It’s not normally a great thing when the military assumes power anywhere, and many perils undoubtedly face those struggling for secular democracy in Egypt. But it’s impossible not to share the joy of those who brought down Hosni Mubarak’s regime with simple demands for freedom and justice, and their hopes the Egyptian military will now honor its commitment to hold genuinely free elections.
American observers have by and large not been distinguished by a great deal of foresight or imagination in reacting to the events in Egypt. But I do hope those (mostly conservatives) who have been shedding tears for Mubarak and flatly stating that a “stable” pro-American regime is by definition superior to whatever democracy might create feel a little shame today.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
When President Obama sends his latest budget proposal to Congress on Valentine’s Day, how will we know whether he is floating a serious proposal or just playing politics? I’ve written a guide to help TNR’s readers figure it out.
In its latest long-term budget and economic estimates, the CBO looks at our fiscal future in two different ways. Its “baseline” budget assumes that current law does not change. Under that scenario, the deficit declines to about 3 percent of GDP by mid-decade and remains there until the end of the ten-year budget window. Debt held by the public rises from $10.4 trillion to $18.3 trillion, net interest payments increase from $225 billion in 2011 to almost $800 billion in 2011, and debt held by the public reaches 77 percent, the highest level since the end of the Truman administration.
And that’s the good news–too good to be probable, in fact. It presupposes steady growth without a recession between now and 2021, a longer uninterrupted period of growth than we have ever experienced. Moreover, in following current law, as it is required to do in constructing its baseline, the CBO assumed that all the Bush tax cuts expire in 2012, that the alternative minimum tax would expand to hit many more households than ever before, and that sharp reductions in Medicare payment rates for doctors take effect at the end of 2011. For those assumptions to come true, Congress would have to make decisions that it has steadfastly rejected for many years, and Obama would have to abandon his pledge not to raise taxes for families with annual incomes below $250,000.
The CBO’s second projection uses more realistic assumptions. It forecasts that the deficit would average more than 6 percent of GDP over the next decade, and debt held by the public would skyrocket by $12 trillion to 97 percent of GDP, a level that few economists contemplate with equanimity. This prospect, not current law, defines our real baseline for the next decade. And it gets much worse in the decade after that. It has become a cliché to suggest that we are on an “unsustainable” course. It is also the truth.
This framework gives us a metric for evaluating the claims and counter-claims, proposals and counter-proposals, with which we are about to be deluged. It is expected, for example, that the president’s budget will propose a five-year freeze on non-security related discretionary spending, which senior officials estimate would reduce the deficit by about $400 billion over the next decade. As they say, that’s real money. But it’s only 6 percent of the total baseline deficit we’ll incur during that period, and only 3 percent of the deficit projected using more realistic assumptions.
Is the White House taking these projections seriously? As OMB director Jack Lew said last week in an op-ed titled “The Easy Cuts Are Behind Us,” because non-security discretionary spending amounts to little more than a tenth of the federal budget, “cutting solely in this area will never be enough to address our long-term fiscal challenges.” When the administration releases its FY2012 budget, we’ll be able to compare it to these numbers and see if Obama’s priorities tackle this basic truth.
The signs so far are not encouraging. Based on what Lew said and on other straws in the wind, it seems unlikely that Obama will offer concrete and significant proposals–to raise revenues (even in the context of fundamental tax reform), to make more than marginal cuts in security-related spending, or to begin the task of adjusting entitlement spending to reality. If so, he will have missed an opportunity to exert truly transformative leadership. And if he doesn’t lead, Congress won’t do it for him.
The conventional wisdom is that proposing such drastic cuts would be horrible politics because the American people are simply not prepared to entertain, let alone accept, the kind of measures needed to put the country on a sustainable course. There’s a lot of solid survey evidence to back up that belief. But as the president contemplates his options in the fiscal debate that begins next week, he might want to consider the findings of another survey released by Gallup on Wednesday. Only 27 percent of the people approve of his handling of the federal budget deficit, by far his lowest grade in any sector of public policy. Worse, only 19 percent of Independents approve. Obama may be hoping that these unaffiliated voters, 52 percent of whom supported him in 2008, don’t care very much about fiscal issues. Pretty soon, we’ll find out.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
TO: GENE SPERLING
FROM: BILL GALSTON
SUBJ: INFRASTRUCTURE
It feels like a lifetime ago that you and I shared a windowless broomcloset in the West Wing. I assume your digs are more spacious and better illuminated now. In any event, congratulations on returning to a position you occupied with such distinction in the Clinton administration.
The purpose of this memo is to inform you–in case you don’t already know–that hell has frozen over: Late last week, Tom Donohue and Rich Trumka issued a joint statement applauding the president’s call for increased infrastructure investment and urging both Democrats and Republicans to support it. If there was ever a cause whose time has come, this is it. It has to be done big, and it has to be done right–big because it’s not just another program, but a paradigm change; right because it won’t work if it sinks into the morass of the congressional appropriations process, out-of-date formula allocations, and logrolling project selections. Let me explain–briefly, because I know how busy you are right now.
Despite short-term gains, the consumer-driven model of growth on which we’ve relied for decades has hit a wall. We need to shift from spending to saving, from consumption to production, and from deficit-financed imports to aggressive export promotion. We need to invest in the basic building blocks of productivity. And we need to focus on generating good jobs that can’t be exported.
Infrastructure investment can contribute to all these objectives, and the need is great. Because we’ve neglected our infrastructure for more than three decades, the best estimates suggest that we face an accumulated gap–between what we should have invested and what we actually did–of more than $2 trillion. Anyone who has traveled outside the United States in recent years knows that we no longer have a world-class infrastructure. And time-wasting, productivity-sapping bottlenecks are building up, especially in transportation.
During his 2008 campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama advanced an innovative idea to deal with this situation: a national infrastructure bank, which would mobilize private money to finance large, worthy, long-term infrastructure projects that are capable of turning a profit in the free market. In his 2011 State of the Union, President Obama reopened this issue without specifically mentioning the bank. Now is the time to flesh it out and hit it hard.
By this I mean two things. First, get beyond what Hollywood calls the elevator speech, and send Congress a framework for actual legislation. Bills introduced in both the House and Senate within the past few years could serve as a useful baseline. And there are lots of outside experts who would be willing to help out if needed.
Second, specifically include the infrastructure bank in the president’s forthcoming FY2012 budget proposal. You know as well as anyone that if it’s not in the budget, it’s not real. (Remember welfare reform in President Clinton’s first budget proposal?)
Of course, seed money for the bank is going to cost something. And given the rising pressure for fiscal restraint, you’re not in a position to significantly increase spending in order to stand it up. So consider redirecting the necessary amounts from existing infrastructure projects, which neither leverage private capital nor endure the rigors of a market test. As you do, make it clear that the bank would be a public-private partnership, not a government-run enterprise, and would enjoy neither explicit nor implicit public guarantees. If investors aren’t willing to assume market risks, the projects in question shouldn’t be funded: period, full stop.
A final thought. Programmatic changes are sand castles on the beach, easily washed away when the tide changes. All the heavy lifting you did in the 1990s to turn deficits into surpluses went for naught as soon as a new administration took power. As FDR understood, institutional innovations fortify long-term policies against short-term political shifts–and all of the investments President Obama has already made in the economy could easily be defunded. An infrastructure bank, however, would institutionalize the development of public goods in a way that simply passing a budget cannot. And it would be large first step toward the reformed governance that President Obama has so forcefully advocated.

Watching the effusion of U.S. commentary on the crisis in Egypt, it’s sometimes hard to tell where various pols and pundits are coming from, and that’s particularly true of conservatives, who seem conflicted, collectively and sometimes individually, on the meaning of it all.
But some conservatives have adopted the less-than-intuitive and not very popular position of defending Mubarek, or at least attacking his enemies–most notably Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei.
To sort out the sheep from the goats, check out Justin Elliot’s slide show at Salon examining Mubarak’s most prominent American defenders. They aren’t all conservatives, but the group does include two men (Mike Huckabee and John Bolton) mulling over campaigns for the Republican nomination for president, and another who is the country’s best-known conservative voice (Rush Limbaugh).
Then take a look at Matt Yglesias’ piece for The American Prospect that explains the special disdain many U.S. conservatives have for EdBaradei thanks to his position as a weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency during the buildup to the Iraq War. His team famously didn’t find evidence of nuclear weapons, because there weren’t any. As Yglesias puts it: “Many on the right can’t stand ElBaradei because he committed a cardinal sin: He was right about Iraq.”
It’s not unusual for people to bring old perceptions and grudges to the table when trying to interpret startling new developments in distant lands. But before listening to them, you should know about the ax they are about to grind.

President Obama’s memorial speech in Tucson has established a solid foundation for the creation of new social norms to reduce the role of violent extremist political rhetoric in American public life. But our politics will quickly revert to its previous state if political commentators and politicians cannot define a clear and reasonably unambiguous “line in the sand” between what should be considered acceptable in political discourse and what should be viewed as unacceptable.
One social norm that is already emerging is that specific threats of violence are simply no longer acceptable. It is unlikely that we will hear overtly threatening remarks again anytime soon about “meeting census surveyors at the door with shotguns”, or “watering the tree of liberty with blood” in mainstream political discourse. Nor are we likely to see men appearing at political rallies with assault weapons strapped to their backs without there being serious and strenuous outcry. Among elected officials there will for some time probably even be a self-imposed ban on “humorous” remarks about “my close friends Smith and Wesson” or coy references to “second amendment remedies” that imply the threat of using guns and violence to achieve political goals.
This in itself will certainly be healthy, but it will not prevent the gradual (or not so gradual) return of the kind of rhetoric that portrays politics as a desperate, life or death struggle between literally evil and subversive, “un-American opponents of freedom and liberty” on the one hand and “heroic patriots” standing against them on the other (in the comparable left-wing rhetorical framework the dichotomy is between embattled “defenders of traditional democratic values” and “racist, right-wing crypto-fascists”). Simply creating a norm against clear threats of violence will not by itself reverse the broader “climate of hate” or “lack of civility” in politics.
Yet neither a “climate of hate” nor a “lack of civility” are sufficiently precise to create a clear new social norm. In fact, because of this imprecision, they are already being subject to criticism and even ridicule on the grounds that “politics is necessarily passionate” and “metaphors don’t kill people, people kill people.” A number of conservative commentators have dismissed the notions as typical nanny-state political correctness run amok.
As a result, we need a standard that reasonable people can consistently apply and insist upon — one that distinguishes what is acceptable from what is not acceptable.
Politics as Warfare, Political Opponents as “Enemies”
For some time TDS has been arguing that there are two key concepts that lie at the root of both political extremism and the climate of violence: The notions of politics as warfare and political opponents as enemies. This is how a TDS Strategy Memo put it last year:

For most Americans, the most critical — and in fact the defining — characteristic of “political extremism” – whether left or right – is the approval of violence as a means to achieve political goals. Opinions on issues, no matter how “extreme” or irrational they may be do not by themselves necessarily make a person a dangerous “extremist.” Whether opinions are crackpot (e.g. abolish all paper money) or repulsive (e.g. non-whites should be treated as sub-humans) extreme political opinions are not in and of themselves incitements to or justifications for violence.
As a result, there is actually one very clear and unambiguous way to define a genuinely “extremist” political ideology — it is any ideology that justifies or incites violence.
Underlying all extremist political ideologies are two central ideas – the vision of “politics as warfare” and “political opponents as enemies.” While these notions are widely used as metaphors, political extremists mean them in an entirely concrete and operational way. It is a view that is codified in the belief that political opponents are literally “enemies” who must be crushed rather than fellow Americans with different opinions with whom negotiated political compromises must be sought.

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This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Warning label: This article will make civil libertarians unhappy. Read at your own risk.
We are embroiled, alas, in a politicized argument about the slaughter in Tucson. While most of the charges being flung about rest on a scanty basis (at best), the most important and least contestable facts are getting lost: Jared Lee Loughner was mentally ill when he pulled the trigger, there were multiple signs of his descent into delusion over the past year, and no one did very much about it.
To be sure, the authorities at Pima Community College finally suspended him after five contacts with the police and conditioned his return on clearance from a mental health professional. Police delivered the letter of suspension to Loughner’s home and talked with him and his parents. We do not know what happened next. Perhaps his parents tried to persuade him to seek help and were rebuffed; perhaps they were reluctant to have further involvement with the authorities; perhaps they were too confused or conflicted even to try. In any event, there’s no evidence that he did receive treatment, and according to college officials, he did not attempt to return to school.
The bottom line: No one was legally responsible for taking the next step, and they might well have hit a wall if they had. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the director of the Urgent Psychiatric Care Center in Phoenix said that in the absence of specific threats, parents or authorities might well have failed to meet the tests for involuntary commitment under Arizona law, which resembles laws in most states as well. Liz Rebensdorf, a retired psychologist and an official in the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, said, “Unless there’s a crime committed, it’s very difficult to force someone into treatment.” For someone delusional who’s bent on mayhem, that’s too long to wait.
The story repeats itself, over and over. A single narrative connects the Unabomber, George Wallace shooter Arthur Bremmer, Reagan shooter John Hinckley, the Virginia Tech shooter–all mentally disturbed loners who needed to be committed and treated against their will. But the law would not permit it.
Starting in the 1970s, civil libertarians worked to eliminate involuntary commitment or, that failing, to raise the standards and burden of proof so high that few individuals would meet it. Important decisions by the Supreme Court and subordinate courts gave individuals new protections, including a constitutional right to refuse psychotropic medication. A few states have tried to push back in constitutionally acceptable ways, but efforts such as California’s Laura’s Law, designed to make it easier to force patients to take medication, have been stymied by civil rights concerns and lack of funding.
We need legal reform to shift the balance in favor of protecting the community, especially against those who are armed and deranged. This means two changes in particular. First, those who acquire credible evidence of an individual’s mental disturbance should be required to report it to both law enforcement authorities and the courts, and the legal jeopardy for failing to do so should be tough enough to ensure compliance. Parents, school authorities, and other involved parties should be made to understand that they have responsibilities to the community as a whole, not just to family members or to their own student body. While embarrassment and reluctance to get involved are understandable sentiments, they should not be allowed to drive conduct when the public safety is at stake. We’re not necessarily cramming these measures down anyone’s throat: I’ve known many families who were desperate for laws that would help them do what they knew needed to be done for their adult children, and many college administrators who felt that their hands were tied.
Second, the law should no longer require, as a condition of involuntary incarceration, that seriously disturbed individuals constitute a danger to themselves or others, let alone a “substantial” or “imminent” danger, as many states do. A delusional loss of contact with reality should be enough to trigger a process that starts with multiple offers of voluntary assistance and ends with involuntary treatment, including commitment if necessary. How many more mass murders and assassinations do we need before we understand that the rights-based hyper-individualism of our laws governing mental illness is endangering the security of our community and the functioning of our democracy?

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
President Obama has an opportunity on his hands. Now that he’s cut a grand tax-cut bargain with Republicans, the time is ripe–from both a policy and a political standpoint–to shift toward a comprehensive program of fiscal stabilization and economic growth, integrated into a narrative of American success in the twenty-first century. He should do so during next year’s State of the Union address, which, if used correctly, may well be the pivotal speech of the Obama presidency.
This is how the situation stands: Because of the tax deal, Congress no longer needs to worry about passing additional economic stimulus to boost job creation, since in tandem with the Fed’s $600 billion bond-purchase program, Obama’s agreement offers a substantial short-term injection of cash that could increase growth by 1 percent or more. There is now zero excuse for legislators to ignore the long-term budget problem and put off measures that would repair America’s economic competitiveness. Additionally, Obama has a political window in which to make substantial progress on those goals, because many of the necessary policies have at least some bipartisan support. The following is a point-by-point look at what he should say in January and at the policies he should pursue during the next two years.
Substantively, Obama’s new agenda should focus on two overriding objectives: Stabilizing our long-term budget situation, and laying the groundwork for sustainable economic growth. This is easier said than done, of course, but it’s possible to come up with some immediate proposals that would take us a long way toward success. Let’s start with the budget:
Discretionary Spending: First, as budget veterans predicted, the president’s early pledge to scrub the budget line-by-line has come to naught. There’s only one way to trim discretionary spending: Obama should propose multi-year caps or freezes, defended by rigorous budget procedures. To make this work politically, defense and domestic programs must be treated symmetrically. Starting no later than 2015, all foreign combat commitments should be fully paid for, with a war surtax if necessary.
Tax Reform: The most encouraging surprise of the past year has been the development of an emerging consensus on structural tax reform. Liberals accept the concept of broadening the base and lowering rates, while conservatives acknowledge that many tax preferences represent backdoor spending. Done right, tax reform–corporate as well as individual–can both accelerate growth and increase revenues. Obama should announce the goal of getting reform done before the end of the 112th Congress.
Social Security: While Social Security reform that stabilizes the program for the long-term would have virtually no impact on the budget over the next decade, getting it done would begin to restore confidence–now lacking abroad as well as here at home–that we are capable of governing ourselves. President George W. Bush’s failed 2005 effort made it clear that there is little support for changing the program’s basic structure. A consensus on a package of modest benefit and revenue adjustments is within reach–if Obama commits to it.
Medicare: Many budget-watchers will point out that is not mainly Social Security, but the astonishing explosion of Medicare costs that are at the heart of our long-term fiscal difficulties. They are absolutely right, but nonetheless, this is not a problem that Obama should attempt to solve during the next two years. There’s a reason for this: During that time period, there is no possibility of consensus. The president should frankly acknowledge that disagreement. During the 112th Congress, he could say, Democrats will be trying to promote–and the Republicans to prevent–the implementation of his health reform law. But at some point, the argument must end, and we must work together within some shared framework to foster coverage and quality while lowering costs.

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This item is by TDS contributor Lee Drutman, senior fellow and managing editor at the Progressive Policy Institute. It is cross-posted from ProgressiveFix.
As Democrats shift from licking their wounds to figuring out how to win back the House in 2012, the obvious question is: what will it take? Or at least, what will it take besides the obvious triumvirate of a solidly recovering economy, a healthy dose of Republican overreach, and a bit of luck?
Over the next several weeks, I’m going to be taking a closer look at the 66 seats (net 63) that Democrats lost, asking some questions about the character of these lost districts with the goal of putting a finer point on what Democrats need to pay attention to in order to get those seats back. In this post, I’m going to focus on the role of manufacturing, race, and education.
But first a quick look at the map: Democrats lost seats all over the country: 23 in the South, 20 in the Midwest, 15 in the Northeast, and eight in the West.
The bulk of post-election commentary has blamed the losses on the fact that the incumbent party almost always loses seats in a mid-term election and the fact that Democrats were being blamed for a bad economy.
But yet California, where unemployment is 12.4 percent, did not yield a single Republican pick-up (though California is famous for having very safe districts, so this may not be a fair test.). In Oregon, where unemployment is 10.5 percent, Democrats held the five (out of six) seats they maintain.
Manufacturing
One industry that has been hit particularly hard in the recession is manufacturing. Of course, the decline in manufacturing has been going on for a long time. In 1950, roughly three in ten U.S. employees worked in manufacturing. Today manufacturing jobs account for just 8.9 percent of U.S. nonfarm jobs. In the 2000s, manufacturing lost roughly one-third of its jobs, falling from 17.3 million people to 11.6 million people.
In most cases, these are jobs that are not coming back, leaving communities that depended on them demoralized and angry. How much of a factor was this in the 2010 elections?
Across the 66 Republican pick-up districts, manufacturing accounts for, on average, 11.9 percent of the jobs. That’s three full percentage points higher than the national average of 8.9 percent. In roughly three quarters (73 percent) of the districts Democrats lost, manufacturing accounted for more than the national average of 8.9 percent of the jobs.
Not surprisingly, this was most pronounced in the Midwest, where the 21 districts Republicans picked up averaged 14.4 percent of manufacturing jobs as a share of total non-farm employment. But it was also pronounced in the Northeast and the South. In both regions, manufacturing accounted for 11 percent of the jobs in the districts Democrats lost, two points above the national average. Only in the West did the districts the Democrats lost have less manufacturing than the national average, averaging only 6.9 percent of the economy. This was the region in which Democrats lost fewest seats – only nine.
To understand the potential importance of declining manufacturing as a key to the Democrats’ losses, consider Pennsylvania’s 11th District, which includes Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. Democrat Paul Kanjorski had held the seat since 1985, but was ousted by Lou Barletta by a 55-to-45 percent margin. The district gave Obama 57 percent of its vote, and was one of only nine Republican pick-up districts that voted for Kerry. Manufacturing accounts for 16.9 percent of jobs in the district.
Or Wisconsin’s 7th District (northwest and Central Wisconsin), where Republicans picked up a seat formerly held by long-time incumbent David Obey, and a district both Obama and Kerry carried as well. Manufacturing accounts for 17 percent of the jobs in the district. Likewise with the 17st District of Illinois (northwest Illinois) – held by a Democrat since 1983, went for both Kerry and Obama, and 14.3 percent of its jobs come from manufacturing.
Education and Race
Democrats also have a problem with non-college educated whites. This has been a long-standing challenge for Democrats. Many of these voters feel frustrated and left behind by economic changes related to the loss of manufacturing jobs and global competition. They don’t see Democrats as helping them out. They wonder why they can’t seem to get ahead, and they want answers and somebody to blame.

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This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
While tout Washington is furiously debating the deal between President Obama and the Republican congressional leadership, it’s time to look ahead. Assume that some form of the deal survives the cross-fire and is enacted into law. What then for the president?
There’s one thing we already know for sure: the agreement will light the fuse on a bomb timed to explode at the height of the 2012 presidential campaign. Unfortunately for Obama, taxation is an issue on which Republicans have long enjoyed an advantage in the court of public opinion, a situation not likely to change anytime soon. On the other hand, the president could not accept a permanent extension of all the Bush tax cuts without destroying the possibility of long-term deficit reduction.
There’s only one way out, which fortunately combines good policy with good politics. Obama should seize the initiative by moving comprehensive tax reform to the center of his agenda. He could argue–correctly, in my view–that the current tax code is far too complex, treats millions of average families unfairly, and constitutes an impediment to economic growth. Building on an emerging bipartisan consensus, he could go on to advocate a plan that broadens the base of the system while reducing rates–a formula that applies to both individual and corporate taxes. And he could challenge both parties to join with him to make a reformed code the law of the land during the 112th Congress.
So conceived and framed, tax reform serves both of the long-term goals–economic growth and fiscal restraint–that Obama must promote as the heart of his domestic agenda. Embracing it would enable him to move back on offense and to become the transformative leader he clearly wants to be. And if he places himself at the head of an initiative with substantial appeal across party lines, he could also begin to redeem the promise of a more cooperative, less confrontational politics that first brought him to national notice and helped him become president.
This is one of many reasons why the 2011 State of the Union address may well be the most important speech of Obama’s presidency. If he is able to chart a new course toward growth and fiscal sanity and back it with specifics–starting but not ending with tax reform–he will improve not only his own prospects, but the nation’s as well. If he does not–if the speech devolves into the kind of routine laundry list that Winston Churchill once dubbed a “themeless pudding”–the chances of gridlock and drift will rise, and so will the prospects of a return to unified Republican governance in 2013.
By the end of January, we’ll find up whether Obama and his advisors have been able to raise their game. The stakes could not be higher, and the time is short.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Back in March, Gallup found that while Americans named unemployment and the economy as the most immediate problems, they regarded the federal budget deficit as the most important future problem. Apparently the future is now. On the eve of the president’s deficit commission report, Gallup released a survey that asked a random sample of adults the following question:
If you had to choose, which of these would be the best approach for Congress and the president to take in dealing with the U.S. economy?
Here are the answers:
Reducing the deficit and debt 39
Increasing taxes on the wealthy 31
Cutting taxes 23
Increasing stimulus spending 5
And here is the partisan breakdown (Democrats, Republicans, Independents):
Reducing the deficit and debt 24 49 42
Increasing taxes on the wealthy 52 11 30
Cutting taxes 12 35 23
Increasing stimulus spending 9 3 4
Some points of interest:
* Support for additional stimulus has collapsed, even among Democrats.
* Of the general public’s top two choices, “reducing the deficit and debt” is rejected by three-quarters of Democrats, and “increasing taxes on the wealthy” by nine-tenths of Republicans.
* Independents track overall sentiment very closely.
The conventional wisdom is that Americans accept the goal of deficit reduction but not the steps needed to achieve it. That may turn out to be right. But Gallup found that fully 75 percent of Americans believe failing to address the costs of Medicare and Social Security would create major economic problems for the United States in the future. When asked what we should do about this, the responses were:
Cut benefits, not raise taxes 19
Raise taxes, not cut benefits 30
Combination of both benefit cuts and tax increases 46
There is, it seems, at least a public plurality in favor of the kind of approach that allegedly “elitist” and “out of touch” experts and commissions typically recommend.
I’m not–repeat, not–claiming that the people are always right. But the midterm election was a massive protest against a political system that seemed not to be paying attention to what the people were saying. Before the major parties decide to default to their entrenched preferences–upper-income tax cuts for Republicans, down-the-line defense of entitlements for Democrats–wouldn’t it be a good idea to try listening a bit more attentively?