digby writes
The magnificent failure of the grown-up in the room strategy:
A strategy only a villager could love::
The budget deficit is the lowest it has been since President Barack Obama took office, according to a Congressional Budget Office report this week. But don't expect that to matter to the American people.
In fact, the deficit has been falling steadily since 2009. Yet a new HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that Americans still think the deficit is going up and disapprove of Washington politicians accordingly.
It's a painful irony for the jobless, whose livelihoods were sacrificed in the pursuit of deficit reduction over the past several years. Beginning in 2010, the White House shifted its focus from growing the economy to reducing the deficit, hoping to win over swing voters thought to be turned off by too much government spending. As public jobs were slashed and government spending slowed, the economy took the predicted hit. But as the survey shows, there was no political gain that came with the pain.
The administration has since pivoted away from talk of belt tightening and shifted back toward economic growth—which, economists have pointed out all along, is the fastest way to reduce the deficit.
According to the new poll, 54 percent of Americans think the budget deficit has increased since Obama took office in 2009, while only 19 percent know it has decreased. Fourteen percent think it has stayed the same since Obama became president.
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Some of us pointed out many, many moons ago that there would be no political payoff for this. By demagoguing the deficit they plant the idea in people's heads that it's the most intractable problem the nation has ever faced and that the only thing we can do to fix it is slash government as far as the eye can see. The real numbers are irrelevant. Cutting the deficit is like the war on terror—it will never end. (And if it does, as happened briefly at the end of the Clinton administration, the Republicans will seize power with their stirring message: tax cuts! It's yer muneee!)
The Democrats had a chance to break this cycle because we were in a depression and citizens were looking to the government for solutions. But all the hemming and hawing about "short-term-stimulus-long-term-deficit-just-like-your-family-budget" nonsense ended up confusing the public and they fell back into their old way of thinking. Of course, attacking "the deficit" was always the Democrats' plan because only then could they "get it off the table" and move on to funding all the neat stuff the public really needs and wants.
How's that working out for us?
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—The Wages of Bigotry:
When they're trying to get you to vote for that referendum that bans same-sex marriage*, they tell you that it's all about The Sanctity of Marriage, and Protecting Religious Freedom, and that of course it's not about Screwing Over Gay People. It's not going to disenfranchise anyone, they say—it's about setting some common-sense limits.
Actions have consequences, though, and the people of Michigan are about to realize that their 2004 vote to prohibit same-sex marriage did, in fact, relegate an entire class of citizens to permanent second-class status. Because the Michigan Court of Appeals held today that the gay marriage ban also bans same-sex domestic partner benefits. […]
So even a quasi-autonomous public entity like the University of Michigan is now prohibited from offering some of its top employees domestic partner benefits. Unmarried opposite-sex partners, of course, can continue to enjoy the benefits. But gay employees and their families are SOL, even if they've been receiving family benefits for years. Is that what Michiganders expected when they passed their marriage ban? Who knows. But regardless of what they expected, <>this is what you actually get when you vote for a feel-good "protection of marriage" referendum. No matter what its purveyors tell you, if you read it closely enough, somewhere buried in the fine print, you'll find the wages of bigotry. Today, we're reminded that they eventually come due.
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Tweet of the Day:
You'd think I'd be a creationist, but these days I prefer to deny any involvement in this fiasco.
— @TheTweetOfGod
On today's
Kagro in the Morning show, the Christie saga continues, with former aides taking the 5th and refusing to comply with subpoenas.
Greg Dworkin joins us to talk about that, the new Republican threat to the ACA's "risk corridors," and Arkansas Republicans' attempt to boot 85,000 people back off their new-found health care coverage. Next, a little background on the Bridgegate contempt mechanics. A look at the House's super-important floor business for today, the "Sportsmen's Heritage And Recreational Enhancement Act." And Elizabeth Warren backs a new proposal to let the US Postal Service offer basic banking services.
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