Can Washington Cut Spending?
- By PEGGY NOONAN
PK here. I truly believe when it comes to rhetoric, that we have to fight fire with fire.
When people refuse to discuss things with each other based on the facts, then little recourse is left except slinging mud right back at the mud slingers.
I read this article because I know nothing of Glen Beck, and I think I never want to. What I hear repeated of his rhetoric is 3rd grade hack.
This lady is satan compared to him though, because she couches far-right ideas as though it were a reasonable centrist question, and really makes sounds like the center would, but she is, in my esteem, guilty of swaying somewhat reasonable people into believing far-fetched and atrocious things.
So here's one guy's rhetorical retort and the Wall Street Journal article that spawned it.
President Obama's decision to appoint Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson to his bipartisan commission on government spending is politically shrewd and, in terms of policy, potentially helpful.
I would argue that Obama, while not perfect, has done a myriad of politically and economically shrewd things that have helped this nation. He's very centrist as noted by his lack of concessions to the Left once in office. He has at least charted a socially liberal course which expands the rights of citizens to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (that Constitution thing). He's moved us back towards nuclear energy. He won reparation from the Bailouts. He admonished the Corporate agenda serving Supreme Court. Above all of many other things, he's chosen to spend his time not as his predecessor, passing junk regulatory legislation, starting wars, running unjustified debt (wars and tax cuts for the wealthy), or distracting voters with non-issues like abortion and the morality of stem-cell research. Instead, he has focused on positive progress in health care, foreign policy/relations, and domestic economic issues, most notably trying to reinvigorate the middle class who create the GDP via their consumption (or currently, the lack thereof).
In other words, yes he seems like he's courting the right a bit, but he's been very busy doing politically shrewd and helpful things.
It is shrewd in that he is doing what he has been urged to do, which is bring in wise men. You mean other wise men, since a majority of us think he is one too. Here are two respected Beltway veterans, one from each party. respected beltway veterans = old power = that which is corrupt (adept in campaign financing?) = those I and most other people in this country in fact don't respect. It shows the president willing to do what he said he'd do when he ran, which is listen to other voices. Not the sum total of what he said, but ok. The announcement subtly underscores the trope "The system is broken and progress through normal channels is impossible," which is the one Democrats prefer to "Boy did we mess up the past year and make things worse." And here we see how efficiently an opinion piece can assume something that is either false or just not assumable in general. I think the left and the right agree that "the system is broken and progress through normal channels is difficult," but only the right, far at that, agrees that "we messed up the past year" or that "things are worse". If you watch FOX, everything always seems worse except of course when Old-timey faux philosophies win the occasional symbolic battle in the culture wars they keep starting. Most of us agree that things are looking up, the economy is getting back on track, and that we're closer than ever to enacting solutions to our problems . I would also remind people that part of the purpose of government is to muck simple decisions up with things like compromise and fact-finding and considering the many perspectives of any issue; so the ACTION NOW screams of the right sound lovely to their own ears, but meanwhile their party makes nothing-legislation and those of us willing to be realistic go as fast as we can - too slow for demagogues. Their god would literally be happiest with a Dictatorship, military or not, and a population of brainwashed and uneducated citizens. Under such a system, boy it would be easy to get things done in a hurry. We in the U.S. this last two years haven't passed any critical points of no return, but when I read this opinion piece, it really seems like all Hell has broken loose under Obama's watch... And the commission gets some pressure off the president. Every time he's knocked for spending, he can say "I agree, it's terrible. Help me tell the commission!" Our brilliant and educated and reason-following President has many things to say about spending. On the right, that's about all they have on him - that he's so full of words. I remind them that 'full of words' doesn't equal 'not filled with other things as well'. He inherited Bush's quagmire, and cutting the purse strings on day one would have been stupid and treasonous, yet doing what got us out of the Great Depression, which also happens to be the lynch-pin of Reaganomics, in a word spending-spending-spending, is somehow suddenly a bad thing because our debt is arbitrarily too big? Our debt was so huge nearly twenty years ago, that they put up a national debt clock in times square. Why was it now and not then that debt became a-priori? I have some theories, but the truth of it is pretty fucking obvious considering we have an enlightened capable leader who is only partially of Western European descent.
It's potentially helpful in that good ideas may come of it, some rough and realistic Washington consensus encouraged. Rough and realistic = No Change because the profiteers run Congress way opposite of how we would and the right is convinced they should throw their lot in with K street's Cheney and Gingrich clowns.
Is it too late? For? what? If I was already immersed in this ladies style of rhetoric, I'm sure I'd be able to fill in this 'Is it too late?' blank with the appropriate ... blank fear. Maybe. (Never too late) Even six months ago, when the president's growing problems so, we're assuming continued growth - magic statistician with the public were becoming apparent (to Heir Beck), the commission and its top appointees might have been received as fresh and hopeful—the adults have arrived (President = child, not coincidentally, Boy = Racial Slur - racist undertones are a signature element of burgeoning right-wing rhetoric), the system can be made to work (meaning the lame status quo could be left alone). Republicans would have felt forced to be part of it, or seen the gain in partnership. Now it looks more as if the president is trying to save his own political life. Timing is everything. You see, Republicans who shut down Congress would TOTALLY have been reasonable, if his timing had been - what? invited a Right-wing zealot to be his personal council from the day he began his Presidency? Like a boy would?
But this is an interesting time. As opposed to the World-recognized nightmare of the Bush era. Just to reiterate some sense here; in Alaska lately, Shannyn Moore has been talking on the radio about how much our legislature here has been "cleaning up" after all the laws that Sarah broke, and we now have to make new laws, since we can no longer assume that certain ethical standards will not be violated or that Governors won't throw decency to the wind when fame and fortune come a'knockin'. It's easy to say that concern about federal spending is old, because it is. It's at least as old as Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Underline the last one in red, then include every President since then, with the notable exception of a Balanced Budget that Bush inherited (but yeah, even that could have been kinda fakey - I get it, but still, it does stand out) and you'll have a list of the Modern Presidential Criminals who Borrowed the United State's Wealth Down the Drain To Prop Up the Short Term Gains of the Financial Industry, While Costing Us the Long Term Growth Strategies That Support The Middle Class. But the national anxiety about spending that we're experiencing now, and that is showing up in the polls, is new (Debt is the new Abortion). The past eight years have concentrated the American mind (on fear). George W. Bush's spending (the least of his crimes, though the one most expected), the crash and Barack Obama's spending have frightened people you mean the spending that every economist was screaming for, congress approved, and that the alarmists would have sounded off about if it hadn't been spent?. It's not just "cranky right-wingers" who are concerned but mostly just right-wingers, because the rest of us don't think that Obama is anything but a centrist since we don't spend our time reading Commentary and watching infotainment pretending to be News on T.V.. If it were, the president would not have appointed his commission Yes he would have! He wants to seem like he's including everybody so that when it is time for reelection he can point at his record and convince even the right that he was leading from the middle (middle-right imo). The President has tons of support from his Congress and his Constituency, plus he recognizes that only by bringing in the "Beltway insiders" can he get much done. That he does that pisses off a majority of the country btw, but they unlike the far right, blame the shitty Beltway insiders, not Obama. Its creation acknowledges that independents are anxious, the center is alarmed—the whole country is. what?! afraid? Could TSA, 9/11, 9/12, FOX news and the screams of Fearmongers and Demagogues have something to do with what seems to be the whole country except the Far Left being anxious, alarmed, and... Or is that just a technique used in rhetoric to associate the centrist president with the further and further Far Left, to characterize him (attack the person when logic fails = Ad Hominem Fallacy) as so Left as to be oblivious of our eminent destruction from enemy combatants foreign and domestic (which don't exist btw)? The people are ahead of their representatives in Washington, who are stuck in the ick of old ways. To be Conservative is to see as much as possible about the old ways as not icky - preferably all of the old ways will be preserved. That's like what the dictionary says. Being "right" used to mean that until the Neo-Cons went to Mass-Media-Sophist School and started buying public opinion with fear and shallow patriotism, leading a charge of impressionable young conservatives who are in it for the arbitrary cry of Morality (worked for McCarthy after all) and for the privatization of the public welfare.
Conservatives all my adulthood have said the American people were, on the issue of spending, the frog in the pot of water: The rising heat lulled him, and when the water came full boil, he wouldn't be able to jump out. Yeah, if you died in about 1970, this would have been true. Otherwise, I call bullshit 'that's what Conservatives have been saying'. Neo-cons quit talking about spending when it comes to tax cuts, military spending, pork barrel projects, and deregulation for profiteers. PERIOD, m.f..
But that is the great achievement, if you will, of the past few years. Only a Fearmonger would see a shitty mess as a great achievement because it further espoused the need for their demagoguery. The frog is coming awake at just the last moment. Oh spare me. This is the last moment because? the movie 2012? the book series Left Behind? because Republicans are 'losing' politically or did lose anyway once the whole world saw what Bush, Cheney, and "Clean Skies" legislation was all about? He is jumping out of the water. Jump America, she's telling you how high.
People are freshly aware and concerned about the real-world implications of a $1.6 trillion dollar deficit, of a $14 trillion debt. It will rob America of its economic power, and eventually even of its ability to defend itself. Militaries cost money. And if other countries own our debt, don't they in some new way own us? If China holds enough of your paper, does it also own some of your foreign policy? Do we want to find out? And there are the moral implications of the debt, which have so roused the tea party movement: The old vote themselves benefits that their children will have to pay for - which is responsible for precisely tiny of our National Debt. Two wars...hello. No bid contracts, tax cuts for wealthy, Billions in corporate hand-outs. Hello? Didn't let us bargain collectively for Medicare Prescription Benefits...HELLO!? What kind of a people do that? And when all else fails, go for the Ad Hominem attack - should have been pointing that out along the way of this article. WHAT IS HE!?!! WHAT ARE THEY?!! *The enlightened debaters of the world fail to applaud at such attacks.
It has been two or three years since I have heard a Republican or conservative say deficits don't matter. Ever since they quit being in charge - patently stated! WAR is okay, but JOBS BILLS ARE UNPATRIOTIC according to them. Huge ones do, period. Slightly a little bit LESS than huge deficits DON't matter. Period. Apparently. Semi-colon; such as the ones the Bushes gave us. As for Democrats and new spending, the air is, for now, out of the balloon. My enemy is a spent piece of latex - Ad Hominem? or an opinion supported by chemistry and physics? You decide.
A question among Republicans is whether to back, as a party, Rep. Paul Ryan's road map, his far-reaching and creative attempt to cut the deficit and the debt. The Congressional Budget Office says its numbers add up: It would, actually, remove the deficit in the long term. Oh, so there IS something being proposed by Republicans...for some reason I hadn't heard of that this guy. Apparently only newbie Republicans try to reach across the aisle at all, and only a few of those. Other proposals that would cut the deficit and the debt: taking the profit out of health care, ending two wars of occupation that would make Rome blush, and getting the top tier tax rate, in the eighty and ninety percents back a hundred years ago, down to less than twenty percent now, back up to say forty percent, oh and that percentage will be not coming out of just the stuff they don't hide in the Caymen Islands or wherever else they hide money. I realize this plan runs the risk of making all of Halliburton's sick corporate cousins move to Dubai and the EU, and everywhere but here with their headquarters, but worst case scenario, we're better off without them - they're not running our economy very well right now - that's for sure. But the Ryan plan is, inevitably, as complicated as the entitlements entitlements is the CATO institute word for social services that every other industrialized nation sees fit to bestow on their patriotic and tax paying citizens, for the common good as well as the economic stability it engenders. it seeks to reform, involving vouchers and tax credits, cost controls and privatization Thank you corporate elite for providing such swingin' lingo to describe the gutting of Public Infrastructure from schools, hospitals (wait - they're private already), police services, and Social Security, Medicare, the Veterans Administration, and any thing else the government does that gives a damn about the people who feed it money. It is always possible that this is right for the moment, for the new antispending era. HERE WE ARE: ANTI-SPENDING. COMING TO A TV SCREEN NEAR YOU I'd wager. But the party itself has some other jobs right now, and one of them is to encourage the circumstances that will make real change possible. Here the abstract collides with the particular. READ THIS AS: all that justification and gobbledygook above doesn't mean anything, all you have to do is your job Conservative Neo-Con-washed one, your job is making REAL change, OUR change possible. Fortunately they aren't as good at it as they used to be. The more the average person votes, the more they loose.
In the long run the Republicans have to do two things, and one they probably cannot do alone, or rather probably cannot do without holding the presidency, and a gifted president he would have to be. They have to prepare the ground for an American decision —a decision by a solid majority of America's adults—that they can faithfully back specific cuts in federal spending: that they can trust the cuts will be made fairly, that we will all be treated equally, that no finagling pols will sneak in "protection" for this pet interest group or that power lobby, that we are in this together as a nation and can make progress together as a nation. The American Decision - sounds like civil war to me, though I'll not engage in it - and finally she ends with exactly the reforms we've been screaming for since the 70's.
This is a huge job, and may ultimately require one strong and believable voice. Dictator for life Beck.
Second the Republicans should tread delicately while moving forward seriously. Voters are feeling as never before in recent political history the vulnerability of their individual positions. There is no reason to believe they are interested in highly complicated and technical reforms, the kind that go under the heading "homework." As in: "I know my future security depends on understanding this thing and having a responsible view, but I cannot make it out. My whole life is homework. I cannot do more."
We are not a nation of accountants, however much our government tries to turn us into one.
Margaret Thatcher once told me what she learned from the poll-tax protests that prompted her downfall. She said she learned in a deeper way how anxious people are, how understandably questioning and even suspicious they are of governmental reforms and changes: "They're frightened, you see." None of us feel we have a wide enough margin for error.
Americans lack trust that government will act in good faith, which is part of why they're anxious. They look at every bill, proposal and idea with an eye to hidden horrors.
The good news is the new consensus that America must move forward in a new way to get spending under control. The bad news is we don't trust Washington to do it. And in the end, only Washington can.
Paul Ryan is doing exactly what a representative who's actually serious should do—putting forward innovative and honest ideas for long-term solutions. He should continue going to the people with it, making his case and seeing how they respond, from the Tennessee Tea Party to the Bergen County, N.J., Republican Club. Maybe a movement will start, maybe not. But it's a good conversation to be having.
The GOP itself should be going forward with its philosophy, with the things it's long stood for and, in some cases, newly rediscovered, and painting the broader picture of the implications of endless, compulsive high spending. Those lawmakers who have a good reputation in this area—Sen. Tom Coburn is one—should be moved forward more prominently. Congressmen who focus on earmarks, on controllable spending, are doing something wise. They are trying to demonstrate that those who can be trusted with small things—cutting back what can be removed now—can be trusted with larger things.
The rest of it didn't make much sense to me, not enough to comment on anyway. A moose now resides in my backyard. It seems similar to the Elephant imposing itself on our Living Room; they'll both trot their own way to be forgotten eventually.
