As debate rages over whether President Obama is playing eleven-dimensional chess or not, one very important point was made by Ezra Klein today in a post that has gone almost unnoticed in a cursory scan of the blogs.
As Ezra says, progressives should be thanking Eric Cantor today, because President Obama really is desperate to get the Grand Deal done, even at the cost of massive cuts to key programs, including Social Security and Medicare.
I knew the White House wanted a compromise on the debt ceiling. I just didn't expect them to do quite so much, well, compromising.
Here's what appears to have been in the $4 trillion deal they offered the Republicans: A two-year increase in the Medicare eligibility age. Chained-CPI, which amounts to a $200 billion cut to Social Security benefits. A tax-reform component that would raise $800 billion and preempt the expiration of the Bush tax cuts -- which would mean, for those following along at home, that the deal would only include half as much revenue as the fiscal commission recommended, and when you add the effect of making the Bush tax cuts a permanent part of the code, would net out to a tax cut of more than $3 trillion when compared to current law. That last bit apparently killed the deal.
Now, that's not exactly big news. Those who have been paying close attention since the beginning of these utterly unnecessary and deliberately harmful negotiations are at least vaguely aware of the concessions President Obama has put on the table, as well as the part of the deal that John Boehner couldn't get his Tea Party Caucus to go along with. The inability of the Republicans to accommodate even such a minor increase in revenues was the occasion for even the detestable David Brooks to freak out over the monster he and his ilk created, and for Lawrence O'Donnell to exult that President Obama had been playing Boehner for a fool all along.
But the salient part of Klein's analysis is the one with real explanatory power: the reality is that President Obama (and probably many other high-level Democrats) desperately want a big package of spending cuts, including cuts to Social Security and Medicare that are utterly irrelevant to the deficit, to go through. After all, you don't use language like unique opportunity in relation to massive cuts unless you actually mean it. And as usual, it's all about taxes for the wealthy, especially in a coming election year.
Klein's take is compelling:
Currently, Democrats are bargaining for some revenues now, with the option of forcing much more in revenues later. All they need to do to get $4 trillion in revenues next year is fail to come to an agreement with the Republican Party. And is there anything Congress is better at than not agreeing?
The deal Obama offered Boehner would've traded away the option to force much more in revenues later in order to get slightly more in revenues now. And it would have thrown in a slew of entitlement cuts and spending cuts as a sweetener.
In part, this is because the Obama administration, much to the disappointment of liberals, doesn't value the option to fight over taxes in 2012. They'd prefer to finish the debt debates now and move onto other issues after the election. They have no intention of letting the Bush tax cuts lapse in full, and since they're privately unsure that congressional Democrats will stand with them to let the cuts expire for incomes beneath $1,000,000, they don't see much upside in beginning their hoped-for second term with a bruising battle over taxes.
This is the kicker. President Obama and many of the Democrats in leadership have no desire whatsoever to actually have the debate America desperately needs to engage in: an argument over reversing record income inequality, in part and in particular by raising taxes on the wealthy. In fact, President Obama is sadly eager to avoid this debate--so eager, in fact, that he would be willing to throw Social Security and Medicare under the bus in order to do so--thereby effectively neutering the Democrats' strongest argument against the GOP in 2012 attacking Paul Ryan's plan to end Medicare as we know it.
America must have this debate sooner rather than later. Every year that goes by without have an all-out no-holds-barred fight over income inequality, is another year closer to complete corporate control of the economy and our electoral processes, another year in the which the American middle class continues to shrink, and another year in which the public loses faith in not only the Democratic Party to advance its interests, but in the power of our collective government itself to do so.
President Obama is backing away from this much-needed battle, and is using the debt ceiling negotiations as a tool to do so. In so doing, the President is undermining the Democrats' key arguments against Republicans heading into 2012, as well as legitimizing the notions that Medicare and Social Security have something relevant to do with the deficit, that spending cuts are the way forward toward dealing with deficit reduction, and even that the deficit must be addressed in any significant way at all in the midst of a massive recession and fledgling (at best) recovery.
So yes, Ezra Klein. Allow me to agree with you in thanking Eric Cantor for doing his part to help make sure that we do have a clarifying argument over taxes on the rich heading into 2012, while helping save Medicare and Social Security to boot.