The myth that the budget deficit and the national debt are the top concerns of Americans has suffered yet another major blow, as TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’:

In the latest CBS/New York Times poll, a plurality of 39 percent say the economy/jobs is the most important problem facing the country compared to just 15 percent who say the deficit/debt is the main problem.

Nor does the public buy the myth that “reducing the federal budget deficit is somehow going to solve the jobs problem,” notes Teixeira:

In the same poll a mere 29 percent think cutting the deficit will create jobs compared to 29 percent who believe a major reduction in the annual budget will actually cost jobs and 27 percent who think there will be an effect on jobs.

Let the conservatives rail on about deficits and debt. It appears that the party that keeps the focus on jobs will have the edge in 2012.

In case you’ve missed it (and their campaigns are so blessedly short it’s likely you did), the Canadians are holding a national election on Monday, and there’s a rare degree of intrigue as to what might happen. Until very recently, it appeared that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who have been operating a minority government (one without an actual majority in the House of Common–not that unusual a situation in Canada) since 2006, would finally gain a narrow majority of parliamentary seats. In Canada’s multi-party, first-past-the-post system, that would normally require about 40% of the popular vote. But now, another minority Tory government seems more likely, with the outside possibility of Harper losing power to a coalition of all the other parties.
The really interesting dynamic involves Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP), a social democratic party with close ties to the labor movement, which in some recent polls has surged into second place, past the center-left Liberals, long considered the country’s “natural” governing party. NDP chieftain Jack Layton (who is suffering from prostate cancer) seems to be the most popular of the party leaders, and the winner of both English- and French-language leader debates. NDP has been gaining strength in several parts of Canada, most notably in Quebec (usually dominated by the Liberals and the quasi-separatist Bloc Quebecois). If NDP’s surge holds up, Layton could become the official Leader of the Opposition, and under an unlikely but tantalizing scenario, Prime Minister in a coalition government involving NDP, the Liberals and the Bloc (the Green Party pulls a substantial vote in Canada–9% in 2008–but hold no seats in Parliament).
The issues in this election wouldn’t seem unfamiliar to Americans, but the context is quite different. The Canadian economy is in better shape than that of the U.S. (unemployment is 7.7%, not that bad by historical standards), and the fiscal situation much better: all the major parties promise a balanced federal budget within the next few years. The most remarkable difference is that no one serious would propose any sort of privatization of Canada’s single-payer health care system. Some have feared a majority Tory government might try to undermine legalized same-sex marriage, but Harper declared the matter “closed” after a solid vote confirming the policy in the House of Commons in 2006.
Early voting for this election has been up sharply, and the variety of possible outcomes should make for an interesting election day on Monday.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Three recent items–two surveys and a news article–illuminate the current state of our country’s fiscal debate. Taken together, their message is straightforward: The American people want the problem addressed now, they’re dissatisfied with the solutions proposed thus far, and everything depends on the Senate’s “Gang of Six.”
According to a Pew Research poll released April 26, 81 percent of the American people believe that “the federal budget deficit is a major problem that the country must address now.” Not only is this figure up 11 points in the past four months, but also it reflects a rare consensus across lines of ideology and partisanship. 89 percent of Republicans respond in the affirmative; so do 81 percent of Democrats and 79 percent of Independents. This is as close to unanimity on a major issue as our country ever gets.
While the people have issued clear marching orders to their elected representatives, they have little confidence that their voices will be heard or heeded. The same poll notes that only 31 percent believe that we’ll make significant progress toward deficit reduction in the next five years, down from 37 percent in December. The 50-point gap between the supermajority that wants the problem to be addressed seriously and the minority that thinks this will happen is a pretty good measure of the low level of confidence Americans now repose in their governing institution. If we get to the general election with unemployment still much too high and progress toward deficit reduction stalled, the public mood will be sour and explosive.
Why are people so dissatisfied with what the political system is offering up? A Gallup survey out April 27 shows that 43 percent prefer the Republican/Ryan plan for long-term deficit reduction to the Democratic alternative, while 44 percent prefer the Democratic/Obama plan to the Republican alternative. But they don’t much like either one. Asked about the Obama plan, 71 percent say that it doesn’t go far enough to fix the problem, and 62 percent fear that Democrats will use the deficit as an excuse to raise taxes. Asked about the Ryan plan, 66 percent are worried that it cuts Medicare too much, 64 percent that it would “take away needed protections for the poor and disadvantaged” and “protect the rich at the expense of everyone else.”
In the midst of such public dissatisfaction, the Senate’s “Gang of Six” has become the locus of all hopes for a compromise. The same day that the Gallup poll was made public, a Bloomberg article offered some insight into the Gang’s negotiations: Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that the group is considering a plan to cut $3 in federal spending for every $1 of revenue it raises. He suggested that it would involve spending cuts in every major budget category along with changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. And he expressed a sense of urgency: If the Gang cannot create a bipartisan plan around which responsible members of both parties can coalesce, however reluctantly, over the next two months, we may well be heading for a damaging train wreck over the debt ceiling.
In this murky situation, a few things are clear. First, the American people have grave doubts about what the parties have proposed. Second, neither party can get its way on its own. And third, the Senate plan under negotiation seems closer to center of gravity of public opinion than either House Republicans or the White House, and more responsive to the people’s reservations about the plans made public so far.
Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, another member of the Gang, said last Sunday that “The country can’t afford for us not to have an agreement.” He’s absolutely right. Not only would the collapse of the Gang’s efforts endanger our international fiscal standing this summer; it would virtually guarantee that no significant steps toward fiscal stability would occur until after the presidential election–at the earliest.
Amidst our hyper-polarized politics, it falls to the Senate to display reason and moderation. The senators may not welcome this responsibility, but they dare not shirk it. The Founders would not have been surprised.

Even as the struggle over the federal budget intensifies, and the Obama administration tries to avoid catastrophic damage to the economy if a debt limit increase is not approved, it’s important to note that a combination of Federal Reserve policy and Republican control of the U.S. House has completely ended any hope of short-term action to speed the recovery or help the unemployed. Here’s Ezra Klein’s sad summary after watching Ben Bernanke’s press conference yesterday:

This, then, is what the economic policymaking world looks like today: Congress has long since given up on further stimulus, and is arguing over how big its spending cuts should be in 2012 (in one of his most interesting answers, Bernanke said the long-term deficit was a top priority, but large, short-term spending cuts by Congress would force compensatory action from the Fed to protect the economy). The Federal Reserve has given up on doing more, and in June, will pull back to doing slightly less. And the recovery remains shaky, with first quarter GDP growth expected to come in under two percent and few signs that some dam of pent-up demand for workers is about to burst forth. In short? Sucks to be you, unemployed Americans.

Hard to argue with that.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
No later than the first year of the next presidential term, we’ll have to find a way of coming together around a plan to restore long-term fiscal sustainability. There are three principal impediments to agreement: the president’s health reform law; Medicare and Medicaid; and taxes. I don’t mean to suggest that other issues–such as defense and Social Security–are trivial, but only that the gaps on these issues seem easier to bridge.
Of the three most difficult issues, one–the health reform law–will have to wait until 2013, because it will be a focal point of the 2012 presidential campaign. Obama will defend it staunchly, while the Republican nominee will demand its repeal. (If Mitt Romney is his party’s candidate, it will be interesting to see how he frames the argument.) If Obama wins, the law will go into effect and become part of the fiscal baseline; if he loses, it probably won’t.
I’ll focus today on one of the remaining issues–Medicare–reserving the others for future columns. I’m leading off with it because I have some skin in the game: This January, I had the sobering experience of signing up for Medicare. (Note to fellow boomers: make sure you’ve set aside a good bottle of wine to get you through the period of mourning that follows.)
As I filled out my form, I began thinking about my situation. My wife and I are both professionals. While neither of us is paid lavishly, our combined income is enough to place us in the upper-middle class. For us, Medicare’s major advantage is guaranteed issue regardless of preexisting conditions. (And you don’t reach my age without accruing some.) If we had to pay the full actuarial cost of our insurance, we could. Yes, we’d probably have to make some adjustments elsewhere in our budget. But we’d still be more comfortable than most working Americans, even after we retire.
There’s an obvious rejoinder: Haven’t my wife and I already paid into the system for the benefits we’ll receive over the next two or three decades? Answer: Yes, but not enough. A few months ago, Eugene Steuerle and Stephanie Renanne of the Urban Institute put out a very useful summary, “Social Security and Medicare Taxes and Benefits Over a Lifetime,” calculated for different retirement cohorts. While I’m no methodologist, their assumptions seem straightforward and plausible. Applying them to our own case suggests that the value of my contributions falls short of the actuarial value of our benefits by at least $100,000. And if my wife and I were younger professionals scheduled to retire in 2030, the gap would be far greater.
So who’s going to make up the difference? Answer: today’s workers, many of whom are already struggling to raise their children, pay the mortgage, and save for college. Worse, workers as a share of the total population are declining. A recent analysis of BLS data showed that share declining in 2010 to only 45.3 percent, the lowest since 1983. Yes, part of that decline represents the effects of the Great Recession. But longer-term trends are also evident: our population is aging, the share of women working outside the home has plateaued, and men have been dropping out of the labor force for more than a quarter of a century. A generation ago, more than 80 percent of working-age men were employed. Today, that figure stands at 66.8 percent.
One of the large demographic developments of the past generation is the emergence of a mass upper-middle class, a new meritocracy of credentialed professionals whose family incomes reflect the compounding effects of assortive mating. While we are not rich, our lives differ quantitatively and qualitatively from those of today’s hard-pressed middle class. Our lives are rich with choices; theirs are driven mostly by necessity. It’s just not right for us to make their lives even harder. Nor is it sustainable. Over the next decade, our country can’t afford the tax cuts the Republicans insist on giving us. Nor can it afford to subsidize our retirement–certainly not to the extent of current law.
My fellow boomer-professionals, fiscal responsibility begins at home. Didn’t the young president who inspired so many of us fifty years ago have something to say about this? Are we still capable of responding?

If you thought that, surely by now Republicans would have a clue that screwing around with Medicare is an unpopular idea, you would be wrong. The House Republican budget bill cuts funding for Medicare and substitutes a fixed amount voucher that seniors would have to use to buy private health insurance. “To say this approach is unpopular is to considerably understate the case,” explains TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot‘:

First, take cutting Medicare. In a just-released Washington Post/ABC poll 78 percent opposed cutting spending on Medicare “to reduce the national debt,” including 65 percent who were strongly opposed. This compares to just 21 percent who favored cutting the program.

The voucher idea long-favored by conservatives’ fared even worse in the poll, notes Teixeira:

As for turning Medicare into a fixed amount voucher to be used to purchase private health insurance, 65 percent in the same poll prefer that the system remain the way it is. And that number rises to 84 percent when a follow-up query is posed stipulating that the value of the voucher would rise more slowly than the price of private health insurance (as the Congressional Budget Office projects will be the case).

As Teixeira concludes, “This can fairly be characterized as massive opposition.”

This being a serious political strategy e-rag, we try hard to avoid name-calling, since it never elevates dialogue about relevant issues. So, resisting that very difficult (in this case) temptation, I’ll try a little reverse psychology: Please Republicans don’t nominate that Donald Trump. We Dems are so scared of running against him. Trembling in our Birkenstocks, we are. As he said himself, “I’m the last person Obama wants to run against.”
OK, maybe you don’t buy that. How about a straight-up sincere appeal: Please Republicans, nominate Trump. We beg you. You know in your souls that his narcissistic personality captures the spirit of current GOP policies better than anyone. Go for the gusto! Let form follow function. We’ll even give you an edge, by telling you what video ad we will run against him. That’s right, you guessed it: His own “bragging birther” video clip, which is a tad nauseating to embed here, but you can see it at YouTube.
Yeah, we know. There’s no real chance he’s going to win the GOP nomination. It’s not only that he lacks the humility gene. His lightweight “policies” are all over the place and his narrative is too weird. On America’s worst day, I doubt there are enough ‘low information’ voters to affirm such sheer idiocy.
Speaking of humility, is there any chance fed and state Republican pols who wasted all those taxpayer dollars and time writing and huckstering ‘birther’ bills will now apologize to taxpayers?…Didn’t think so. But every one of them should be asked to do so, or explain why they won’t, on camera.

A lot of conservatives are jubilant about a Gallup Poll finding that Americans are evenly split on whether they support the “the Republican plan put forth by Congressman Paul Ryan” or “the Democratic plan put forth by President Obama” when it comes to a long-term deficit reduction measure. And some are particularly happy that a plurality of respondents aged 50 and over prefer Ryan to Obama. Hey, maybe seniors and near-seniors understand they’ll be “grandfathered” by Ryan’s Medicare proposals and don’t give a damn about anyone else! How exciting!
Or maybe not. As Jon Walker of Firedoglake tartly notes, the Gallup poll provides no description whatsoever of the “Ryan” or “Obama” plans, but does helpfully provide a party identification (useful to the vast numbers of non-Beltway-focused Americans who probably can’t tell Paul Ryan from Private Ryan at this point). The age breakouts in this poll nicely reflect the inverse relationship that has existed since before the 2008 elections between age and support for the president and the Democratic Party.
Perhaps the grandfathering in Ryan’s plan will reassure some seniors, but it’s worth remembering that it didn’t work for George W. Bush in 2005 when he proposed a Social Security privatization scheme with precisely the same buy-off-the-old-folks feature. For now, all we really know is that the Medicare cuts in Ryan’s plan poll terribly across the age groups and even partisan and ideological groupings. As always, Republicans do better in measurements of abstract support for spending cuts, and worse when they have to get specific. The Gallup poll probably represents the absolute high point in support for Private–er, I mean Privatizing–Ryan.

The devolution of the latest bout of birther hysteria, culminating in the White House release today of the president’s “long form” birth certificate (long the document birthers have demanded), is a pretty good indication of how thoroughly fringe conspiracy theories have saturated conservative politics and media.
The birther nonsense was a minor crazy-person “issue” in the 2008 presidential campaign. Afterwards, for no apparent reason other than constant repetition by right-wing blogs and web sites (notably WorldNetDaily) who influenced more conventional media like Fox, it grew and grew, eventually capturing a major segment of the Republican rank-and-file. Inevitably, a demagogue thinking about a presidential campaign seized on it, shot to the top of the GOP polls, and legitimized birtherism even more.
Now that the manufactured controversy has been definitively answered, Donald Trump is taking credit for “solving” the great puzzle of the president’s origins, but has already moved on to other contrived sets of “questions,” demanding Obama’s school records, and even more obnoxiously, reviving the Bill-Ayers-Wrote-Obama’s-book crap that surfaced during the presidential campaign.
And it’s not just Trump. On Fox last night, when commenting on (and defending) birtherism, Sarah Palin also made an offhand reference to Ayers perhaps writing Dreams From My Father.
You can certainly understand the evil utility of the Ayers “story,” which not only makes the president the terrorist-lover that Palin liked to talk about on the campaign trail in 2008, but also feeds all sorts of racist memes about Obama’s intelligence (as do the “questions” about his academic record).
What it all really illustrates is the endless game of “whack-a-mole” required when responding to “allegations” about the president involving conspiracy theories and invented “facts” that start with disreputable sources and invariably bleed over into conservative-activist email chatter, right-wing blogs, and eventually to Fox and actual Republican politicians.
Serious conservatives need to repudiate this idiocy once and for all, but they also need to meditate a bit on their own demonization of Obama and his policies, which has made it very easy for rank-and-file Republicans to believe the man wears horns. As it stands now, there’s every reason to assume many opinion-leaders on the right get a kick out of it, or at least find it useful so long as it doesn’t elevate Donald Trump or Sarah Palin to the White House.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s surprise announcement that he is not, after all, running for president in 2012 is sparking an incipient sense of panic in the self-confident ranks of Republican insiders. Ol’ Haley was so their type: solidly conservative without getting too carried away with it, innately at home with money and those who made lots of it, and always ready to cut a shrewd deal. But now, for whatever reason, Haley’s out. And from the corridors of lobbying firms in DC and corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago and elsewhere, the discerning ear can detect a high-pitched wail of distress aimed at a calm, small man in Indianapolis: “Save us, Mitch Daniels!”
With Barbour out, the conservative establishment is likely to double down on its effort to draft Daniels, who is in many ways a more perfect embodiment of their ideal than Barbour himself. But even with the encouragement and the resources of the Republican elite at his back, Daniels is right to remain cautious. The very qualities that have made him so popular among Republicans in Washington seem unlikely to win him a great deal of support among the party faithful.
Daniels, who is currently serving his second term as governor of Indiana, is reportedly Barbour’s best friend in politics–if he were to run, he’d likely get the Mississippian’s formidable help in fundraising and organizing. But beyond that, Daniels is best suited to fill the psychological void currently besetting GOP insiders. By his resume alone, he fits the bill even better than his former Reagan White House boss Barbour: a long-time Senate staffer and then White House political operative, before going back to Indiana to run a nationally prominent conservative think tank, then make his bones as a corporate exec at a pharmaceutical giant. Daniels returned to Washington to serve as OMB director, and came home again to become a famously tight-fisted and politically popular two-term governor. He’s a known quantity who is attractive to the Very Serious People in the GOP–otherwise known as “economic conservatives” or “fiscal hawks”–who want their party to return the birthers and the bible thumpers to the back-room phone banks and get on with the serious work of shaping government to serve the tangible interests of people like themselves.
Moreover, Daniels embodies the fiscal conservative creed with an unusual intensity. In his rapturously received speech at this year’s CPAC conference, the most closely watched venue for potential Republican presidential candidates, he vividly compared the “Red Menace” of fiscal indiscipline to the twentieth-century communist threat–a clever metaphor, since anti-communism is universally remembered as the glue that kept together the various wings of the conservative movement during its decades-long rise. Last year Daniels made waves by telling The Weekly Standard‘s Andrew Ferguson–who penned a lavish puff piece advertising its subject as exactly what the political doctor ordered–that the country needed a “truce” on divisive cultural issues until such time as the fiscal/economic crisis was resolved. This is exactly what Republican insiders tend to think; some, indeed, would like to make the “truce” permanent so as not to discomfit swing voters.
Best of all, and in contrast to Barbour, Daniels does not exude the constant scent of big money. Though a firm ally of GOP plutocrats, Daniels nestles his fiscal conservatism in the traditions of thrifty Hoosier folk virtues. As the Ferguson profile demonstrated with its admiring tales of the governor roaring around Indiana on his Harley and dropping into truck stops and diners unannounced to pour coffee for startled citizens, Mitch Daniels can add a populist touch to the Club for Growth agenda.
But just because conservatives in Washington love him doesn’t mean Daniels is likely to storm the field and charge to victory. In fact, Daniels has at least three glaring problems he would need to quickly solve in order to make a serious presidential bid.
The first is of his own making: The “truce” pledge, while music to the ears of many fiscal hawks, is perceived as a deadly insult by social conservatives, who are already angry about decades of being taken for granted by the party. These people matter a great deal during the Republican nominating process, particularly in Iowa, where an ongoing effort to overturn the state supreme court’s 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage is the single hottest topic for conservative activists. During early candidate events in Iowa, virtually everyone other than Barbour has taken a veiled shot or two at Daniels and his “truce” proposal. Unless he decides to campaign as an open opponent of the Christian Right’s agenda–a proposition that has never worked for any Republican candidate, as John McCain demonstrated in 2000–Daniels will have to spend a great deal of time kissing the posteriors of social conservative activists. And in Iowa, it will have to be done one posterior at a time.

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