What do the Republicans really want?
by digby
Matt Yglesias has noticed the same contradictory narratives about the GOP agenda among the beltway wagsthat I wrote about yesterday. He catches Vandehei in living color:
Here’s Jim Vandehei on Morning Joe this morning (emphasis added):
Yeah, I would just replay that clip [Obama talking to Stephanopoulos] over and over and over again, and that tells you everything you need to know about the next year. The president wants tax increases and he, and he does not want to do a bill where there is big changes in entitlement reforms. Republicans don’t want tax increases and they want to do big, they want to do some big changes on entitlements. So, there’s not really a middle ground to be had.
And here’s Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen on Tuesday (emphasis added):
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says he can envision such a scenario if Democrats put specific entitlement cuts on the table. But, top House GOP officials tell us that is nuts. The prevailing view among House Republicans is that they have finally won the cuts they spent years fighting for and see little reason to tick off senior voters by cutting entitlements while also ticking off the base with new taxes. In truth, many Republicans aren’t very motivated themselves to start messing with entitlements if they don’t have to.
The first is, of course, the standard both-sides-are-at-fault narrative that has Republicans digging in on taxes while Democrats refuse to cut entitlements. But seeing as the negotiations are between the President and the Republicans and the President is on record ready, even eager, to cut those entitlements, I agree with Yglesias that the latter is the more likely reality.
As I wrote yesterday, they believe in cutting entitlements, no doubt about it. They have always hated these government programs. But they are stuck at the moment because their only growing demographic is older people and even these nuts aren’t so looney that they don’t realize it. What they want is to pass entitlement cuts without voting for it, so they can run against the Democrats as the entitlement cutters. (They want to “save” them, of course. Doesn’t everybody?)
I hesitate to pin too much hope on this, but you have to admit that it’s held up so far. The president’s been explicitly offering up entitlements for two years now and the Republicans haven’t taken him up on it. And at this point all he’s asking for is some vague loophole closing they know the lobbyists will fix in a jiffy. No, the problem is that they don’t want to be on record voting for entitlement cuts. Would you?
In the current poll, 24% say that if they were making up the federal government’s budget this year they would decrease spending for military defense, down from 30% two years ago. More than seven-in-ten either support increasing defense spending (32%) or maintaining it at current levels (41%).
There continue to be sizable partisan differences in views of funding for government programs. For most, substantially larger shares of Republicans than Democrats support decreased funding. Yet there are only two possible reductions that draw majority support from Republicans – foreign aid (70%) and unemployment assistance (56%). There is no program among the 19 included in the survey that even a plurality of Democrats wants to see decreased.
An earlier report on this survey showed that 70% think it is essential for the president and Congress to pass major legislation to reduce the federal budget deficit this year. That portion of the survey, conducted in collaboration with USA TODAY, also found that more Americans want the focus of deficit-reduction efforts to be mostly on spending reductions rather than tax increases.
Yet the survey also finds higher percentages support increases rather than decreases in spending for education, veterans’ benefits, entitlements and other programs. Six-in-ten (60%) say they would increase education funding, while 53% want funding for veterans’ benefits and services to grow and 41% say the same about spending on Social Security.
Now, many of of our leaders are dumb or ideological extremists, we know this. But there are also quite a few, I’m sure, who know this deficit obsession is bullshit. Some might even read the papers and see what’s happened to Europe. But I guarantee every last one of them can read polls. And even the ones in those safe gerrymandered districts know that cutting the “entitlements” will cause them problems. It’s very unpopular.
In fact, all cutting is unpopular — there’s not one category in the list that gets majority support. And since we don’t actually have to do it — I’d guess it explains why we keep having these stand-offs. This is all a kabuki dance designed to appease the elites. There’s no upside for politicians and no upside for the country! Even Republicans have to see the political pitfalls.
Sadly, we seem to have a president who wants us to eat our spinach and thinks the world will thank him for it later. But he doesn’t have to run for re-election again. (He sure wasn’t very specific about his preferences during his election campaign, was he? Joe Biden’s assurances were just one of his colorful gaffes apparently.) But all these other political leaders do have to run again.
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