The Biden-McConnell shuffle
by digby
Until yesterday, I was a confused by this as Matt Yglesias is about this:
As the sequestration fight continues, I’m reminded that I continue to be confused as to why the White House struck the fiscal cliff deal back in January. As you may recall, at that time the country was facing three simultaneous occurences. One was sequestration. One was the full expiration of the Bush tax cuts. One was the expiration of the payroll tax holiday. Democrats and Republicans agreed on a deal that extended more of the Bush tax cuts than Obama had proposed but less than all of them, allowed the payroll tax holiday to fully expire, and kicked the can on the sequestration issue until March 1. Now they’re arguing over whether sequestration should be replaced fully with spending cuts, or with a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes.
Now imagine an alternate universe in which everyone woke up on January 3 to discover sequestration in effect and the Bush tax cuts fully expired. Republicans would have wanted a giant tax cut, and a big increase in defense spending. Obama would have wanted a smaller-but-still-large tax cut, a smaller increase in defense spending, and a substantial increase in non-military spending. It seems like cutting a deal to cut taxes and increase both military and non-military spending could have been struck relatively easily. Yes, the country would have suffered from a week or two or maybe even five of excessive fiscal drag. But with everyone agreeing that taxes are too high and military spending too low, working something out where we raise non-military spending a bit more than Republicans want and in exchange cut taxes a bit more than Democrats want doesn’t seem too hard.
Now, I knew before yesterday that the president has often said he wanted to “fix” the “entitlements.” And he has offered up cuts to Social Security and Medicare numerous times over the past couple of years in various negotiations. But I would have thought that he’d nonetheless be open to not cutting them when he had the chance to put an end to this constant budget brinksmanship, if only for the good of the country. That’s why I too was confused when they sent in Biden to work with McConnell and they came up with this particular deal. I always thought that kicking the can down the road was better than cutting vital programs, but I thought they would put it on the back burner when the best opportunity to break the GOP’s obstructionism was in their hands.
Now I think it’s quite clear that the whole point of all this is to force cuts to “entitlements” — and wrapping up the sequestration with a deal to cut taxes and increase both military and non-military spending would have defeated that purpose. Apparently, they truly want their legacy to be the administration that raised taxes and cut the safety net. Perhaps they believe that being the mirror image of Ronald Reagan’s manufactured reputation means that they’ll be loved just as much. I don’t think that’s true.
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