I've rarely agreed with Ezra Klein, but tonight in his article on the Washington Post, he's right in calling out the bad optics of the budgetary deal between the White House, the Senate, and the House.
In this article, Klein certainly doesn't mince words, and he's usually given the White House a lot of leeway in his prior articles. For him to do this tells me that he's seeing what is coming down the road--more austerity measures, Social Security, Medicare, and other programs on the chopping bloc with the debt ceiling raise and the next fiscal budget.
The final compromise was $38.5 billion below 2010’s funding levels. That’s $78.5 billion below President Obama’s original budget proposal, which would’ve added $40 billion to 2010’s funding levels, and $6.5 billion below John Boehner’s original counteroffer, which would’ve subtracted $32 billion from 2010’s budget totals. In the end, the real negotiation was not between the Republicans and the Democrats, or even the Republicans and the White House. It was between John Boehner and the conservative wing of his party. And once that became clear, it turned out that Boehner’s original offer wasn’t even in the middle. It was slightly center-left.
Here's more from Klein's article below:
The Obama White House is looking toward the Clinton model. After all, Clinton also suffered a major setback in his first midterm, Clinton also faced down a hardline Republican Congress, Clinton also suffered major policy defeats, and yet Clinton, as the story goes, managed to co-opt the conservative agenda and remake himself into a successful centrist. The Obama administration has even hired many of Clinton’s top aides to help them recapture that late-90s magic.
That story misses something important: Clinton’s success was a function of a roaring economy. The late ‘90s were a boom time like few others -- and not just in America. The unemployment rate was less than 6 percent in 1995, and fell to under 5 percent in 1996. Cutting deficits was the right thing to do at that time. Deficits should be low to nonexistent when the economy is strong, and larger when it is weak. The Obama administration’s economists know that full well. They are, after all, the very people who worked to balance the budget in the 1990s, and who fought to expand the deficit in response to the recession.
Right now, the economy is weak. Giving into austerity will weaken it further, or at least delay recovery for longer. And if Obama does not get a recovery, then he will not be a successful president, no matter how hard he works to claim Boehner’s successes as his own.
Klein is right in pointing out the budgetary differences between 1995 and 2011. This is what many progressives have pointed out before, only to be ignored like the Cassandras they are in Washington, D.C. The problem is that the model that worked in 1995 is sixteen years out of date, and may not even work with the independent voters that the White House is going after in 2012.
We've seen what has happened to other countries that tried the austerity model---their economies tanked, and now they have to get themselves out of the holes that were dug for them by all the austerity peacocks. Now, our economy may very well suffer from this round of budgetary cuts, and that's exactly what the GOP wants. They don't care if the economy suffers because it impacts the White House's chance of a second term in 2012.
Boehner was the winner in tonight's high noon showdown, and he and the GOP got what they wanted, $38 billion more in cuts on top of $40 billion cuts to date. And they're not done just yet. There's the debt ceiling raise, in which they can bleed America's middle class and low-income class more to keep their wealthy benefactors fattened and happy, and the next year's fiscal budget. That is what is coming down the road, and we'll be the Cassandras pointing this out, only to be ignored.