White House photo
Obama and his team have an idea Republicans used to like.
Even before House Speaker John Boehner moved away from his own fiscal talks by unveiling his "Plan B," there was an important sticking point in his talks with President Obama.
As far as the White House was concerned, Obama offered a very credible, entirely balanced third offer: a package that contained $1.2 trillion in new revenue and $1.22 trillion spending cuts. Boehner's office, looking at the exact same figures, said the president was proposing $1.3 trillion in revenue and $930 billion in spending cuts.
How can officials look at the same numbers on the same page and see entirely different results? The underlying dispute has to do with interest payments on the national debt. As Obama and his team see it, their fiscal approach would require less borrowing, which in turn would produce significant savings (roughly $290 billion) in the form of lower interest on the debt.
Congressional Republicans, as of yesterday, are insisting this is an accounting trick, and Obama can't justifiably count interest savings as "spending cuts." And while one can certainly make the case that the GOP line has merit, there's a problem: these same Republicans have already argued the exact opposite.
House Republicans have repeatedly used the same arithmetic to beef up the size of proposed spending cuts that they oppose now that President Barack Obama is using it. [...]
Republicans have employed this very same tool -- counting the billions saved from not having to borrow billions more -- to pad the size of deficit reduction, sometimes to placate their own restless base.
The accounting measure is even part of the Paul Ryan budget plan, which Republicans not only supported en mass, but which Boehner used as a model just last week.
GOP leaders can't pretend interest savings count, but only when it suits their purposes.
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What? Of course they can pretend something means something different when it suits their purposes.
That's how the Republicans ran their entire presidential campaign!
It's our old friend It's Okay If You're A Republican! Hypocrisy, double dealing, different standards depending on who you're talking to and about? Par for the GOP course.
GOP leaders can't pretend interest savings count, but only when it suits their purposes.
Why should this be any different from how the GOP has viewed things so far? All during the campaign they manufactured their own numbers for polls, tried to use the exact same Medicare savings against Obama while simultaneously porporting their Medicare savings were somehow different (well, Ryan, anyway. Romney wanted to put back the 'savings', thus making it less solvent. But, I digress). More political posturing and hoping the American public doesn't notice the difference.
Logical consistency is for weak minded Democrats not the members of the Republican caucus.
Perhaps the most important political idea to take root while GWB was President is IOKIYAR. That is what is at play here.
What does all this matter. Only two more days until the end of the Mayan calendar.
Add "logic" to the list of things that have a known liberal bias.
Let me see. Two wars that were kept "off the books" and the Republicans want to talk about accounting trickery?
If you listen closely you can hear the chant of straining Republican logic....."Must...Gut...New...Deal...Must...Gut...New...Deal..."
They have been after this for 80 years and they are not about to give up now
It's OK. That's why we have expiration dates. Keep on playing GOP...and you WILL be blamed for putting us back in a recession. We WILL remember 2008!
Its going to be a helluva Inauguration when a hundred thousand elderly people show up in wheelchairs and dragging oxygen tanks to protest Obama's proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicaid. There won't be a lot of pomp but plenty of circumstance.
This President has displayed the spine of a Slinky by offering up a couple of long sought GOP trophys to hang on the wall and Harry Reid seems to be the only obstruction to this sellout of seniors right now.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If Obama and the Dems want a disaffected, disappointed--and disappearing voting base in 2014, they just need to continue down this road. Gee, I wonder what happens when Democratic voters stay home and Republicans leverage these victories? After all, we haven't had that happen lately, have we?
Republicans will beat Democrats over the head relentlessly for cutting Social Security. The Dems will lose one of their most effective talking points and provide an impetus for a big GOP victory in 2014.
This sounds all too familiar.
Instead of futzing around with the yearly increases to Social Security why not look at the annual increases in the pay of the members of Congress?
It's so easy to target Senior citizens and disabled people -- or to target the members of the government who do the actual work -- but no one lifts up their eyes to the House and the Senate.
Wonder why . . .
They need to make insider trading illegal for members of Congress also.
Of course they can -- they do. More to the point, it works. In large part because, after all, nobody who isn't a partisan hack like Rachel calls them on it, and of course partisan hacks are just throwing out partisan talking points -- they can be ignored.