Nothing, it seems, is capable of causing quite as much outrage as the predictable.
With the completion of a budget deal that traded nearly $100 billion in cuts to vital programs in exchange for a rejection of insane and ideologically driven GOP riders, the sad story of budgets in Obama's first term reaches not a final end, nor the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.
A beginning in which a supposedly transformational Democratic President of the United States, accused of socialism and even communism by his rightwing opponents, openly praised historic cuts to discretionary spending with an air of optimism that one would normally associate with devotees of Herbert Hoover steeped in Austrian economics. Reasonable commentators normally broadly supportive of the White House have noted the terrible optics of this arrangement, even as much of the progressive movement recoiled in some mixture of the shock and horror that one might find at the discovery that a spouse one had suspected of straying, had not only been unfaithful but actually moonlighted in the professional escort industry.
The Bush tax cuts become the Obama tax cuts
And yet none of this should be surprising to anyone. This outcome was almost guaranteed since well before the November 2010 elections, and at least since December 2010. It was a foregone conclusion from the moment a Democratic President, House and Senate decided it was in their best interest to extend the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy during a Great Recession, combined with a period of record income inequality.
The political realities are frankly uglier than one might like to admit. The United States is currently facing a $1.4 trillion dollar deficit. Recession or no, that's not a number to scoff at. The fact that half of that deficit can be attributed to two wars, at least one of which was entirely unnecessary and both of which were certainly poorly executed at greater than necessary expense, is a story that needs telling for contextual and political reasons, but is not particularly relevant to the current situation. There is no way to quickly and cleanly fix that problem.
But what is immediately relevant is that a great percentage of that deficit--at least $300 billion or more of it--is directly attributable to Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. When attempting to close a gap between spending and income, the prospect of extra income must be on the table, particularly from those who are receiving the most benefits from the system without paying their fair share in exchange. Simply leaving the deficit to grow unchecked is not actually a politically feasible option.
So when Democrats, of their own volition and in control of the entire government apparatus, singlehandedly took revenue increases off the table while doing less than nothing to draw down expenses on overseas adventures, spending cuts were essentially guaranteed. The only question was: how much?
And once the question on cutting spending becomes not "whether" but "how much", the battle is already lost. If spending cuts are the answer, the Party of spending cuts is going to be dominant in the equation, and hold all the cards. That will be true not just today, but in the fight over the debt ceiling in a few short months, and then in the gargantuan battle coming down the pipe over the budget in 2012, a battle that may determine whether President Obama receives a second term. All that is left for the Party that alleges to work on behalf of the common person and the working class is a hollow attempt to take credit for passing supposedly responsible austerity measures. Per Ezra Klein:
So why were Reid and Obama so eager to celebrate Boehner’s compromise with his conservative members? The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.
Once the budget choice became between a few spending cuts and a few more spending cuts, it's no surprise to see both sides taking credit for spending cuts. After all, the single-party government supposedly dedicated to the interests of the middle class had taken off the table even the faint notion that money stolen by the top 1% of America's wealthiest with help from taxpayer bailouts of Wall St. should be invested back into the American people even at low Clinton-era levels. What else was there to do? As Dave Weigel points out:
For the second time in five months, the White House has faced a political crisis, looked at an opposition that completely disagreed with liberal economics, and blinked. Five months ago, automatic tax increases were stopped, and the GOP got a validation of supply-side economics. Tonight, in a battle over a much smaller amount of money, the Democrats signed on to austerity economics. They didn’t have much of a choice, but they didn’t challenge the premise, either. We’re a long way from the “Sputnik moment.”
Indeed. Anger with the Administration should not be focused on its actions tonight. They, and the actions to come during the next two major battles going into 2012, were the inevitable and predetermined outcome of the decision made in December 2010 not to take any action on the revenue side of the deficit equation, back when Republicans had little power to significantly affect the outcome. When the Bush tax cuts became the Obama tax cuts, this result was already guaranteed.