dagblog - Comments for "The People's Budget: Yes Virginia, there are Decent Democrats"

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AmericanDreamer — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:23:32 +0000

In reply to The People's Budget: Yes Virginia, there are Decent Democrats

http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx

Link is to E.J. Dionne, Jr.'s column yesterday, titled "At last, from referee to player", also pertinent to at least 2 other threads going on now, Genghis' "Obama's Budget Speech: Live Stream and Peanut Gallery": http://dagblog.com/politics/obamas-budget-speech-live-stream-and-peanut-gallery-9815 and David Coates' "The Danger of Losing the Plot So Early in the Play": http://dagblog.com/reader-blogs/danger-losing-plot-so-early-play-9819

Thanks for the links. A few

AmericanDreamer — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 04:16:13 +0000

In reply to in the MSM.Well, Ryan's been

Thanks for the links. A few comments:

The Milbank excerpt leaves me unimpressed on account of a high snark to substance ratio. Examples: he ridicules the 80% tax increase share. A number of those proposed "tax increases" would do away with corporate welfare provisions in the tax code which won't pass, not because they aren't good ideas or because they would not be popular with the general public but because politicians who vote to do away with them know they are going to be targeted in their next election by the special interests whose oxes they have gored. There are 79 House members who put their names on that document and if you did the research I bet you would find that virtually all of them are from very safe Democratic seats. There are many other Democrats in less safe seats who would agree on the merits but are, correctly, fearful of losing their seats by voting to do these things in a context in which that budget could not pass a GOP majority House and would not pass any Democratic majority House in memory, including the last one.

As another example of snark over substance, Milbank sneers at their having the Economic Policy Institute, a "like-minded think tank" do the scoring.

Well, let's look at that.

Milbank implies something underhanded or sneaky or vaguely dishonest about having EPI rather than CBO score their proposal. CBO is just a tad busy right about now, and lately. Understandably they will give priority attention to scoring measures that can pass. I would be interested to find out from CBO the reason why they didn't score this proposal. Criticize the group for not getting this proposal done earlier, if you will--perhaps that might have permitted a credibility-enhancing CBO score. I'm pretty sure they also wanted the proposal to reflect the most recent budget developments to the maximum extent possible knowing if they failed to be fully current they could well have a tougher time getting attention for that reason.

EPI published the technical paper on their website: http://epi.3cdn.net/fb71e9b292c387953d_8am6b398v.pdf This is what responsible advocacy organizations do, so that dispassionate others can know the assumptions and sources used. From my professional work I know that many advocacy organizations that call themselves "think tanks" release "studies" on public policy issues that do not include technical reports that allow independent others to analyze the merits of the "studies". EPI states up front, in regard to the technical report:

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has analyzed and scored the specific policy proposals in the People’s Budget and modeled their cumulative impact on the federal budget over the next decade...The People’s Budget Department of Defense proposals were crafted by Congressional Progressive Caucus staff in conjunction with Congressional Research Service staff; budgetary scores were provided to the Economic Policy Institute but independent verification is beyond our area of expertise. All other policy proposals have been independently analyzed and scored by EPI based on a variety of other sources, notably data from the Congressional Budget Office, Joint Committee on Taxation, Office of Management and Budget, Tax Policy Center, and Citizens for Tax Justice.

So they acknowledge inadequate in-house expertise to analyze independently the defense proposals but claim they have that expertise for the other proposals and do so, using sources which are, in the first 3 cases, gold standard government agencies and in the last case a highly respected DC-based tax policy advocacy group. About the Tax Policy Center I don't know--others can google them as could I.

Milbank bashes the proposal for not making projections beyond 10 years. Well, I wonder if he asked the Caucus for comment before deciding to write that, because there are numerous health care proposals addressing cost issues, which are mentioned prominently in the document, as well as proposals addressing the long-term SS shortfall. So it would seem fair to ask the Caucus for comment in response to that criticism. I'm sure one could criticize aspects of the document with justification but I doubt that a failure to address the health care cost mess which is such a huge part of the deficit problem, and to address the longer-term SS shortfall, are legit criticisms. Whether one agrees or not with what they propose to address those problems is a separate question, of course.

Dana Milbank has done good work but this is an unjustifiably dismissive, sloppy, hack job. I don't know--is the group better off for having gotten this kind of junk food MSM treatment than not?

That a proposal like this could not pass now says nothing about the soundness or merits of the proposals. Concerning their popularity with the public, they are technical enough to require something like focus group exercises where random citizens are provided with the best available information and options for making budget choices, and spend some significant amount of time so as to have some meaningful chance to understand the proposals. Some deficit-reduction groups that are not ideologically invested in either left or right wing agendas have done this at times in the past. If memory serves what the citizens' panels typically come up with is a hell of a lot closer to this proposal than to the budget that will end up getting passed this year.

That a proposal such as this could not pass now says, rather, a great deal about the dominance of our political process by special interests, such that numerous sound policies are nonstarters and all sorts of happy horseshit screwing the average Jane and Joe not only gets enacted but is sacrosanct.

in the MSM.Well, Ryan's been

artappraiser — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:54:37 +0000

In reply to The People's Budget: Yes Virginia, there are Decent Democrats

in the MSM.

Well, Ryan's been out there with his plans for quite some time and he's Chairman of the House Budget Committee. The latter makes his ideas much more newsworthy on this issue no matter how crazy his plan. They just unveiled theirs, apparently 90 minutes before Obama's speech? Doing that, whatever they had to say, as a small minority 80-member caucus in a House of 435 members, was bound to be tossed aside for discussing what the president said in reply to the majority in the House and the plan of of the Chairman of the House Budget Committee. But I found this coverage anyways:

CNN gave them this op-ed.

Dana Milbank at WaPo wrote this article, with these criticisms, among others:

...Obama, who outlined his plan 90 minutes after the progressives unveiled theirs, may find their proposal useful because it gives him a far-left counterweight to the far-right Ryan plan. The president’s fiscal commission recommended a proportion of two-thirds spending cuts and one-third tax increases. Even Bob Greenstein of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says fifty-fifty would be a reasonable mix. The Progressive Caucus budget is 80 percent tax increases.
It’s difficult to evaluate the liberals’ dream scheme because they don’t make projections beyond 10 years (after which entitlement spending problems become larger), and, rather than having the proposal “scored” by the Congressional Budget Office, they used as their referee the Economic Policy Institute, a like-minded think tank.
Still, it gives a sense of how things would be if liberals ran the world:....

Note there's 795 comments on that article.

Rush Limbaugh ridiculed it here.

Here's Fox's Cavuto interviewing Rep. Eddie Johnson about it. There's a lot of secondary coverage of that interview on blogs, like this one, apparently iit caused a bit of a stir.

80 members huh?You know this

Richard Day — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 21:14:52 +0000

In reply to The People's Budget: Yes Virginia, there are Decent Democrats

80 members huh?

You know this is impressive.

Waifs and strays. Wonderful drawing.

Hmmm... Ryan as Ted Bundy...

MrSmith1 — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:53:46 +0000

In reply to LOL. So true. I don't see

Hmmm... Ryan as Ted Bundy...

LOL. So true. I don't see

Ramona — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:46:56 +0000

In reply to Oh I love how the media fond

LOL. So true. I don't see the appeal in Ryan but then, why would I?

It struck me, too, AD. And

Ramona — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:45:22 +0000

In reply to Thanks for this,

It struck me, too, AD. And something else: Where's Anthony Weiner on that list? Sounds like it would be right up his alley but he's not there. I wrote to him asking him about it, but of course I didn't get an answer.

Thanks for this,

AmericanDreamer — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 02:25:03 +0000

In reply to The People's Budget: Yes Virginia, there are Decent Democrats

Thanks for this, Ramona.

Hmmm...a single Senator participating in this. Sanders almost doesn't count as he appears to be terminally confused about what he is supposed to be doing as an elected official. Perhaps he missed orientation.

And some suggest that Senators are out of touch with, or at any rate uninterested in trying to address, the needs of ordinary Americans not plugged into powerful interest groups.

I'm being uncleverly snarky and there are other endangered species senators whose efforts I appreciate such as Sherrod Brown and Patti Murray.

But a single senator on this? That's pathetic.

Oh I love how the media fond

cmaukonen — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:24:42 +0000

In reply to The People's Budget: Yes Virginia, there are Decent Democrats

Oh I love how the media fond over Ryan as being so genial, good looking, a nice guy, courageous. Funny though...serial rapists and murderers also present themselves that way as well.

What I would like to see

Beetlejuice — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:09:02 +0000

In reply to The People's Budget: Yes Virginia, there are Decent Democrats

What I would like to see would be the federal government must always run a surplus. Now there will be times when it must run deficits...wars, famines, environmental disasters and so forth..., however, there needs to be rules Congress must follow to minimize the cost to the public. Such as, any time a deficit is run, taxes must be increased to restore the surplus within a responsible amount of time depending on the level of economic activity at the time...no cutting and gutting funding from other programs - taxes must be increased...no excuses. That way GOPer's will think twice before they go on a spending spree without a thought how their excesses will be paid. And wouldn't it be dandy if there was a dollar value threshold how much of a deficit could be run at any one time? Anything of greater value must be approved in an ad hoc general election since the public will be the ones who will bear the brunt of paying off the debt. That way Congress would still be able to manipulate the purse strings, but the public has control over how much credit they can draw.

However, if Congress doesn't want the public interfering in their business, then they should just raise the taxes on Corporate American and the 1% for whom the Bu$h tax cuts were given too. Unfortunately, there are those in the GOPer rank and file who firmly believe all taxes are evil and wouldn't support a reasonable tax strategy that included public input.

That said. this initiative is pretty much dead until those rank and file GOPer's feel the stinging whip of their beloved GOPer's upon thier backsides. It's the only way to public solidarity on the excesses of Congress.