in this Washington Post op ed this morning. As if often the case, Dionne absolutely hits the mark with this one.
The key, in my mind, to his piece, can be seen in this one paragraph, then 3rd in the pieice:
And you wonder: Will President Obama welcome the responsibility of engaging the country in this big argument, or will he shrink from it? Will his political advisers remain robotically obsessed with poll results about the 2012 election, or will they embrace Obama’s historic obligation — and opportunity — to win the most important struggle over the role of government since the New Deal?
reread those words: the most important struggle over the role of government since the New Deal - absolutely on target, because what is at risk is the entire architecture of programs that support the less well off, as Republicans try to shift even more wealth - and power - to the already wealth, powerful, advantaged at the expense of the rest of us.
Dionne does a detailed analysis of what he has appropriately labeled "Ryan care" - what the Republican Congressman from WI (and chair of the House Budget Committee) wants to do.
Remember that Ryan wants to make the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent and totally eliminate taxes on capital gains.
Remember that Ryan wants to cut the funding of Medicaid and tax what is left and turn it over to the states as block grants.
Dionne tells us that as we remember these things about Ryan care, we should
He immediately follow that with these words:
Put the two parts of the Ryan design together — tax cuts for the rich, program cuts for the poor — and its radically redistributionist purposes become clear. Timid Democrats would never dare embark on class warfare on this scale the other way around.
Or as Warren Buffett put it, several times in different venues, "here's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
There's more. Dionne examines the Senate Republican proposal presented by Jim DeMint that would limit government expenditures to 18% of GDP. Since this wouyld be based on the previous year's GDP, the effective rate of spending would actually be only 16.7% of GDP, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, whicih notes the last time spending was that low was 1956, before Medicare, Medicaid, much federal aid to education, environmental protection, or as Dionne quotes from the Center's analysis,
“basic programs to ease poverty and hardship such as Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and disabled poor, food stamps, and the Earned Income Tax Credit.”
It would also require a 2/3 vote to raise taxes, thus enabling a minority to block necessary action for the government to pay its bills.
Yesterday we saw the right-wing majority on the Court, coincidentally all Catholics, basic sanction state programs that let people opt out of state taxes (and by implication local taxes if similar programs are enacted focused on that level) by making certain kinds of donations to religiously-based schools which can exclude people not part of their religion. This is one way to undercut the progress this nation has made since i was born almost 65 years ago. Starving the government of revenues is another, one that would move in the direction of gutting all the programs the rightwingers have never liked, because it sometimes involves tax revenues being spent on "those people" however others might be classified. They do not like government providing services without a profit when they see a way of profiting from the same services, although when the services are privatized, the quality of what is delivered usually suffers - ask those from the military electrocuted by faulty showers built by contractors in Iraq, as just one example.
Dionne notes that the Republican proposals are "extreme and irresponsible stuff. " He points out the President knows it, and wonders if he will engage.
As I write this, I have heard that the Republican proposal for a one week Continuing Resolution would fully fund the Pentagon for the year but have $12 billion in other cuts. Excuse me - consider the impact of that proposal - it would gut social programs.
Will the Democrats stand up to this? Will the President show some leadership, including telling the nation what the Republicans are trying to do?
Dionne ends the column like this
“This is our time,” Obama liked to say during the 2008 campaign. This most certainly is his time to stand up for the vision of a practical, progressive government that he once advanced so eloquently.
If he does not stand up, then perhaps we can already answer the question that is the title both of Dionne's column and of this diary: The end of progressive government?
The answer unfortunately will be in the affirmative, a YES, which would be about as negative as anything that has happened in my lifetime to the hopes and dreams of most of the American people.