This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Along with a large and increasing number of Americans, I care about the long-term deficit because I think that, left unchecked, it will constrict and distort our future economy and society. And I am far from alone in believing that President Obama’s FY2012 budget proposal mostly evades the problem. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s recently released analysis, his proposal wouldn’t reduce the annual deficit below 4 percent of GDP, and the debt held by the public would double from $10.4 trillion to $20.8 trillion, nearly 90 percent of our GDP. That’s an outcome almost no one wants. To avoid it, we need to change course.
In these circumstances, you might imagine that I would welcome the budget plan House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan released on Tuesday. I do not, because it spurns the only possible framework for an adult conversation between the political parties that could lead over time to a long-term fiscal agreement. We don’t have to speculate about the shape of that agreement. We saw one version of it in the report of the Bowles-Simpson commission and another in the report of the Domenici-Rivlin commission. We may well see a third if the bipartisan Senate “Gang of Six” can coalesce around an agreement. (Full disclosure: Maya McGuineas, the head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and I put out a fourth version last fall.)
By contrast, the Ryan budget represents the victory of the Tea Party mentality over mainstream conservatism within the Republican Party. It illustrates the inevitable and draconian consequences of a fiscal policy that excludes net tax increases and holds federal government spending to its historic postwar average. “Draconian” is more than the adjective du jour; it is the literal truth. CBO estimates that under Ryan’s proposal, the portion of the federal budget not devoted to mandatory health programs, Social Security, or interest on the debt would decline from 12 percent in 2010 to 6 percent in 2022 to 31/2 percent by 2050. Does anyone think this is serious? Does anyone think this will happen? How many people–really, deep down–think it should?
There is an alternative approach that makes much more sense–economically, socially, and politically. Bipartisan discussions have converged on the objective of holding public debt to around 60 percent of GDP in 2020 through a balanced menu of spending cuts and revenue increases. While there are compelling economic reasons for not allowing the debt to rise as far as our current course would take it, only ideology requires it to disappear altogether. Nor is it necessary to hold federal spending to its historical level: All other things equal, the aging of the population and the rise in medical costs (even if slowed, as it should be, from the current rate) would suggest a somewhat higher level. The Galston-McGuineas proposal would hold spending to about 22 percent of GDP, higher than the postwar average but much lower than what the status quo would produce. Other bipartisan plans have ended up in roughly the same place.
But that’s the point: The Ryan plan is not bipartisan. (Given how skittishly House Republicans reacted to Ryan’s “Roadmap” last year, it remains to be seen whether it’s even mono-partisan.) If it’s the GOP’s best and final offer, it will be a conversation-stopper. It will be interesting to see how many contenders for the Republican presidential nomination calculate that they have no chance of winning the nomination of a Tea Party-dominated primary electorate unless they endorse the Ryan plan. One thing is pretty clear: Any Republican presidential candidate who embraces this plan will have committed general election suicide.
Ryan’s plan has one incontestable virtue: It recognizes, as do many analysts outside the conservative fold, that health care costs lie at the heart of our long-term fiscal problems. But the question is what to do about them. Turning Medicaid into a block grant to the states–a key Ryan proposal–is a genuinely bad idea, because it will lead inevitably to cutbacks in care for low-income people who have nowhere else to turn, contradicting Ryan’s own pledge of a “secure safety net.” Under his proposal, CBO estimates, federal spending for Medicaid would be 35 percent lower in 2022 and 49 percent lower in 2030 than currently projected. What are the odds that hard-pressed states could pick up the slack? And if not, how many poor children would go without without health care? How many elderly Americans without personal resources would go without decent nursing homes?

Read more…

So the federal government didn’t shut down, and the appropriations deal that was cut disappointed many Tea Party types (particularly those focused on defunding family planning) and probably even more progressives, with the latter being particularly upset by White House boasting over the level of spending cuts involved.
But just about everyone understands the bigger fight over the long-term budget is a much bigger deal, with the possibility of a rejection of a public debt limit increase being the hand grenade Tea Party allies are threatening to unpin.
This is the point at which tactical retreats by Democrats will stop making much sense. And for that reason, there is already heavy grumbling among Democrats about reports the White House is going to soon release plans for a deficit reduction strategy that includes “entitlement reform.”
The key thing to watch for is whether the administration consistently links changes in entitlement programs (sure to fall far short of the kind of toxic “reforms” being proposed by Paul Ryan) to tax increases for the wealthy. So long as they do that, and Republicans continue to oppose revenue increases as a theological matter, then talk of “betrayal” or “surrender” is simply wrong. Sure, many progressives prefer a different strategy based on out-front, unambiguous opposition to any change in entitlements. But that’s not the same as asserting that anything less is no strategy at all.

As you may have heard, the House passed a resolution yesterday extending funding for the federal government for another week, but with an immediate $12 billion cut (annualized, that would be some very serious money). The maneuver was universally interpreted as a meaningless gesture (guaranteed to die in the Senate) aimed at influencing how a government shutdown would be interepreted.
But without much attention, five House Republicans voted against the CR. Of those five, two are likely Republican presidential candidates, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul. And a third, Steve King, is considered an extremely powerful poohbah with respect to next year’s Iowa Caucuses.
King and Bachmann, who are very close allies in all things wingnutty, had publicly pledged to vote against any appropriations measure that did not kill off funding–even non-appropriated mandatory funding–to implement health reform. And Ron Paul votes against appropriations bills routinely.
But it’s a significant reminder that the logic of the Republican nomination campaign trail is different from the logic of even a remarkably conservative House GOP. You really can’t get too conservative in preparing to appeal to the hard-core party faithful at the ballot box.

With a government shutdown tonight now pretty likely, it’s as good a time as any to consider how Americans may react: not to a theoretical event, but to the real thing.
Yesterday Nate Silver had an important post on that subject, based in no small part on surveys showing that Americans are not thinking about politics much at all right now, and will experience a government shutdown as a nasty shock:

Washington is a political town 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, and the hamster wheel keeps turning even when the nation’s attention is focused somewhere else. When the public is less engaged with day-to-day politics, Washington acts as even more of an echo chamber, and politicians may conflate winning the support of elites with popular opinion.
This is mostly a warning, I suppose, to Paul D. Ryan and the Republicans. His proposed budget for 2012 includes a number of politically risky changes, including to entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
Mr. Ryan is probably not feeling that opposition in a visceral way yet — most voters don’t know who he is, let alone what his budget says. (Most voters don’t even know that Republicans control the House but not the Senate.) But the further Mr. Ryan and the Republicans take this proposal, the greater the risk of a backlash.
In particular, most voters are not expecting a shutdown, so if one were to occur, the political winds could go from being nearly still to gale-force in a hurry.

And those winds will not necessarily be driven by the sorts of micro-tweaks in political messaging coming out of Washington today, with both parties trying to deflect blame based on spinning every development.
The big picture this week is that Republicans, with the Tea Party folk howling at their back, are pushing big changes in the role of government in national life, including elimination of Medicare and Medicaid as they’ve traditionally operated. Democrats are resisting, though not that loudly. The government is shutting down over it all.
If I were a Republican, I would be very nervous about how this is going to play out, not in the news media but among Americans who have not been following any of the back-and-forth at all.

As policy wonks begin to stare more intensely at Paul Ryan’s budget “blueprint,” it becomes more obvious all the time that he’s aiming more at conservative policy prescriptions than at any sort of fiscal discipline. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t be insisting on yet another tax cut for high earners (and for corporations), and a really big one at that.
Meanwhile, the claim that Republicans are risking a government shutdown because they are so concerned about levels of “government spending” is looking threadbare, too. At this point, it’s all about the appropriations riders, and mostly about killing off federal funding for family planning and for environmental protection.
Next time you read that the “Tea Party” is forcing John Boehner to go to the mats for “more cuts,” you should mentally add: “to programs and policies right-wingers don’t like.” It wasn’t about the money in Wisconsin, isn’t about the money with the long-term budget, and isn’t about the money on appropriations, either. When it is about the money, maybe we can talk, but for now, it’s just an effort to use fiscal concerns to take the country back to the 1960s or earlier.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
There are so many unknowns to bedevil any poor pundit trying to call the 2012 Republican nomination. For starters, we still don’t know for sure who’s going to run. We also don’t know how the candidates will respond to the pressures of a campaign cycle dominated by new campaign-finance standards and loaded with countless opportunities for gaffes. And here’s another crucial variable that rarely gets mentioned, which could actually be fundamental in determining whether the race becomes a drawn-out slugfest between Mitt Romney and an anti-Romney, or something resembling John Kerry’s quick 2004 victory over Howard Dean, or a savage coup for someone like Michele Bachmann: We don’t yet know when, and in what states, the primary contest will be decided.
Political junkies sometimes act as though the primary and caucus calendar came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets. We are deeply accustomed to the rituals of Iowa and New Hampshire, where candidates hug babies in the cold hoping to make a good first impression and eager young activists pile into tour buses, having long prepared for “the presidential.” Yet those states are only the beginning, and the calendar is in fact a complex, ever-shifting amalgam in the hands of largely uncoordinated state legislators and local party officials. Every election cycle, the sequence and timing–and thus the opportunities and pitfalls for different candidates–has changed.
This election, the schedule is completely in flux. At the beginning of both the 2008 and 2012 cycles, the national parties actually made a serious effort to impose some order on the nominating calendar, in no small part to limit the phenomenon of “frontloading,” whereby every state has an incentive to schedule its vote earlier in order to gain more clout. In response to complaints (particularly among Democrats) that the old Iowa-New Hampshire duopoly wasn’t a representative sample, two other states, Nevada and South Carolina, were let under the velvet rope to hold officially sanctioned early contests. But the limited ability of national parties to control the states was evidenced by the Florida and Michigan fiascos of 2008, in which defiant interlopers very nearly succeeded in pushing the first event in Iowa back into 2007, and posed an uncomfortable challenge to national leaders reluctant to punish them with a loss of delegates.
Now, both parties have worked together on a coordinated calendar that tries to confirm the Iowa/New Hampshire/Nevada/South Carolina events as privileged; pushes them forward into February; and banishes the other states beyond a March 1 barrier. When these rules were adopted, they required 35 states, which were crowding into February if not January, to move their primary or caucus dates forward. And, notably, the Republicans added an additional inducement to later nominating events by limiting winner-take-all delegate awards, which enhance a state’s clout, to primaries or caucuses held after April 1.
But even as most states worked dutifully to comply with the new rules, bad-boy Florida acted out again, with Republican legislators threatening to leave the primary date at January 31–the day before the Iowa caucus–a maneuver sure to blow up the entire carefully arranged schedule, driving the “privileged four” early states to push their contests even further forward and expose themselves, along with Florida, to sanctions for defying the ordained calendar. Renewed pressures for “frontloading” could also tempt other states to sneak forward into forbidden territory. In saber-rattling typical of the jockeying for calendar position, the chairmen of the Iowa and South Carolina Republican Party have called on the RNC to move the 2012 National Convention from Tampa to some more law-abiding site.
Yet, adding to the confusion, there is another dynamic pushing in the exact opposite direction. Even as some states keep the frontloading pressure up, others are trying to schedule their contests very late, often because constrained budgets make it inadvisable to maintain separate presidential and state-local primaries. Texas is looking at a consolidated primary in late March or early April, and California may move all the way to June (where it was for many years). The unchallenged expert on all these complex dynamics, Davidson College’s Josh Putnam, explains at his amazingly focused site, Frontloading HQ:

If Texas were to move back [to late March or April] and California to June, it would fundamentally reshape the delegate calculus in the Republican nomination race. The point at which one candidate could surpass the 50% plus one delegate level would shift back significantly as a result and potentially shift back the point at which the nomination is settled in the process. It would also make Florida a much more attractive early calendar prize. As an aside, if the Texas primary is moved back to April the Republican Party in the state to keep the winner-take-all elements they have maintained in terms of delegate allocation in the post-reform era.

So how will these two cross-pressures ultimately sort out the field, and which candidates stand to benefit or lose under different likely scenarios? For one thing, the start-date in Iowa is more than a bit important to candidates in a field that has already been slow to emerge. You don’t want to be caught putting together your caucus organization in the autumn of 2011 if the big event itself is immediately after the holidays, as it was in 2008. That’s particularly true if you are, say, Haley Barbour or Mitch Daniels, competing with candidates who already started lining up highly motivated religious conservatives for the caucus back in March.
More generally, it’s thought that a heavily frontloaded calendar makes a relatively quick knockout victory–like those of Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and Democrat John Kerry in 2004–more likely, while an extended calendar favors candidates with the money and hard-core support to survive early losses and win by attrition, particularly if the early winners cannot mathematically win a majority of delegates until late March or April. The 2008 Democratic contest, which featured not one but two equally matched candidates with that kind of money and support, is unlikely to be replicated any time soon, and it’s worth noting that Obama might have wrapped up the nomination very early if he had won just a few thousand more votes in New Hampshire.

Read more…

Those who are wondering about the effects of the latest wave of Republican union-busting on union voters should read Alan I. Abramowitz’s column at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Abramowitz, a member of the TDS Advisory Board and author of “The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization and American Democracy,” provides an informative analysis of union members’ recent voting patterns and party i.d. data.
Acknowledging that unions are influential because of the money and turnout manpower they provide for Democrats, Abramowitz then presents data demonstrating that union influence as a voting block is small and declining: “In 1952, 28% of voters were members of union households; in 2008, only 13% of voters were members of union households.” In terms of party identification, he explains:

…Attachment to the Democratic Party among voters in union households peaked in the 1960s. At that time, 69% of union voters identified with the Democratic Party compared with 51% of non-union voters. By the first decade of the 21st century, however, Democratic identification among union voters had fallen to 58%compared with 48% among non-union voters. While union voters remained considerably more attached to the Democratic Party than non-union voters, the gap between the two groups had shrunk considerably due mainly to declining Democratic identification among union voters.

Breaking it down by race, church attendance and marital status, Abramowitz presents data in charts and tables and adds,

The decline in Democratic identification since the 1960s has been much greater among some types of union voters than among others, however. Among African-Americans, who have gone from 10% of union voters in the 1960s to 13% today, there has been no decline in Democratic identification. Between 89% and 93% of African-American union voters identified with the Democratic Party throughout this time period. Among white union voters, however, Democratic identification fell from 66% in the ’60s to 51% in the 2000s. Moreover, the decline in Democratic identification among white union voters has been greatest among socially conservative groups such as regular churchgoers and married men. Among regular churchgoers, Democratic identification fell from 67% in the ’60s to 40% in the 2000s and, among married men, Democratic identification fell from 68% in the ’60s to 44% in the 2000s.
…Evidence from the 2008 National Exit Poll indicates that even in an election in which the economy was the dominant issue, both church attendance and gun ownership exerted a substantially stronger influence than union membership on candidate preference among white voters. It remains to be seen whether an increase in the salience of issues affecting unions such as the collective bargaining rights of public employees will alter this pattern in 2012.

Abramowitz’s findings may be discouraging to Democrats, but he leaves open the possibility that the attacks on collective bargaining rights could sway union voters to support Dems in greater numbers. In addition, unions may be poised for a new era of growth, if only because we may be approaching the point at which millions of workers begin to realize that unions provide the best hope for job security, decent wages and benefits.

As we are all debating the significance of Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, the heretical Republican David Frum offers a very interesting perspective:

If the plan is not a real-world budget proposal, not an electioneering document, not a negotiating position — then what is it?
Answer: The Ryan plan is a Republican “memo to me” — an attempt by a party emerging from a troubled history to answer the question, “Who are we?” The answer is not aimed at the general public, but at Republicans themselves.
It goes like this: “Perhaps we used to be the people who introduced Medicare Part D. No longer. We have rediscovered our identity as the people who shrink government, not the people who expand it. Here is the proof.”
This “speaking to ourselves” mission explains many things about the plan that are otherwise puzzling.
■Why are there no revenue enhancements of any kind — not even fees or excise taxes that have no negative impact on incentives or savings?
■Why is Medicare protected in its existing form for a decade while the changes to Medicaid go into effect immediately?
■Why is Social Security exempted entirely?
■Why is agriculture treated so lightly — $30 billion in savings over 10 years, all of them (interestingly) to be decided by the Agriculture Committee, a unique concession by a Budget Committee otherwise determined to centralize decision-making?
Pose these questions and the answers become obvious:
These days, Americans over 55 vote heavily Republican. Under-55s lean Democratic, under-30s overwhelmingly so. (That’s the reverse, by the way, of the situation that prevailed as recently as the 1980s). Farmers vote Republican. Medicaid recipients do not. The deficit grows because the deficit reduction plan includes a big additional tax cut to upper-income taxpayers. And so on.

Frum’s characterization of the Ryan proposal as a reassurance of the GOP’s right-wing base is persuasive, but does leave a fairly obvious question: why do Republicans consider it necessary to share this “memo to me” with the rest of the country? You get the sense that hard-core conservatives will only trust the Republican Party if it makes its covenant marriage with the Right a matter of public record. But that public record won’t fare well when compared with the later argument that Republicans are mild-mannered folk who just want to rein in the excesses of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

In my last post I speculated that all the publicity surrounding Paul Ryan’s budget proposal was going to heavily influence public perceptions of responsibility for the technically unrelated but thematically indistinguishable battle over current-year appropriations that seems headed towards a government shutdown. Basically, conservatives haven’t been able to curb their enthusiasm for Ryan’s radical proposal, so they are inadvertently helping Democrats (who frankly could use the help) in making the “shutdown” argument revolve around something tangible and scary: Ryan’s assault on Medicare and Medicaid.
There’s a straw in the wind in Washington today that shows how Republicans may be losing control of the spin over the appropriations battle. At a Tea Party rally aimed at keeping up the pressure for deeper spending cuts, this interchange transpired, as reported by TPM’s Ryan J. Reilly:

Minutes after the crowd that was assembled at an Americans for Prosperity-backed Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill on Wednesday broke out into chants of “shut it down,” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) claimed that the Tea Party doesn’t want the government to shut down and that Democrats would unfairly blame the movement if it did.
“They want to blame it on you,” Bachmann said. But there was a large part of the crowd willing to step up and take the blame.

So TV viewers tonight are going to see Republicans ecstatic about Ryan’s radical budget and Tea Partiers–despite the tips-from-the-coach offered by Bachmann–chanting for a government shutdown. Sure, most rank-and-file Republicans will see nothing wrong with this scenario, but elsewhere, the public is likely to deduce that the “savings” congressional GOPers are demanding are about something more fundamental than subsidies for Big Bird or the exact level of cuts.

There’s no actual connection between the release of a draft budget resolution by Rep. Paul Ryan yesterday, and what appears to be a stalemate in negotiations over a short-term appropriations measure, that could trigger a partial shutdown of the federal government.
But you have to wonder, given all the talk from Republicans about Ryan’s incredible boldness and courage, and from Democrats about the dire consequences of what he is proposing, if the public is going to make a connection on its own. As Mark Blumenthal explains at Pollster today, polls show a very volatile situation in terms of the “blame” assigned if the government shuts down. Self-identified Democrats are much more supportive of a compromise by their side than are Republicans. But the perception that Republicans have introduced a new, radical note in the “budget” negotiations (which is how most media have described the appropriations battle) could influence the reactions of both self-identified Democrats and independents in the direction of anger towards the GOP for upsetting a delicate situation.
We’ll soon see how it plays out, but it is worth remembering that most folks make little or no distinction between short-term and long-term budget fights, and have every reason to figure that Paul Ryan is leading Republicans into a confrontation with Democrats over his aspirations to end Medicare and Medicaid as we’ve know them.