We all know that Donald Trump neither wrote “The Art of the Deal” nor has much of an idea about how to really negotiate. He may know how to bully, but that won’t work when dealing with strong Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

In the current government shutdown standoff, Pelosi seems to be taking the position that Trump and other Republicans must fully concede, and then the Democrats will join Trump and others on negotiations about a “wall” and other immigration-related issues.

Democrats have traditionally been willing to negotiate, recognizing that to gain something you have to give something. You may not want to give anything away, but it is generally the price of reaching an agreement. In the case of negotiating with Donald Trump, it’s possible that they would have to give very little because (a) he is rarely locked into positions, and (b) he is becoming more and more desperate as his popularity falls, now down to 40% and sliding precipitously.

It can be very difficult to make Donald Trump look good to reasonable people, but Nancy Pelosi may be trying to do so. If she portrays the Democrats as the party of intransigence and inflexibility, she is giving Trump a gift that he neither deserves nor could ever earn. Rather than locking herself in a position of “no negotiations until ….,” she could offer something to Trump, just to put negotiations in motion. Suppose that she offered the following:

1. Two billion dollars for a wall, with the proviso that it be made entirely out of recyclable materials.
2. An Immediate re-opening of all government agencies, based on bills passed by the House in 2019 and the Senate in 2018.
3. An agreement to work on comprehensive immigration reform in 2019, with commitments by Senate Majority Leader and Pelosi to permit up-or-down votes in their respective chambers on all provisions of the proposed changes.

Trump may not agree to this, but he would be put on the defensive and it would clearly give her the high ground. He has a weak position to defend and that might wear and tear on him. If he doesn’t budge, what is the big deal of Pelosi changes her sweetener from two billion to three billion, and in return she gets something meaningful in return such as a start to an infrastructure deal.

There are many directions in which to go, but Pelosi is making it seems as though she is locked into only one. She is far wise and savvier than I am about the internal politics of Congress, but that does not mean that she can’t have a brain cramp at a particular moment.

Here’s hoping that she gives peace, er negotiations, a chance.

The post Madam Speaker, please negotiate. It’s good policy and it gives you the high ground appeared first on Occasional Planet.

As with so many issues that confront the nation, we are divided by party, by culture and by our sense of what is logical and reasonable. Nothing could reflect this more than Donald Trump’s idea of a wall to separate the United States from Mexico.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi looks at it as a moral issue; how could a civilized nation use a Medieval form of separation to define the border between the United States and Mexico? But Donald Trump seems to reject any alternative way monitor the border, claiming that he knows more about drone technology than anyone else in the world.

All of this is being fought in the context of re-opening the federal government. Trump invited this to happen, claimed to own it, and then walked away from responsibility when he saw that his moves did nothing positive for his popularity.

Compromise has been a vanishing concept in Washington. The spirit of bi-partisan cooperation has become more difficult as the Republican Party has become more and more locked into positions frequently defined by fear and hate.

But Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have some leverage now, and if they play to Trump’s vanity (not too difficult to do), they can possibly fashion a compromise that gives Trump what he wants at not too great a cost to America and what might be built along the border. So as to not scare anyone too much, let’s call it a revocable compromise.

Suppose that you could build a wall made of materials that were any combination of reusable, recyclable and sustainable? Start building the damn wall to satisfy Trump for the time-being. But soon enough, cooler heads will prevail, and it will become apparent that there are more effective ways to monitor and even control a border than with a presumably impenetrable wall. Trump has floated all kinds of ideas as to what the wall could be made of or look like, so parlay that notion into something that can be as readily dissembled and/or utilized for other purposes as it could be constructed. Neither of these tasks would be easy, but it is a way to try to make something out of nothing at not too great a cost.

After meeting with leaders of Congress today, Trump said that Democrats wanted any wall to be made of steel since that would help the domestic steel industry. Whether or not that is the way in which it actually went down is unclear, but if it was built with steel, it would be much more reusable and recyclable than concrete.

For most of us, there is no apparent impact from the government shutdown. For many, it is a minor inconvenience. But for millions it is a matter of not having a paycheck, and in the case of some, there will never be reimbursement. This is all difficult for Trump to understand. But most Democrats do. Why not explore a compromise that is as close to revocable as possible? Just something to think about.

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The House has passed a tax bill that is disproportionately kind to the wealthy; the Senate is about to do the same and then Donald Trump can flash that Cheshire grin again as he signs a document that may sound good to his base, but in reality will not be.

Besides stacking the deck in favor of the likes of himself, the bill also gives him and other Republicans a long-awaited victory in dissembling the Affordable Care Act. The individual mandate for health care coverage will essentially be gutted because penalties for non-compliance are eliminated. This means that thirteen million fewer individuals will have health care coverage and premiums will go up for those who still have coverage.

Regrettably, the underlying theme to Republican policies is meanness. Parenthetically, it might be noted that a recent CNN poll shows that Republican Senator is 20% more popular among Democrats than members of his own party (68% – 48%). If only McCain would show the party the same respect that they show to him.

The recent literal train wreck in Washington State gave Trump another opportunity to call next for a robust infrastructure bill. Of course, this comes as his budget cuts infrastructure spending by $55 billion, including a considerable amount for Amtrak. None of this stops Trump from calling for massive upgrades to our roads, bridges, airports, rail system – just about everything except cyber security. Democrats have talked about a real infrastructure bill that would cost on the order of a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money, but it be fresh money going into circulation and the multiplier effect of contractors and workers receiving it would mean that each dollar would turn over in the economy up to four times in a year. Much of that would come back in the way of tax revenue.

Trump has also spoken about a trillion dollars for infrastructure, but up to eighty percent of it would be smoke and mirrors. That’s because it would not be actual federal spending. Instead, it would be up to $800 billion in tax breaks to contractors and real estate owners such as himself to “stimulate” infrastructure growth.

This one has difficulty passing the giggle test, because tax breaks for the wealthy do what they are called, they give more money to the wealthy. Without macro plans from the government to fund necessary projects, there will be negligible improvement to the infrastructure. What should be a major public program to improve the lives of the American people is just a further transference of public money into the coffers of the wealthy.

The mysteries of the Republican brain continue to be at the center of dysfunctional policies. There seems to be a lack of empathy, and policy-makers do not mind constructing programs that harm the most vulnerable (one of the seven forbidden words) among us. But even more odd is how the economically deprived in the Republican base have difficulty seeing who is oppressing them. They may scapegoat that it is “liberal values” and a lack of respect for their hard work (not everyone in any “class” is really a hard worker). It’s true that liberal programs have not always been a panacea for those who are designed to help, but the progressive perspective is to try to help and learn from mistakes. Many Republicans are happy to oppress their base if it means more money for the wealthy. That’s the tax bill and a likely infrastructure bill to come.

Democrats must put all the pressure they can on Trump so he seriously negotiates with “Chuck and Nancy” so that something can be salvaged. But that might be expecting too much of a man constructed like Trump.

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The CBO [Congressional Budget Office] earned the ire of Republicans when it estimated that the GOP’s bill to repeal and/or replace Obamacare would take health insurance away from 25 million people. So, GOP Congressmen tried to retaliate. Taking a meat cleaver to CBO’s budget, they attempted to eliminate all 89 employees at CBO’s Budget Analysis Office, using the Holman Rule.

“The [Holman Rule] is a little-known relic from the 1870s [that] lets any member of the House make significant changes to agency functions or personnel through an amendment during the appropriations process,” says Federal News Radio in a July 25, 2017 report. “It was the first time lawmakers attempted to use the rule since the House reinstated it earlier this year.”

The Holman Rule essentially lets House lawmakers make changes to a federal employee’s salary or position without input from the appropriations committee. Members can debate these amendments on the House floor for a limited time…Congress hasn’t invoked the Holman Rule since 1983.

According to the Washington Post:

A separate amendment filed by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) would also eliminate the same division and specify that the CBO instead evaluate legislation “by facilitating and assimilating scoring data” compiled by four private think tanks — the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Urban Institute.

Of course, those are all private, conservative think tanks. And, essentially, Meadows’ idea is to outsource and privatize the process, calling it “a pragmatic way to use the private sector and yet let Congress depend on a score that is accurate.”

The CBO is known for its objectivity and non-partisan approach to its work. Congress established the CBO in 1974. On its own web page, CBO describes its birth this way: [Note the connection to Richard Nixon.]

Conflict between the legislative and executive branches reached a high point during the summer of 1974, when Members of Congress objected to President Richard Nixon’s threats to withhold Congressional appropriations for programs that were inconsistent with his policies (a process known as impoundment). The dispute led to the enactment of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 in July of that year.

Democrats representing areas around Washington DC blasted the vindictive amendment, calling it “part of a strategic assault on objectivity and expertise in the civil service.”

This is exactly what we worried about when Republicans reinstated this arcane rule in January,” members said in a joint statement. “The Holman Rule empowers members of Congress to target individual federal employees. The rule is being used to punish an important advisory body for doing its job by providing forecasts which some members now find inconvenient.

The Partnership on Government Oversight [POGO], a good-government non-profit group, said this about the proposed amendment:

Getting rid of the CBO would send a chilling message to all other independent offices, such as the Congressional Research Service or the Government Accountability Office, to tell Congress what it wants to hear or risk being closed,” POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian said in a July 25 statement. “If there are legitimate concerns over the operation of the CBO, the solution is reform not decimation.”

Even the conservative National Review opposed Meadows’ idea.

“Congress shouldn’t abandon its brain,” wrote National Review:

…Meadows wants to turn the CBO into an “aggregator” of cost-and-benefit scores performed by private think tanks. In other words, Meadows wants the CBO to serve as a middleman and collect scores from nongovernmental organizations, many of which have an admitted ideological leaning, to create a “composite score” on which lawmakers would rely… If legislative cost estimates were outsourced to think tanks, Congress would give up a rare and vital source of internal, independent information.

Fortunately, this year’s Republican-sponsored CBO-retribution amendments failed after Democratic and Republican leaders of the Ways and Means Committee came out in support of the CBO:

“We rely on CBO’s analysts to provide fair, impartial and fact-based analysis,” said the committee leaders in a letter to their House colleagues.

In the end [ July 25, 2017], the budget cuts were defeated 314-107, and the staff cuts failed 309 -106, according to the House Office of the Clerk. Neither will be included in the Orwellian-titled “Make America Secure Appropriations Act” for fiscal 2018.

But they tried, and that in itself is important. While Donald Trump distracts us with outrageous tweets,  demagogic speeches, and White House staff wars, Republican apparatchiks in Congress are busily—cynically, gleefully—going about the business of undermining democracy one small chink at a time— mostly unnoticed. Thankfully, this effort failed. But It won’t be the last time they’ll try.

The post Republicans try to punish CBO for telling the truth appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Alas, it’s a lousy time to be a senior in Missouri.  Besides the Circuit Breaker, other special help for our older neighbors is under attack in Jefferson City and Washington.

Let’s look at Grandma Jane, a hypothetical but friendly women in her 70’s living with a bunch of health problems. She has a modest but cute apartment in an area suburb.  She worked a bit after raising her kids but her Social Security payment, like many widows, is based on the survivor formula on her late husband’s account. She gets $900 a month, $10,800 per year. That’s a bit above average for surviving spouses , yet, not enough for her to sit pretty. That’s not a surprise since the Poverty Level for a single person is $12,060 a year or $1,005 a month.

Fortunately, she qualifies for several programs…

$ 500 Missouri Circuit Breaker  a tax credit to lower-income seniors to help offset property taxes

$ 1,200 Missouri Rx Program   help paying for her many prescriptions beyond Medicare’s coverage

$ 1,716 Qualified Medicare Beneficiary (QMB)  Medicaid payment towards her share of Medicare

$ 2,160  Food Stamps   $180 per month, or, around $1.94 per meal

$250  Heating Assistance Grant  a state pass-through of a federal allocation to Missouri

Wow!  Grandma Jane gets $ 5,826 in special help each year!  This targeted aid gives her a standard of living of about $16,600. Not golden toilet living like Donald Trump, but a lot better than Social Security alone.

Uh-oh!

Remember, in 2017 the Circuit Breaker for renters got SEALed [by Missouri Governor and former Navy Seal Eric Greitens]. The legislature also cut back on the Missouri Rx program, meaning that $100 a month will become $50 or $0. Proposed federal cuts to Medicaid (MO HealthNet) will target that QMB.

And, the Trump administration and friends plan to trim food stamps by 25%, and, give states a 10% to 25% co-pay…Maybe Grandma Jane will get $20 or $50 a month when the dust clears.

That heating grant?  Trump has targeted the Low-Income Heat Assistance Program (LiHEAP) for complete elimination.

In other words, a series of trims and cuts which don’t sound that big each on their own wind up taking $3,000 a year or more out of Grandma Jane’s standard of living. Poverty’s sting grows sharper.

Of course, we’re told these inefficient and wasteful programs must be slashed.  Missouri and America must “pay for” tax cuts for wealthy ‘job creators.’

Sorry grandma.

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As Republicans recklessly move forward in doing damage to health care in America, it’s important for Democrats to have a clear vision for the alternative: Medicare-for-All. Democrats must communicate that their goal is straight-forward: to provide complete and affordable health care for all Americans. It’s basic economics. You want to ensure that the demand for goods and services is met by suppliers who are properly remunerated.

The demand for health care is always in flux. Each day, new Americans contract illnesses or are injured. At the same time, Americans are recovering from what had set them back. We as individuals, we as a society, are only as good as we are healthy. It is in everyone’s best interest for us to have a system in which health care is available in a timely and convenient fashion. To those who are taking care of us, it is important for them to be properly paid and to perform their duties in the best of working conditions.

There is nothing engraved in stone that says that insurance companies should be involved with how we do health care. Insurance is legalized gambling, on both the part of the suppliers and the purchasers. That may be acceptable if you go to the race track or a local casino. However, it is far too casual and unreliable to use as an approach to deal with our physical and mental well-being. In insurance, there are winners and losers. When it comes to our wellness, we need “win-win” solutions.

What Republicans are currently doing for insurance companies is not to expand the market as the Affordable Care Act has done. Rather Republicans are minimizing risk by essentially allowing the companies to either not insure people who may require the costliest procedures or to price individuals out of the market. But what Republicans are doing through their approach to health care is not just taking care of insurance companies with whom they are cozy. They are acting in a way that it consistent with one of their basic political, and even psychological, goals: to simply be mean to people about whom they care the least.

At last look, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Republican plan will cause twenty-four million Americans to lose health care.  Eight years ago, under President Obama, our nation talked about how low we could make the number of people who did not have access to health care. With Donald Trump and the Republicans, it’s how many we can remove from our health care system.

Why do they do this? Some, like House Speaker Paul Ryan, would say that it is to be responsible overseers of our federal budget. But it looks and smells much more like overseers of people who they want to keep subservient.

If Republicans really care about balancing the federal budget, as they say, why do they want to balance the budget? The conventional answer is that they care about deficits and deficits cause inflation. Take a look at the two charts below to see how specious this argument is:

As you can see above, the federal debt has grown, almost exponentially, since 1980. But below, you see that inflation has topped 5% only once during that period. Over thirty-five years of recent history clearly shows that running federal deficits has little or nothing to do with inflation [the real factor is what percentage of the GNP is the deficit, but Republicans don’t talk about that.]

So why is it that Republicans constantly harp on wanting to balance the budget? First, by supporting the reduction of federal expenditures, they put themselves in a position to support tax cuts for the wealthy. That’s something they clearly like.

Second, and this is more psychological than political, we have to recognize that there are some people in our society who are just plain mean when it comes to public policy. They almost seem to lack an empathy gene and they don’t care about the suffering of others, particularly if those people are not like them. Why else would you support a health care bill that would reduce $800 billion of taxes on the wealthy while denying twenty-four million people access to health care?

It’s not that Republicans are mean; it’s that those among us who are mean tend to be Republicans¹. Psychologically and politically, there is very little that Democrats and others can do about changing that. But what it does mean is that those who have more of a sense of empathy can try to fashion public policy that provides the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. When it comes to health care, that is clearly Medicare-for-All.

So Democrats, please don’t get bogged down in the details of the Republican policies. Don’t worry about giving a fair shake to the insurance companies? Our goal for those in the health insurance industry should be to help them find gainful employment in the future, just as it is for coal miners.

Not only is Medicare-for-All sound policy, it is good politics. Let’s face it, the American people don’t like complexity. That’s why neither the Republican plan nor the Affordable Care Act are popular.

Keep it simple, when you can. The message and the policy should be Medicare-for-All.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

¹ Many of these people are very cordial and thoughtful towards those who they know. But when it comes to fashioning public policy that serves the common good, they are just plain mean.

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Where did Donald Trump’s absurd, brutal and immoral budget proposal come from? His recently appointed Budget Director, Mick Mulvaney, has now told us: “If he said it in the campaign, it’s in the budget,” he said. “We wanted to know what his policies were. And we turned those policies into numbers.”

What a fine way to create a budget for the United States: Consulting the array of impulsive utterances, crowd-pleasing, absurd and often contradictory campaign promises, robotically delivered speeches written by others, and perhaps even early-morning, incoherent tweets that add up to the nothing-burger that is Donald Trump’s policy “thinking.”

Let me see if I understand this process: During the campaign, Trump panders to xenophobic supporters, and shouts about building a “beautiful” wall, and making Mexico pay for it. Virtually everyone who knows anything about our relationship with Mexico—and border security — calls this an absurd idea. Even his campaign cronies know that this is not a realistic idea. Nevertheless, in the interest of fulfilling a ridiculous campaign utterance, his Budget Director translates that into $2 billion in the US budget—no mention, by the way, of the bogus “promise” to make Mexico reimburse us for the costs.

In speeches obviously written for him by whisperer-in-chief Steve Bannon, Trump trumpets about “rebuilding our military,” which, in reality, does not need rebuilding. He is said to have requested a display of military tanks and rocket launchers during his inauguration parade. Mulvaney picks up on that notion and makes an extra $54 billion in new military spending magically appear in the budget, so Trump can fulfill his 12-year-old-boy fantasy of having the biggest, most destructive toys to play with. So, this is how policy is interpreted and turned into budget proposals?

And if he’s “culling” Trump’s pronouncements for policy ideas, you have to wonder how he translated some of Trump’s tweets into numbers. There’s a scary thought.

To give this story a bit of historical context, think back to Richard Nixon. He was notoriously prone to instruct his White House staff to commit nasty, sometimes illegal acts—and not just the Watergate break-in. We learned, later, that his top aides often left the Oval Office scratching their heads and then agreeing to simply disregard what they had been asked to do. Even those guys—most of whom left political life in disgrace—had the judgment to recognize intemperate, unsound orders from a mentally unbalanced president when they saw them.

Mulvaney could have done America a great service by not enshrining Trump’s unreasoned rantings in a document as important as the budget. But he didn’t. He’s just another Trump sycophant who refuses to acknowledge that the emperor has no clothes.

The fact that Mulvaney said that he “wanted to know what [Trump’s] policy priorities were,” is a significant tell: After his boss has been in office for two months, Mulvaney still can’t identify the president’s policies and has to hunt them down?  Clearly, that means that Trump doesn’t have any thoughts about issues, let alone priorities. And if you’re searching through his speeches, tweets and campaign rants for trends, it quickly becomes clear that his only priority is himself.

It is irresponsible and insane to base our national budget on the zigzagging, self-contradictory and utterly uninformed pronouncements of this man.

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Paul Ryan never seems happier than when talking about the money that can be saved by repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. It seems as if he has zeros bouncing around in his head and his goal is to get all his ducks in a row so that everything in life zeroes out.

He is in a position of making public policy, and it seems that his goal of reforming government is to ensure that there is no deficit, and government spends no more than it takes in. Since he likes his taxes to be low, this means that expenses also must be low for the budget to zero-out.

Numbers can lend themselves to order. Being fixated by numbers is a frequent characteristic of people who experience obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The person is intently emotionally invested in the numbers turning out the way he wants.

This can be fine if you’re a banker, if you’re a baseball player, if you’re a meteorologist. But this is not what Ryan is. He is a public official whose job it is to provide those public services to the population that the private sector cannot effectively do.

Clearly, left to its own devices, the private sector cannot provide adequate and affordable health care to all Americans. Even with the Affordable Care Act, nearly 12% of Americans do not have health care coverage. With the Trump-Ryan plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, another fourteen million Americans will lose coverage next year, and a total of twenty-four million by 2024.

But for Paul Ryan, it may be that the suffering of those people who cannot get needed health care, or not have access to preventative health care, is simply outweighed by the joy of having the federal budget zero out. If the lens through which he looks at public policy is obscured by his fascination with having all the numbers in the right place, then he can get great satisfaction and consider himself doing a good job, even if it means that millions of people must suffer for your personal world to be in order.

This is why people can say about Paul Ryan, as they said about Ronald Reagan, that he is such a nice guy. Because being friendly with someone else, particularly if they are like you, does not have to create an imbalance in the way in which he sees the world.

Ryan, like many other Republicans, not only wants a balanced budget every year, but he wants the entire $19 trillion federal debt paid off. By certain Republicans’ standards, this could be done in short order. Since the federal government collects about $3.5 trillion in revenue each year, it would take less than six years to simply collect money, de-fund all programs, and pay off the debt.

Putting it in such stark terms is necessary to understand the impact of certain Republican policies, particularly if someone like Ryan is obsessed with them. Just seven years with no Social Security, no Medicare, no airport controllers, no national parks, no office of the attorney-general. Maybe some Republicans would like to keep the military budget, but that would mean extending the pay-down another three or four years.

Yes, paying off the national debt and running balanced budgets every year could put a certain kind of economic house in order. That kind of house would be the one in which some of us are lucky enough to live.

But this is not the reality of macro-economics, the kind that governs the role of our federal government in our national economy.

Why do Republicans dislike deficits and debts so much? Because borrowing means that there is more money in circulation and by some textbooks, that results in inflation. But here’s the problem. As the federal debt has doubled since the year 2000, inflation has barely risen. The likely reason is a macro-economic tenet that has new-found credibility. The theory says that what’s bad is for the federal debt to rise at a rate faster than the overall economy. In those terms, debt has gone down.

There’s nothing engraved in stone by this theory, but for the last generation, the data has substantiated it. So, the U.S. government has spent a great deal more than it has taken in. A lot of that was spent to fund dubious wars, another large percentage went to give tax breaks to the very wealthy, some of it has gone to meet the rising demand of entitlements, and some of it has been increased discretionary spending for items like developing clean energy, medical research, infrastructure and federal aid to education.

Could the U.S. make significant cuts in spending? Yes. Ending and not getting into new ill-advised wars would be a good start. So would fairly taxing the wealthy.

But the bottom line is that we are surviving the current ratio of income and expenses. That is not an orderly world to Paul Ryan and other Republicans. But what’s more important? Should we aim to zero-out every budget because it makes certain people happy, or should we strive to provide the necessary social services that the economically disenfranchised and middle class need?

Ryan needs to get out of his video game, ZERO-OUT, and see the world around him. Let the “zero hero” be the pitcher or goalie who throws or completes a shut-out.

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There must be something in the local water that leads Missouri Democrats to wail and figuratively rend their garments over the question of deficits and the national debt. It also often leads them to support what can only be described as stupid policies. Claire McCaskill worked hard to establish her me-too, “bipartisan” fiscal credentials by embracing the very bad idea of a balanced budget amendment. Jason Kander, who hopes to join her in the Senate next year, drew gasps of horror from many potential Democratic supporters when he jumped on that same bandwagon. We’ll soon see how far it will carry him.

Showing that he’s on the cutting edge of Missouri deficit thinking, Chuck Raasch, a political columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch revived the Oh-dear-me-the-deficit-is-looming refrain in a column published today (9/3), which dealt with the responses of the two presidential candidates when asked to describe what they would do to reduce deficit (yearly overspending) and manage the nation’s debt (the  sum of past years’ deficits).” Raasch was disturbed by what he considered the failure of either to adequately address the issue. In the case of Donald Trump, who, as Raasch points out seemed to confuse the trade deficit with the federal spending deficit, most rational people would agree.

As for Hillary Clinton, Raasch seems to think that while she proposes tax reform to generate new revenue, she fails to address what he calls the “eat-your-peas challenges,” presumably spending cuts to programs like social security and Medicare, the necessity of which Raasch seems to think has been indisputably established. He also gives short shrift to Clinton’s claim that directing the new tax revenue to infrastructure and education spending would generate deficit-shrinking growth. In short, Raasch evaluates her answer on the basis of the bill of goods Republicans have been hawking since the dawn of modern political time.

Deficit spending is not such a terrible thing

First off we should get our facts straight. Deficit spending is not necessarily the problem alarmists want us to think it is. Lots of economists, liberal and otherwise, are emphatic that our current yearly deficits are not excessive when viewed as a percentage of GDP, nor is the national debt (the sum of past yearly deficits) potentially unmanageable.

Among those who hold these views are widely respected economists like the Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman who is actually arguing that now is the time to increase the deficit. Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz believes that there is a long-term debt problem although he has definitively rejected the “eat-your-peas” solution. (He famously described anti-debt, European austerity programs as a “suicide pact” – a description that seems prescient as austerity-raddled EU economies stall.) Neither are industry economists inclined to worry about current deficits. Business Insider notes that Scott Brown, chief economist at the investment firm Raymond James has argued that the current deficit rate of %2.5 of GDP is easily sustainable and goes even further, asserting that warnings about the long-term dire effects of the national debt are overstated:

Many of these same economists would also endorse the deficit reducing effect of the proposed Clinton program of progressive tax reform combined with economic programs designed to lessen economic inequality. Although this program leaves Raasch unimpressed, it is very suggestive of the remedies proposed by economists like Stiglitz and Brookings economist Henry Aaron who remarks that:

Many analysts, from both political parties, agree that the federal government should do more now to spur economic growth and that it should simultaneously take steps to lower projected long-term deficits. Republicans and Democrats often don’t agree on the details. But here is one illustrative strategy that economists from both parties have endorsed. The first element is increased investment in what is called ‘infrastructure’—meaning roads, bridges, tunnels, harbors, and airports. Many are in need of repair, replacement, or expansion. Furthermore, interest rates are abnormally low just now, which means that borrowing is unusually inexpensive. When interest rates are low is the best time to undertake long-lived investments. Carrying out those repairs and improvements would put people to work now and improve productive capacity in the future. So would increased support for scientific research and increased spending to support post-high-school education of those who cannot now afford it. These measures would promote economic recovery right now and boost U.S. productivity in the future.

Hillary isn’t necessarily evading the “eat-your-peas” issues, she just has a different perspective than the one sold to journalists like Raasch as economic orthodoxy.

The Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop

Raasch, like our other Missouri Democratic Sistren and Brethren mentioned above, is a victim of what Greg Sargent has described as the “Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop” which he defines as “the relentless bipartisan focus on the deficit convinces voters to be worried about it, which in turn leads lawmakers to spend still more time talking about it and less time talking about the economy” – the real economy, that is, the economy in which the deficit is a rather minor consideration and the growth of the national debt is an easily managed problem.

And why is this feedback loop so prevalent? To paraphrase Mount Holyoke College professor Douglas J. Amy, it has provided the GOP with an issue to help fan resentment against government and against their Democratic opposition. Additionally, it is a tool that can be used to fight progressive programs that the GOP has long opposed such as Medicare and Social Security.

What’s sad is the fact that the deficit chorus is endlessly echoed by otherwise competent journalists like Raasch and that otherwise astute politicians like McCaskill and Kander have so easily succumbed. But we can still be happy that we have a presidential candidate who declines to sing the same, sad old song.

[This article was originally posted on ShowMe Progress.]

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In a shocking policy statement released last week, Democrat Jason Kander—who is running for US Senate to unseat Republican incumbent Roy Blunt—announced that he supports a Balanced Budget amendment to the US Constitution.

That is a very odd policy position for a Democrat. Usually, this balanced-budget stuff is the bailiwick of Republicans, who claim that it’s a more responsible way to run government. Democrats usually oppose this kind of policy. Here are some of the reasons behind their opposition, from a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution:

• Budget deficits are sometimes beneficial, not just in times of war but also during economic slowdowns.

• A balanced-budget amendment brings the threat of political extortion by a congressional minority. Requiring a super-majority to run a deficit “is a veritable summons to political extortion by an intransigent minority” and could trigger a constitutional crisis.

• It is unwise to lock into the Constitution an economic variable of limiting government spending to 18 or 20 percent of economic output, since that level may need to change based on facts and circumstances.

And conventional [Democratic] wisdom says that the whole notion of a balanced budget is just a code-word, cover-story for making sure that, when the budget has to be balanced, cuts will come from social programs and the safety net, not from military spending, or from tax advantages for the wealthiest.

So, what is Kander thinking here?

Maybe he thinks that supporting the balanced budget concept will co-opt Blunt, who has co-sponsored such a measure many times during his tenure in Washington DC. In this line of thinking, Kander’s support for the amendment “takes the issue off the table” in the campaign. He has said that a national constitutional amendment would merely take its cue from similar balanced-budget measures in many states.  [Yeah, but what if balanced state budgets are a bad idea, too? Not a very good example. The federal government should be smarter than the states.]

Or maybe he thought that his supporters wouldn’t notice. It’s sort of an obscure issue, after all, and probably not top-of-mind for most people. But if that’s the case, why send out a tweet about it? Why make it an issue at all?  Why not do what most real Democrats do, and oppose it.

Sorry, Jason. I liked you as Missouri Secretary of State. And I was just about to sign up to volunteer for your campaign, on the recommendation of a friend whose opinion I value. But now that you’ve announced this policy, I’m less likely to help you out. This is exactly the kind of stinkin’ thinkin’ that other Missouri Democrats have engaged in as a ploy to appeal to Republican voters. Prime example: Robin Carnahan, another former MO Secretary of State tilted rightward in a previous election, sullying her previously stellar reputation, alienating many supporters, and failing to swing any Republican voters her way, and, of course, ultimately losing the election.]

When will these cowardly Democrats learn? In Missouri, you’re not going to grab any Republican voters by pretending to support conservative ideas. If they want a Republican, they’re going to vote for one. You’re not fooling them.  You can’t out-Republican Missouri Republicans. But what you are doing is alienating Democrats.

What we need are not Republican-light Democrats. We need progressive Democrats—Democrats who are not afraid to work for liberal policies. When Democrats pull this fake conservative bullshit, what they take off the table is the progressive message.  And that is really sad, because a lot of people may call themselves conservative, but expect to receive the services brought to them by progressive ideas [Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, TANF, fully funded police and fire services, infrastructure—to name just a few.] They just don’t realize it. They should be reminded. That’s a really important job for Democrats. And that’s why I have zero patience for Democrats who support terrible, right-wing policies like a balanced- budget amendment.

I await an explanation from Kander.

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