The Republican Budget for Billionaires would reduce non-defense discretionary spending
to 2.1 percent, nearly half its historical average and 0.4 points below current law. The
Congressional Progressive Caucus's Budget for All would set that spending at 3.5 percent.
Budgets are boring. Few people want to read about or think about them much. But budgets are policy. Politicians can lull you all day long with talk about their priorities. But the proof shows up only in what they're willing to put dollars into.
Rep. Paul Ryan has a budget. It's the plutocrats' favorite. Dave Johnson rightly calls it the "Republican Budget For Billionaires." It gorges the rich and gouges everyone else. It destroys jobs. It cuts taxes for the one percent and most likely raises them for some less affluent Americans. It keeps the Pentagon very well fed. It would butcher Medicaid, Medicare and the food stamp program. It chops money that helps kids go to college. It hurts clean-energy initiatives. It is so radical that even some Republicans don't want it. At least not in an election year. Bad optics. DOA the minute it was unfurled.
President Obama has a budget. A middle-of-the-road budget with some good things in it, including infrastructure spending and an end to the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. It doesn't gut Medicare or Medicaid or try to turn Social Security into a 401k plan. It eases down growth in Pentagon spending. But it moves too quickly on deficit reduction, fails to reduce defense spending enough and, just as in February 2009, doesn't propose enough spending to really rev up the economy. The Obama budget was also DOA in Congress.
There's a third budget proposal. Let me start by saying it too doesn't have a chance of passing. And it adopts good ideas from the president's budget. But it doesn't stop there. Rather, Budget for All embraces the kind of thinking that progressives ought to be focusing on. Which is no surprise since it was developed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, using last year's People's Budget as a model. This time around, instead of a pro-forma vote, the CPC ought to get a full-blown debate.
Some will argue that this is a waste of time since it won't pass anyway. Can't get the votes, so why bother? That's short-term thinking. Progressives shouldn’t wait to present our budgetary (or other) visions of good policy until we have the power to implement them. Promoting good ideas can by itself help us gain the political clout to make them happen.
The Budget for All deserves as much analysis and debate, inside and outside Congress, as these other budgets. Rep. Ryan's plan has been dissected six ways to Sunday, which is why we know in detail what a fecal stain it is. Such analysis can't be accomplished in one sitting. So, first, a little overview, and in the days ahead, more detailed digging.
Isaiah J. Poole at the Campaign for America's Future speaks to a key ingredient of the Budget for All:
The Budget for All contains a long list of initiatives, more than $2 trillion worth, designed to put people to work doing jobs that need to be done, such as repairing schools, upgrading and expanding our transportation network, protecting our communities, providing health care and other services to those in need. The Republican budget would slash discretionary spending by $38 billion below the president's request in 2013, and by $352 billion over 10 years, reducing the money available for a broad range of job-creating initiatives.
In the short term, the Budget for All would increase the deficit more than either President Obama's proposed budget, and certainly more than the Republican budget. But it makes eminent sense to run a larger deficit now, when the economy is slack, borrowing costs are near zero, and unemployment is running well above 8 percent.
In just about every category, deep contrasts are to be found between the CPC's Budget for All and the Republican Budget for Billionaires. While that latter budget proposes to whack, whack, whack, the Budget for All focuses on rebuilding the economy. Not just to get us back where we were when the current downturn began but to make some long-term changes dealing with chronic problems. But it still reduces deficit spending by $6.8 trillion over 10 years.
Join us in becoming a citizen sponsor of the Congressional Progressive Caucus's "Budget for All."
I'll return in future diaries to discuss the details, but for now the highlights.
(Continue reading below the fold)
The CPC budget initiates a comprehensive investment approach to spending:
• the much-needed infrastructure bank;
• a six-year $556 billion surface transportation investment (compared with the House Republicans' five-year miserly $260 billion proposal that Speaker John Boehner cannot get passed);
• more than $2 trillion in domestic investment that would entail the Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act, school improvement, park improvement, student jobs and a Child Care Corps;
• job-creating initiatives from the president's 2013 budget
The CPC budget proposes a welcome return to truly progressive taxation instead of following the right wing's playbook that seeks to get us ever closer to a flat tax. Included in these changes are:
• letting the Bush-era tax cuts to expire for the top 2 percent of earners at the end of 2012;
• keeping marriage relief as well as credits and incentives for children, families and education;
• allowing the 28 percent and 25 percent brackets to sunset once the economy is on solid footing, in 2017 and 2019, respectively, while maintaining the 10 percent bracket;
• maintaining refundable credits (Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child and Dependent Care Credit and the American Opportunity Tax Credit);
• indexing the Alternative Minimum Tax for inflation for a decade;
• enacting the Fairness in Taxation Act to add brackets of 45 percent, 46 percent, 47 percent, 48 percent and 49 percent for millionaires and billionaires;
• taxing all capital gains and qualified dividends as ordinary income;
• eliminating the mortgage interest deduction for vacation homes and yachts;
• enacting a 0.5 percent surcharge on wealth over $10 million
The CPC budget also adds some much-needed common sense to corporate tax policy by:
• eliminating corporate welfare for oil, gas and coal companies;
• enacting a "financial crisis responsibility fee";
• enacting a speculation tax;
• taxing carbon pollution but providing rebate to hold low and moderate income households harmless
The CPC budget finally gives defense spending the progressive treatment the country so desperately needs. Not the modest White House-proposed reductions that Republicans have been ranting about since before they were even introduced, but the real thing—deep, but smart, including:
• cutting Pentagon spending over 10 years by $1.9 trillion, nearly twice the amount of any other proposal;
• achieving no savings by reducing wages or benefits of military personnel, including TRICARE and pensions;
• ending emergency war funding beginning with the 2014 budget;
• cutting the size of the armed forces through attrition;
• reducing the number of private contractors;
• abandoning weapon modernization programs unsuited to modern threats, such as the Trident II nuclear missile, F-35, V-22 Osprey and the Virginia class submarine;
• limiting the modernization of Cold War-era nuclear weapons and infrastructure
That's a lot to digest. And there's still more in the CPC's Budget for All, such as a move toward a public option in health care. But looking in detail at that and all the above-mentioned items is what's coming in future diaries.
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Join us in becoming a citizen sponsor of the Congressional Progressive Caucus's "Budget for All."