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It looks like Obama will use the State of the Union to continue his march to the center. According to Politico:
President Obama plans to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary, “non-security” spending in the lead-up to Wednesday’s State of the Union address. The move, intended to blunt the populist backlash against Obama’s $787 billion stimulus and an era of trillion-dollar deficits — and to quell Democratic anxiety over last Tuesday’s Massachusetts Senate election — is projected to save $250 billion, the Democrats said. The freeze would not apply to defense spending or spending on intelligence, homeland security or veterans.
On the bright side, Obama also plans to announce a series of initiatives to aid middle class families, such as increasing the child tax credit and placing a cap on student loan payments – but those are drops in the bucket compared to the social programs that will be adversely affected by a spending freeze.
It seems clear that Obama is listening to the Blue Dogs and the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, and is interpreting Massachusetts as a call to centrism and fiscal restraint – not a sign that he needs to move to the left to keep hold of his liberal base. Looks like it’s going to be a long year for progressives.
What’s on your mind tonight?
18 Comments
The Democratic Party half of the Washington Bipartisan Consensus won a big victory last year, and have been spending the better part of the time since then trying to dislodge progressives from their leg. You’re all beginning to resemble celebrity stalkers.
Stop it. It is unseemly.
Obama has been a Corporate Republican all along. The MA elections just gave him an excuse to push the Corporate Republican agenda even more aggressively.
He freezes spending and pursues Corporate Republican agenda aggressively while throwing symbolic crumbs to the Middle and Working classes. Even George W. Bush did not have the audacity to freeze spending across the board (except, of course, for defense). What Audacity! People are going to lose their unemployment benefits, their cities are going to go bankrupt, haha!! It is up to Nancy Pelosi and other non-centrist Democrats to resist this Corporate Republican.
Prediction: Watch, down the road, President George W. Bush II is going to privatize Social Security. As I had thought during the primary, he is a Corporate Republican. It angers me that I have been so correct in my intuition, and that Obama has turned out to be even worse than I had thought.
The Audacity of Being More Heinous than George W. Bush I.
The country voted for Change, not more of the same Corporate Republican (ie. “centrist”) tax-cuts-for-the-rich strategy. THAT is the narrative. For all those who say “the left” just read their dreams into him, Obama’s platform WAS that he was going to increase taxes on the wealthy, withdraw from the Iraq War, support a public plan, renegotiate NAFTA, etc., ALL of which he has reversed. He misrepresented himself in the election in favor of the corporations, it turns out, that he works for.
Looks like it’s going to be a long year for progressives.
Look like it’s going to be one-term for Obama.
Via Salon:
If ever there was a time to pull out the old Karl Marx chestnut “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” that moment is now. Prominent members of Obama’s own administration have warned against repeating the errors of 1937, namely, Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to cut spending and balance the budget too quickly, thus strangling a nascent recovery from the Great Depression. But with the U.S. economy far from healthy, the president has decided, once again, to bow to the political winds and make the deficit priority number one…
Strangely, however, bond investors have yet to signal in any meaningful way that they are worried about current levels of debt. The U.S. government is still able to borrow on extraordinarily good terms. So what this really looks like is the exact opposite of a tough decision. As Obama has stressed all year long, substantively reducing the deficit will require addressing booming health care costs. So “a tough decision” would be fighting for health care reform. Or pushing for a climate change bill with teeth. Or banging the drums for a second stimulus. Those would also be tough! A spending freeze, on the other hand, is nothing but a gimmick aimed at shoring up political support. It will be perceived as exactly that, and the end result will be Obama looking weaker than ever.
75% of the federal spending is consumed by defense, old folks and debt repayments.
That is not your base. Any deficit reduction will just be spend by the next Republican on tax cuts for the wealthy and military adventurism.
It is time for a HUGE middle class benefit/tax cut. Starve the beast.
A freeze on discretionary spending when costs of living are falling – those are not cuts, folks.
deflation is not a good thing. we need fed deficit spending — a lot of it — and obama is doing the opposite of what is needed.
Actually, what he has been DOING is exactly what is needed, and what he is proposing is up for discussion now. While I prefer stimulus programs, they have to be balanced with cuts somewhere, and wasteful spending is a great place to start. Please note, in medicare fraud is draining resources for real health care. The principle applies in other programs as well.
Ruth – Don’t you think this spending freeze would have far reaching implications on things such as education, energy, and infrastructure that will end up being much more costly in the long run. Wouldn’t defense spending be a better place to start?
This proposed spending freeze is directed at fraud and abuse, mainly; “The senior official sought to portray this as not just a question of spending less money, but of getting our money’s worth—cutting (unspecified) ineffective programs and spending more on programs that work.”
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/01/obama-budget-to-call-for-freeze-in-non-security-discretionary-spending.php
And that’s from a report that wasn’t favorable.
His march to the “center” In regard to health care the man never mentioned single payer. The “public option” is the center on health care. No choice is what Republicans and Liebermann want.
On holding anyone accountable for any of many serious crimes committed the last eight years he as far right wrong as you can get. Not one person has been held accountable. Not one.
Hundreds of thousands are dead, injured, millions displaced and not one person has been held accountable.
Come on Pat Buchanan is the new “center”
Two things still disturb me about this: (1) The symbolic value of targeting domestic programs and exempting defense spending. (2) The fact that this represents another concession to the centrists and a poke-in-the-eye to progressives. Does he realize how much the left is getting disaffected?
And, I do think it will have unintended conqequences for the poor and powerless down the road. These things that are done mainly to score political points always do.
‘The fact that this represents another concession to the centrists and a poke-in-the-eye to progressives’
Sorry, but this is a choice of perspectives. When a proposal is treated as the ultimate sell-out I think it can fairly be described as hysterics.
‘On holding anyone accountable for any of many serious crimes committed the last eight years he as far right wrong as you can get.’
I, too, think Bush and Cheney should presently be in the Hague, but is it up to the administration to spend its term doing that now or in righting the wrongs that have thrown us into economic disaster?
march to the center? He started out a corporate friendly center right ‘New Democrat’ and has been going right ever since. He is going to single handily destroy FDRs brand for the Democrats. If W was the worst ever Obama will be a close second because He hasn’t CHANGED anything.
Obama is shaping up to be a one term mediocrity. It’s time to rally around someone that can mount a viable primary challenge against Obama. While Bush was an abject failure due to errors of commission Obama is an abject failure due to errors of omission. His march to the right and his “New Democrat” persona will not only destroy the Democratic Party but the nation at large.
Moving to the MIDDLE?. Where did you get that idea that moving to the right is somehow the center. You ve been blinded by the wingnut B.S. that some how progressives are not in the middle! Progressivism and it’s ideals hurled this President into the White House and Majority in both Houses. B.O. is moving to the RIGHT. The stinking rotten swamp of conservatism that has been slowly drowning this country for the last three decades! Obama has never been on the left hes made that clear from the beginning!
I, too, would like to see a reduction in defense spending, which is currently gobbling up 54% of the Federal budget:
http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm
Trouble is, war business is Big Business, and we’ve seen how well health care reform fared when we tried to go up against the corporate powers. After eight years of “Terrorists are coming! Be afraid, be VERY afraid!” bombardment, how successful do you think Obama would be in trying to reduce military spending? Sometimes it’s smarter to pick the battles you can win instead of tilting at windmills.
Someone, whose name I can’t recall–sorry–compared the old way of doing business (and war) to chess, a game of attrition in which you win by whittling away your oponent’s forces. “A more effective strategy,” said this person, whose name I can’t remember,”is employed in the game ‘Go’ Where you win by expanding your territory one small piece at a time. In the end, the one holding the most territory wins.”
So what I’m trying to say here is maybe Obama isn’t playing chess; maybe he’s playing Go. And I can confirm from brutal personal experience, when a chess player and a Go player go head-to-head, the Go player always wins.