We begin today's roundup not with a pundit but with
the president who took his "middle class economics" plan to The Huffington Post:
America's resurgence is real. With a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production, we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth.
Now we have to choose what we want that future to look like. Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and rising chances for everyone who makes the effort? [...]
The Budget I'm sending to Congress is a blueprint for success in the new economy. I know that there are Republicans in Congress who disagree with my approach, and I look forward to hearing their ideas for how we can pay for what the middle class needs to grow. But what we can't do is simply pretend that things like child care or college aren't important, or that there's nothing we can do to help middle class families get ahead.
Because we still have work to do. As a country, we have made it through some hard times. But we've laid a new foundation. We've got a new future to write. And I am eager to get to work.
Much more on the day's stories below the fold.
Vice-president Joe Biden also wrote an op-ed (his is in The New York Times), focusing on Central America:
AS we were reminded last summer when thousands of unaccompanied children showed up on our southwestern border, the security and prosperity of Central America are inextricably linked with our own.
The economies of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras remain bogged down as the rest of the Americas surge forward. Inadequate education, institutional corruption, rampant crime and a lack of investment are holding these countries back. Six million young Central Americans are to enter the labor force in the next decade. If opportunity isn’t there for them, the entire Western Hemisphere will feel the consequences.
Confronting these challenges requires nothing less than systemic change, which we in the United States have a direct interest in helping to bring about. Toward that end, on Monday, President Obama will request from Congress $1 billion to help Central America’s leaders make the difficult reforms and investments required to address the region’s interlocking security, governance and economic challenges. That is almost three times what we generally have provided to Central America
Over at The Nation,
Harold Pollack examines the president's doomed 529 plan:
This proposal was dead on arrival in the current congress. The administration advanced it to frame the debate moving forward for the next president and the next congress, to emphasize the need to redirect spending and tax breaks away from the affluent towards low-income people and the middle-class.
Unfortunately, the amateurish way this proposal was presented—and the virtual complete absence of supporting details–virtually guaranteed the opposite outcome. The administration had many politically possible options to reform 529s, and to curb the regressive structure of current college savings subsidies. I don’t know why the administration didn’t release a sensible 1-pager with relevant details, showing how families at different income levels would be affected by different policies. That’s too bad, because this program deserves to be reformed.
Moerover, there is something unseemly about affluent taxpayers becoming so irate when someone threatens to take away our goodies. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a fascinating report describing who in America actually owns 529 accounts. Only about three percent of families do. According to the GAO, the median annual income of 529 account holders was about $142,000. Median financial holdings (which do not include housing wealth) were about $413,000. GAO indicates that this is about 25 times the typical financial wealth among families that don’t have 529 accounts.
Over at USA Today,
Nick Jans explains why the president is right in protecting ANWR:
As a longtime former resident of Arctic Alaska, I join millions of Americans in celebrating President Obama's recent proposal to extend wilderness status to 12 million acres of the refuge, including 1.5 million acres of its coastal plain.
If approved by Congress, such protection would bar roads and other human development from the area. And if lawmakers failed to act, the president's executive power would hold sway — at least until a future administration changes course. Given the current Congress' curled lip toward the president and conservation in general, approval is a slim hope, but I'll take it.
Next up,
Eugene Robinson looks at the political fallout of House Speaker John Boehner inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress, without consulting the president:
First, the politics. Why on earth would anyone think it was a good idea to arrange for Netanyahu to speak to a joint session of Congress without telling Obama or anyone in his administration about the invitation?
Yes, Congress has an important role to play in international affairs. And yes, the days are long gone when disputes among officials over foreign policy ended at the water’s edge; members of Congress routinely gallivant around the globe and share their freelance views of what the United States should or should not be doing. But inviting a foreign leader to speak at the Capitol without even informing the president, let alone consulting him, is a bald-faced usurpation for which there is no recent precedent.
And, on a final note,
John Nichols at The Nation looks at American politics through the prism of recent elections in Greece:
Questions about the point of elections are common in the United States, where the political process has decayed rapidly in an era of money-drenched campaigns, narrowly-defined debates, exceptionally low turnout elections and gridlocked government. [...] In other countries, however, there are different circumstances, different systems, different possibilities. Can their elections bring fundamental change? And can they teach the rest of the world—including countries such as the United States, where the democratic infrastructure has so decayed that barely one-third of the potential voters participated in the recent mid-term elections—something about how elections are supposed to work?
That’s the democracy question that arises in the aftermath of a Greek election that has the potential to transform not just one country but the global debate about austerity. Even those who might not agree with the policies of Syriza—the radical coalition of parties and ideological tendencies that has swept to power on a promise to renew civil society in a country battered by imposed austerity—should recognize that what is at stake is more than economic policy. What is at stake is the question of whether the democratic impulse, which can be traced to ancient Greece, will have meaning in the modern world.