I'm listening to Fox blathering on the budget and getting quite bemused.
Our Glorious Shrub may be being both very smart and very dumb at the same time.
The US pattern from FDR onwards has been a President setting forth a detailed program to deal with XYZ. The problem of course is that a President is not a British Prime Minister who can ramrod a law through Commons using party discipline. The US system of blocking minority vetoes sees any detailed proposal ripped to pieces between Congress, the media, the interest groups and those citizens who participate in the debate. So after coming up with a ton of detail, relatively little survives the process. The President is then pronounced defeated and weakened.
As I said that was the pattern. Then Bush created a new playbook on Social Security. This is the legendary third rail of US politics. Touch it and die. Bush came up with no new detailed proposal. He outlined a set of objectives - economic sanity, actuarial soundness, no tax increases, no benefit cut for those 55 and over, investment accounts for those under 55. No details to pick apart. Just a general set of guidelines. He then followed with a laundry list of ways to get there - each one previously advocated by some famous Democrat or other in the last quarter century. He then essentially asked Congress to hold hearings and start the arduous process of forming a consensus. If they do he will decide if it is close enough to his guidelines to not veto. If they don't he can say he tried and leave the process to the future. It seemed a VERY neat form of political judo. He kept his word without giving his opposition a clear target. He had promised he would push for partial privatization. He did so, sort of , in a way.
Now he seems to have done the same on his budget. There is a complete disconnect on budgetary matters in the GOP and the country as a whole. The GOP disconnect is that they treat tax cutting as secular religion. No new taxes. No sunset of cuts. Constant need for more new cuts. However even on the 20-40-40 mantra the whole 40 isn't really for domestic spending cuts. Every part of the 40 has some part of the domestic budget they would cut but there is no consensus. And the centrists who lean Republican don't want domestic spending cuts at all. They accept the current spending pattern as Republican prudence in the face of a Democratic Party whose response to every program is spend more now. It is not for nothing that they are called programatic liberals. Each program is a secular response to its title - of a program says 'heating money for old people' no amount of proof that the program does little at extreme cost matters. What matters is showing concern by spending public money. The money is manna from heaven and it 'shows concern'/'does good'. Think of it as a mixture of secular prayer and moral one upmanship. Every time the media find a new vicitm, start a new program. Never consolidate them. Never abolish them.
From 1998 onwards the Congressional Republicans essentially stopped fighting for sanity. There was simply no way to get the uber math past the media to a barely listening public. Money for - education, health, veterans, whatever - was good. Having it accomplish anything didn't matter. So all they did was fight an endless rear guard action. Very politically astute but scarcely effectual. Add in the tax cut cult and a war of choice in Iraq and we have a budgetary train wreck. And we got away with it 1998-2004 because the financial markets were willing to keep buying USG bonds. The financial markets are starting to spook. We are a LONG way from crisis but the skittishness is showing in the markets, in the financial press, among the fiscally responsible minority among the active pols of both parties.
In theory this should have put Bush between a rock and a hard place. And on one level his budget seems to do just this. He is proposing a slew of domestic program rollbacks, cuts, terminations. Each little piece has its ferverant supporters [me with Hubble as example]. None has major enemies among the 40 in the middle. Each of them is essentially spare change in terms of the budget. So we seem to have a formula for maximal political pain for very little gain.
On this level Bush is hoist on his own petard and the Kerry people deservedly should be screaming 'I told you so' from the rafters. However Bush has also pushed the ball back to Congress. The House will show their 'compassion' by leaving 80% of the terminated programs alive but coming in somewhere in the vague neighborhood on total spending. And the Bushies keep stressing that he macro numbers are what matters, not how Congress gets there. It is hard to call something a defeat when you are invioted to make changes, be part of the process. The Senate and the magic rule of 60 will then rant about what to do. Unlike House members Senators mostly have real opposition at election time. The Senate will see major argument about raising taxes. Democrats will not offer ANYTHING they will cut. They will come across as irresponsible tax and spenders. Odds are at the end of the day we will not cut the deficit but not grow it much either. The stalemate will take Congressional and media focus off a messy war in Iraq. Bush can again say that he gave a set of guidelines and of course will work with Congress to find something mutually acceptable. It is the political version of Ali's rope-a-dope.
However this all presumes that the financial market reaction and pressure will be incremental. Could be but it is an gamble. It presumes that Iraq's costs can be capped at $80-100 billion / year. Seems probable but betting on Middle Eastern events is too high octane for my blood. It also presumes that the overstretched to snapping ground forces aren't forced to face NK, Iran, Syria...AND it presumes that the tax issue doesn't fracture the Republican Party. The GOP has the most fanatic tax cutters and the most fanatic budget balancers and each has its strength in a different house of Congress.
Now Bush could luck out. The stupidity of his Democratic opposition beggars the imagination. Four years of job losses, a fucked up war in Iraq instead of a cakewalk and the Democrats nominate a man who cannot make a coherent case on either. However the 3rd election of an 8 year cycle has a habbit of being a disaster for the party in power. Bush is counting on the breaks...
posted by scott 8:25 AM