Ezra Klien has an interesting take on how 2011 is playing
out for Obama and the Democrats. With
all of its problems, says Klein, 2011 may turn out to have been a really good
year for Obama and the Democrats and a really bad year for Republicans.
In particular, says Klein, Republicans have totally failed
when it comes to their often stated goal of protecting millionaires from tax
increases while obtaining deficit reduction largely or totally through cuts in
federal spending, particularly cuts in spending on social programs they detest.
Four times this year Republicans went head-to-head with the
White House and Democrats over using spending cuts to cut the federal deficit
instead of raising taxes. In February
they threatened to shut down the government over the issue. In August, they threatened to not raise the
debt ceiling and let the country go into default because of the spending
cut/taxes debate. In November, they
demanded that the supercommittee cut the deficit without raising taxes. And just recently, they have demanded major
spending cuts rather than tax increases on millionaires to pay for extending the payroll tax
cut and unemployment insurance. Each
time they fell short of their goal.
Republicans ended the year with their worst-nightmare
outcome. Rather than reducing the
deficit through a combination of $4 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax
increases, they are ending with the very likely prospect that there will be $4
in taxes increases for every $1 in spending cuts.
This is happening, says Klein, largely because the supercommtteee
failed. “That left two major events on the budgetary horizon: the spending
trigger, which cuts $1 trillion from the budget, half of which comes from the
Pentagon, and none of which comes from Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare
beneficiaries, or assorted other programs for low-income Americans; and the
scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which would raise taxes by almost $4
trillion. Both events are scheduled to happen simultaneously and automatically
on January 1, 2013 — a dual-trigger nightmare for the GOP. And taken together,
they are far
to the left of anything that Democrats have suggested over the past
year.”
Klein provides the following chart which compares the
Republican-preferred Ryan Budget to five other proposals, each of which Obama
was willing to support, with what the Republicans got—the Dual Trigger. If the Republicans had accepted any of the
five proposals Obama could have supported and gotten Democrats to support, the
Republicans would have largely achieved their goal. Millionaires would not pay more taxes and spending
on many social programs Republicans hate would have been cut dramatically in
the name of deficit reduction. However,
Republicans could never say YES. Every
time they got close to winning, they asked for more. Ultimately, they lost. Obama and the Democrats won not because they
were so smart but because Republicans were so incapable of accepting
victory. That’s what happens when the
ideological extreme takes over a party.
