the two parties. We just got Donnelly to endorse gay marriage; we can get all the Democrats to endorse raising the payroll cap and raising benefits. It’s just going to take a lot of time and work.
Holy shit lol, I didn’t see that. That’s a shocker if there ever was one. He ran his freaking campaign against it.
Pony 2012!
This is one of those situations that make me give Arthur Gilroy more credit.
But yeah, Obama has always always always been a neo-liberal at heart.
Me too, especially since he agreed with me the other day about the JFK assassination.
Obama isn’t the whole Democratic Party. What you do is vote for progressive Dems in primaries and put the Party far to the left of Obama. If you’re stuck with a Red Dog then vote for Green, but always vote for the better choice.
Whereupon their 2014 campaign will be all about “Obama and the Dems want to cut your Social Security”. Which will be effective since they’ll never have voted for it.
If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for sale.
elections have consequences.
if you didn’t think there would be consequences to turning over the House to the GOP in 2010, you were delusional
Turning over the House to the GOP in 2010 was the fault of a DCCC that coddled Blue Dogs and didn’t force them to take votes that actually would have gotten the economy moving to recovery faster. And by the failure of the Congressional Democrats and the White House to respond quickly to the August Tea Party assault on health care in 2009–they were on vacation.
Let’s be clear who it was who got defeated and why the the Overton window did not get moved to the left after President Obama’s first election.
It was a self-inflicted wound by the Democratic establishment.
The only tax revenue position worth Chained-CPI as a deal is a return to pre-Eisenhower tax rates and closing the loopholes. If Republicans won’t go for real tax reform and revenue enhancement, they don’t deserve any sweeteners on entitlements.
There seems to be too much wanting to fail going on in the Democratic Party. Enough to make even yellow dogs cynical.
Here’s what I visualize in my mind when everyone gets to talking about how chained CPI isn’t really that big a deal. My mother in law worked her entire life and raised 6 kids, almost all of that time as a single mom, and she receives about $900 a month in Social Security. She is in her late 70’s. Her rent eats up about half of that $900. She suffered through two bouts of cancer when she was working, and never missed a day of work during her treatments. For several years after she retired, she could get a little off her rent every month by cleaning the hallways and stairwells of her apartment building. When her cancer recurred for a third time and she developed complications from COPD, she could no longer continue doing the work for the rent reduction. So her daughter has done it for her in order that she can continue to receive the rent credit.
Now, this whole debate about implementing chained CPI will not impact my mother in law. She will continue to scrape by on what she gets for her remaining years. She has always lived a very simple life. She had no other choice. But she will certainly not be the last person whose life is lived under similar circumstances. She will not be the last one trying to find a way to pay her bills and live on a measly few hundred dollars a month, even after working a lifetime and “doing all the right things”. I simply cannot imagine that most of the people making these decisions on chained CPI probably even personally know anyone like my mother in law. And if they did, if it was their mother or grandmother trying to live on these paltry sums, I would like them to close their eyes and imagine themselves telling their loved one that they have decided that the pittance they get is simply too much to be sustained. We have to take ten, twenty or fifty dollars a month away from them because, well, FREEDOM!, and we mustn’t take any more away from those “job creators”. On paper, the changes that will be caused by the implementing of chained CPI seem kind of innocuous to many of us. But the reality is that it will simply be devastating to so many people. Certainly not to the Paul Krugmans of the world, or to those currently serving in the most shameful of institutions, our current Congress. But the decision makers seem to have forgotten that the percentage of people in our population like my mother in law will always overwhelmingly swamp the percentage of people who live in the favored class, like Krugman and the leadership of the Center For American Progress and the CBPP.
By the way, if this is what’s being cited as Krguman’s “endorsement” of chained CPI, BooMan has either a reading comprehension problem or an honesty deficit.
My 401K is a joke. I NEED social security.
Means-testing for Medicare? WTF? Cuts to disability and unemployment?
I’m sorry, but no. This is not ok. I dont think Obama’s Hitler, but I’m going to raise holy hell with Casey and my Reps over this. And dont be so sure the GOP won’t take it. That “broad patch” schtick only goes so far.
Thanks for making it really easy to write next week’s Piggie, Mr. President.
Medicare is already means-tested, fyi. I’m not against that, or many of the Medicare cuts outlined. Of course, the issue comes when we don’t have an all-payer or single-payer system where doctors have no choice but to take them. Right now, as things stand, they will turn patients away.
Medicare is means-tested from the top and the bottom. If you can’t afford the deductibles, you don’t seek care.
Touche. A lot of people don’t even know it has a deductible.
I believe we’re talking about expanding means-testing for medicare, no?
Let’s keep the lipstick off the pig. At a time when populist sentiment is becoming powerful enough to push the political agenda — on immigration, gay rights, gun control — Obama is actively obstructing the progress on the issue that gets the strongest support from 99% of the American people — economic fairness. The context that’s relevant is Obama’s record on this issue. After 4 years of speaking out of both sides of his mouth, who’s going to believe that he fought the good fight? No, that wasn’t a rhetorical question. His administration is in denial about who’s going to own this betrayal. Someone should tell his pollsters that “balance” doesn’t mean what they think it means.
Don’t talk to me about caveats. Really, it’s insulting. Show me one carve-out that was inclusive enough to spare hard-working people undue hardship. Caveats my ass. You might as well try to tell me that the ACA adequately subsidizes the health insurance premiums that we have to pay to private insurance companies. It’s the caveats that give the lie to this whole enterprise. The money that Obama proposes taking out of Social Security is strategically symbolic and it appears that the “greatest President in our lifetime” and his advisers have no idea about what narratives will be spun on this symbolism.
Do you think straw Hitlers will put progressives on the defense? It’s not we who need to account for our actions. There’s no straw house that will protect Obama from this blowback.
An extra comment.
First of all, anything that opens with “don’t freak out”, is kind of a tell that things just took sharp turn for the worse. “Don’t freak out” is what you say when you crashed someone else’s car or the doctor has REALLY bad news.
TPM has some ugly stuff:
Finally, Krugman on CPI does not sound like a man who endorses CPI. I think you’re playing the “for it before I was against it” game, Booman:
Looking forward to the GOP ads about Democrats and the President cutting your social security.
<
Anything that closes with cat speak is also a tell.
Yeah, that Krugman thing made me do a double-take. No, definitely not a supporter.
Also, the only reference I found to Chained CPI on the Center for American Progress website was a recommendation that federal programs except Social Security be indexed to chained CPI. They specifically omitted it.
I’m not going to freak out, but this is an incredibly bad decision on at least two grounds. First, it’s terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible negotiating. When there’s a bad and unpopular idea you expect your negotiating opponent will demand you make him propose it. Obama of all people should know that by now. And if the Republicans won’t propose it, then fix SS on sounder and better grounds, by raising the payroll cap.
Second, Obama is proposing cuts to SS when economic reality requires increases. The free-market 401(k) experiment is a failure, companies are allowed to loot their pension funds (except the Post Office), and so the only functional retirement system in America is Social Security. Social Security has to be increased to be adequate for retirement by itself, because it’s all we have.
This all is premised on the assumption that Republicans can actually take yes for an answer which I’m not sure they can. If they reject Obama’s proposal out of hand, then he gets to go to the public and say, “Look, I proposed cutting Social Security. My own party is screaming at me. It’s incredibly unpopular. And the Republicans STILL won’t negotiate in good faith.”
If you think Obama’s deal is part of a negotiating strategy, then it is indeed terrible negotiating. But if you think it’s part of a posturing strategy, it might not be so bad.
“This all is premised on the assumption that Republicans can actually take yes for an answer which I’m not sure they can. If they reject Obama’s proposal out of hand, then he gets to go to the public and say, “Look, I proposed cutting Social Security. My own party is screaming at me. It’s incredibly unpopular. And the Republicans STILL won’t negotiate in good faith.”
Yup. We have been through this many times before which is why the public trusts the President more than House Republicans on economic issues and why they blame Republicans more on gridlock.
The Republicans don’t need to take “yes” for an answer. I suspect if the Senate passes a bill with this in it, Boehner will most definitely break the Hastert rule and allow Democrats and maybe 15 Republicans to walk the plank.
seabe, no fucking way will Pelosi and her House leadership allow that scenario to happen, and unlike Boehner and his leadership, Pelosi does her job well. We’ve been through this exercise in this Congress a few times already. In a politically difficult deal for House members like one with Chained CPI, The Orange Man will have to deliver a large portion of his caucus. Otherwise, the vote will fail, just like the first fiscal cliff deal did.
The other thing to know is that no one in the Dem Progressive, Black and Latino Caucuses is likely to vote for a deal with Chained CPI. So she’s already prevented from delivering 70+ Dem votes, even if she wanted them.
??? Normally I’d have agreed with you, that is prior to Pelosi’s endorsement of Chained-CPI “strengthening” SS.
Pelosi Says Chained CPI Would Strengthen Social Security
Boehner cannot deliver more than 50 votes. They will have to come from Pelosi. And like you said, unlike the Tan Man, she is actually good at her job.
And then a month later she admitted that it was a bluff and not only did she not support it but she didn’t actually have the votes for it.
You had that discussion with Booman, and he disagreed; I did as well. Not a bluff. It was support.
Nope, Booman said that Chained CPI was still on the table but I do not think he disagreed with this.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/04/nancy-pelosi-social-security_n_2411881.html
And here are some quotes from Pelosi herself.
“It was really to call the bluff of the Republicans’ tactic,” Pelosi said during a small gathering with reporters on Friday. “At what figure will you raise taxes on the rich? At what place do you keep moving the goalpost on entitlements?”
Nancy Pelosi: My Support For Social Security Cut ‘Was Really To Call The Bluff’ Of Republicans
Posted: 01/04/2013 5:16 pm EST | Updated: 01/04/2013 5:24 pm EST
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Nancy Pelosi, Social Security, Elections 2012, Video, Medicare Cuts, Nancy Pelosi Social Security, Entitlement Reform, Medicare, Nancy Pelosi Chained CPI, Nancy Pelosi Entitlement Reform, Nancy Pelosi Entitlements, Nancy Pelosi Medicare, Pelosi Fiscal Cliff, Social Security Cuts, Politics News
WASHINGTON — House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) upset progressives last month when, amid the fiscal cliff debate, she said she backed the idea of cutting Social Security benefits by changing the way inflation is calculated for recipients.
But now Pelosi says she was bluffing, at least in part, to see how far Republicans would go in compromising on a deal.
“It was really to call the bluff of the Republicans’ tactic,” Pelosi said during a small gathering with reporters on Friday. “At what figure will you raise taxes on the rich? At what place do you keep moving the goalpost on entitlements?”
In the final weeks of fiscal cliff negotiations, President Barack Obama said he supported the idea of tying Social Security cost-of-living increases to a chained CPI, or chained Consumer Price Index. Social Security benefits are currently calculated by inflation rates. By changing the formula and instead calculating benefits with a chained CPI, the result would mean small cuts at first, but would eventually cost beneficiaries thousands of dollars over time, which is why Democrats have largely fought the idea.
It wasn’t long before Pelosi had signaled she agreed with Obama on the issue, going as far as saying she viewed the cuts as “a strengthening of Social Security.” But on Friday, Pelosi recalled that even she wondered at the time why Obama put the idea on the table at first. She said she only learned of his plan to float the proposal just before he made the offer to Republicans.
“Members asked me, and I wondered myself, ‘Why would you put chained CPI and raising [the level for extending the Bush tax cuts] to $400,000 in the same bill? Taking from the poor and giving to the rich?” Pelosi asked, getting laughs when adding, “It turned out to be a very smart thing to do because [Republicans] came back with ‘Plan B.'”
Pelosi gave credit to the White House for having the “clarity” to see that Republicans would blink once chained CPI was on the table with the $400,000 number, and not be able to counteroffer with another compromise.
“Once again they moved the goalposts, and they were right. They were right,” she said of the administration.”
Getting to 2014 is going to be intolerable if progressives lose their sh!t every time the WH postures in trying to deal with the insane, nihilistic House Republicans.
not sure why the link ended up looking so strange..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/04/nancy-pelosi-social-security_n_2411881.html
Warning: Fox news link.
Boehner “preemptively” rejected it!
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/05/obama-proposing-change-to-social-security-in-exchange-for
-taxes-drawing-liberal/
You forget one thing. Obama has been pushing “entitlement reforms” since 2006. Yes, when he was still a Senator from Ill.
Have you been living under a rock? Getting points for screwing your constituents and cozening up to lobbyists for the 1% is no longer the order of the day. Nor is playing to the likes of Bob Woodward or Cokie Roberts. Who exactly is going to clap for Obama when he says “Look, I proposed cutting Social Security”? And if this is such a winning position, why has he dispatched his spokesmen to distance him for his own actions? The Democratic Party better fucking wake up and realize that the Occupy movement wasn’t an aberration. The people are angry and after a few fitful attempts, we’re going to figure out how to make our power count. Democrats better get with the program.
No, the big problem with doing it this way is that the Republicans can refuse the offer and collect a big political bonus as the “defenders of Social Security”. And that’s exactly what they are going to do. And while they do have a master plan to trash it, if you look at proposals on the table, they’ve got a good case.
If Obama had countered a Republican proposal including Chained CPI with his own proposal including Chained CPI, it wouldn’t have been politically disastrous. Still bad policy; possibly excusable if enough good stuff outweighed it. But now he’s grabbed the third rail of his own accord. The Republicans can just sit and watch him fry.
So, Boo, what’s your analysis of the consequences of Obama’s budget proposal on the Democrats’ chances in 2014 under the two scenarios of Republicans taking and not taking the deal? How will it be for progressive Democrats to run against the President’s budget or to defend cuts in Social Security to their constituents? What about the 2016 Presidential election? Biden would be in a pickle, no? Can’t imagine how Republicans would support entitlement cuts and campaign against them at the same time? Please tell us – what are we missing here?
I will say right now, that we are in for a drubbing in 2014 because it will kill any enthusiasm the base had.
Oh yeah, can’t forget he threw away his leverage on the Bush tax cuts too.
O sweet 8lb 3 oz baby Jeebus. Are you talking about the fact that he waited until after the 2010 midterm elections? You do know that this was at the request of Senators Reid and Feingold and a few others who were in close races and didn’t want taxes to be the big issue?
No. I’m talking about how he gave up the tax cut issue prematurely at the start of this year (2013) end of last year (2012).
Use some of that famous MomSense.
Booman has joined the Ministry of Dis Information.
There are a number of issues w/ the chained cpi and Social Security. And Presdient Obama and everyone who supports this idea is lying to themselves about the reality of following this policy.
One Social Security is not a budget item. By law it is not a budget issue nor can it run a deficit. So why is it part of a budget negotiation? If you believe there is a problem w/ Social Security write legislation that effects it alone.
Two, chained CPI assumes that the prices Seniors will pay for goods are less because they need less. Just go into the store and buy any packaged product. You will find the cost is higher the smaller it is. You’ll probably have to do some math to convert prices into per quantity to understand. Worse the largest expense Seniors pay is for healthcare which is more expensive and used more often than in younger people and continually has gone up in cost. Whether you can afford a plan F Medicare Supplement- the absolute best plan or pay co-pays on a Medicare Advantage plan your ability to pay goes down ultimately leading to measures which negatively impact your health and leave the Medicare system Medicaid on the hook for even larger costs from sicker people.
Three, the Presdient offer is against changing rates for income tax. The problem is tno rates but the exclusion of income due to specialized favorable treatment, deductions, credits and exclusions of income. The best known example for indidviduals is the carried interest income clause; Oil exemptions in the corporate sector.
If and when the white faced mulatto would present a proposal that curtailed and changed the many pages of income code then I would think he is serious. There hasn’t been a single proposal from the WH regarding taxes in four years. Ask Charlie Rangel, Danny Davis or John Lewis if you don’t believe me.
Four, any change to Social Security will be permanent. Any change to the tax code will be written over and changed piecemeal under any number of bills and w/o question at the first downturn in the economy. We saw the kind of BS these changes are w
the reduction in the Social Security tax, which lasted for two years as opposed to real change in the tax code
This proposal is among the most dangerous thing the white faced mulatto has done to disenfranchise African Americans. We know from history that many occupations “occupied ” by African Americans were excluded from benefits but were still taxed. We know that due to discrimination African Americans did not participate in many jobs period , for a long enough time to accumulate any real savings in Social Security-yes ignorant people you receive it based on your earnings and now to be told African Americans do with less?
F@#$ you Mr President
Thanks for repeating “white faced mulatto” just in case I missed it the first time. Here’s a clue: whenever you use an adjective to modify another adjective, you need to join the adjectives with a hyphen. E.g. bone-headed bigot.
The benefit-cutting infection has reached epidemic proportions. How often do we hear any argument in favor of raising the payroll tax cap?
Seems like a relatively easy and painless fix, except for a little greed at the top, that is.
Funny. Hours after we first started hearing the left make the argument to increase Social Security benefits, Obama comes out with this.
Did I say funny? I mean strangely suspicious.
great how many votes are there for this proposal in the House and Senate so we can maybe try and move some others across the finish line?
Remember when Booman wrote this (2013-01-10):
I haven’t seen any splintering over budget and fiscal issues.
Then there’s this: (emphasis added)
Tell me again how Obama proposing cuts to Social Security makes the Republicans own this “deeply unpopular” policy.
Lol, nice.
because it highlights what they are demanding. Otherwise, he’s arguing against unspecified spending cuts and balanced budgets, which are popular.
Obama proposes in his budget what Republicans are demanding as a way of marginalizing Republicans?
That’s not convincing at all. Show me another case where Obama has put a Republican idea in a policy proposal in order to defeat them politically. He wants Chained-CPI because he likes it. The White House has even used the term “Superlative CPI” to describe the proposal. That is terminology designed to sell, not to highlight what the other side is demanding.
You didn’t address your remarks of January 10 where you said that Obama’s handling of the sequester was going to put the Republicans in a deep hole. Didn’t happen. Your analysis back then was incorrect. I believe your analysis today is also incorrect.
It’s not his policy. It is what he is prepared to give. It has been for a long time.
If I want your guitar and you say that I can’t have your guitar at any price, and I offer you $500, that doesn’t mean that my policy is to give you $500.
It means that I will offer you $500 dollars for your guitar.
In this case, the Republicans say that they want entitlement reform, but they won’t name their price. Obama wants new revenue, so he is spelling out the degree of entitlement reform he is willing to provide in exchange for the guitar. If you don’t hand over the guitar, you don’t get the entitlement reform.
If I made an error in analysis back in January it was in not sensing the degree to which people like McCain, Graham, Ayotte, McKeon, etc., had lost power within the Republican caucus. I thought the defense cuts were too deep for the GOP to tolerate. But the rest of my analysis is still operable. The GOP needs to make a deal and they can’t bring themselves to do it. What they are asking for is so unpopular that the won’t even spell it out it in plain language. So, the president has done it for them.
One of the weird obsessions I see among progressives is this fear that the Republicans will accuse the Democrats of trying to cut Social Security. We should welcome such attacks, since we’re not cutting Social Security unless the Republicans insist we do. If they define those types of cuts as bad, then we’ve won the policy debate. If the Republicans actually do take a deal, then they will have voted for it. If they don’t, we have no deal because the Republicans wanted deeper cuts in Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. And, in any case, they’ll say whatever they want. They take credit for stimulus projects and complain about cuts to Medicare that they thought were insufficient.
Chained CPI is what the administration is willing to give up because something must be given up. And no one has told me what is preferable. Telling the president to raise the cap is like telling him grow wings and fly.
Why would Obama assume the responsibility of naming his opponent’s price when the public strongly opposes there being any price at all? Who negotiates in such a manner? And where are Obama’s statements that Chained CPI is actually cutting Social Security and that he would never support such a position if the Republicans weren’t demanding it? Why would he allow himself to get into a he said/they said situation? Why would Pelosi say that it’s not really a cut?
An analogy that seems more apt is this: A guy says that he’ll sell you his guitar if you do something nasty to your grandmother. So you put an ad in the paper that says “Guitar wanted. Will steal from my grandmother to get it.”
I’ll repeat a comment I read elsewhere on Friday since I think it is a good summary of what happened. I don’t agree with the conclusion, but the description of the situation is accurate:
Obama is not engaged in a clever manipulation of all parties. He is doing what he wants to do, not to lure Republicans out so that he can expose them, but because he thinks it’s a reasonable policy choice.
Under the circumstances, a lot of people think it is a reasonable policy. Obviously, the president is in that group, too.
Would you prefer raising the retirement age? More sequester pain?
What’s your plan?
What’s my plan? This problem wouldn’t be with us if he held firm in the summer of 2011 during the debt ceiling showdown. This year the House capitulated on the ceiling because there are powerful interests that lean on Republicans to prevent a government default. They would have capitulated back then.
Instead, Obama tried to reach a Grand Bargain, which is his particular obsession. That approach failed and so all parties went for the muddle of sequestration. And even that isn’t working as a cudgel against Republicans.
As far as a plan is concerned, I would not bring Social Security cuts in at any time. It’s political poison, unrelated to the budget, and not an urgent issue. Obama should have held firm on ending the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250K. He accepted a $400K threshold, which meant a loss of revenue of $100B/10y. Chained-CPI means $120B/10y lower outlay. Those amounts are close to each other and I cannot help but see Obama’s handling of the expiration of the Bush Tax cuts leading directly to this Chained-CPI proposal.
We have these problems because he didn’t hold firm in the summer of 2011 or at the end of 2012. I think I’m entitled to complain about this and not have to come up with a solution.
Complaining without offering a solution is the definition of wanking.
When has a president ever offered a pre-comprise, IN THEIR PROPOSED BUDGET? Presidential budgets almost never get enacted as the presidents propose. Presidents aren’t even in charge of the budget. The purpose of a president proposing a budget is to spell out their vision of what government should be, and what agencies/departments they see as vital and/or important. The fact that Obama has proposed Chained-CPI in his budget shows that this is his preference. Just look at comments made by Gene Sperling on Reddit. All the time, slightly in-between-the-lines (only slightly because it’s practically spelled out in plain English) they refer to it as their “preferred” policy. I do not buy this bullshit that he’s giving it up against his will. It’s his preferred policy. Do you have any other historical accounts in the post-war era of a president giving up something he doesn’t want to give up in his outlined budget?
How is this a pre-compromise when they’ve been talking about this for 3 years. This specific compromise has been in the ether now for at least 2 years. It came from the Speaker initially, so maybe I’m missing something.
Either way we don’t know if it’s in his budget because it hasn’t been release yet and even if it is the House Republicans can’t say yes to anything.
One last thing, if I remember correctly when this was first proposed it included a minimum benefit amount where there isn’t one now to ensure that low wage retirees get a better deal in retirement.
It’s one thing to give it up as a compromise measure. Quite another to put it in the proposed budget. It doesn’t get released until Wednesday, but unless every report has it wrong or is lying, it will be in there.
what’s the difference, it’s a compromise that was already agreed upon by the President and the Speaker and it’s contingent on revenues and like I said above other positive changes to Social Security
Um, booman? Citations?
Sorry Boo, looks like they freaked out anyway.