"But The Republicans Are Even Worse" Is True... But Not A Good Enough Excuse For What Obama Is Doing

Obama & GOP budgets both make sure the wealthy don't pay their fair share

Yesterday Paul Krugman summed up a first-look at Obama's conservative budget beautifully in two elegant paragraphs:

There was an old Washingtoon, probably from the mid-1980s, in which Democrats meet to plan their new centrist strategy-- which consists of tax cuts for the rich, reduced spending on the needy, and big defense budgets. “But how is this different from the Republicans?” asks one member of the group. “Compassion,” replies the leader. “We care about the victims of our policies.”

That’s pretty much my initial reaction to what we know so far about the Obama budget. It’s much less awful than the Republican proposal, but it moves in the same direction: listening to the administration, you’d think that discretionary spending, not health care, is at the heart of our long-run deficit problems-- and you’d also think that the job of rescuing the economy was done, with unemployment still at 9 percent.

With extreme right-wing governors in Wisconsin and Ohio targeting public service workers-- i.e., teachers, policemen, firefighters-- and threatening the very concept of collective bargaining even more drastically than Hosni Mubarak did, Obama has come forward with a somewhat milder version of the same radical anti-social objectives they're aiming for. And it isn't just Wisconsin and Ohio, of course. Right-wing Republican kooks in Florida and Iowa are doing the same thing. Florida Gov. Rick Scott-- with a completely GOP-dominated state legislature-- is leading a charge to force public employees to pay more into their pensions while slashing taxes on Big Business, and Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad issued an executive order ending agreements that guaranteed sound taxpayer investment and fair wages to all employees working on public construction projects. And in Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Missouri and New Hampshire, anti-worker groups and legislators are working together to pass deceptive "right to work" laws to weaken workers' collective bargaining power. In Missouri alone, this would drive down living standards and workers' incomes-- by an average of $5,333 a year.

Meanwhile Republican front groups like the Chamber of Commerce and a Bank of America-financed operation are hiring thugs-- both in high-priced law firms and cyber spying firms-- to target progressive organizations, journalists and citizens they felt were in opposition to their political activism. And that is far from the only Republican Party hypocrisy stinking up the budget debate this week. It even looks like Boehner had his pal Paul Ryan stick a $450 million earmark for his own district into the GOP budget that is so drastic for the rest of America.

There are two things the leaders of the new majority in the House of Representatives have made clear since they began to assume the reins of power three months ago. They would:

*Cut spending

*Eliminate earmarks

Those two frequently repeated objectives are being translated into legislation in a 359-page bill filed on the House floor Friday evening-- legislation that will be considered by the full House later this week without the benefit of hearings or even committee deliberation. As promised, the bill contains a breathtaking list of program cuts and terminations.

The bill would shred, among other things, the social safety net in hard-pressed localities across America with reductions in nutrition programs for infants and pregnant mothers. And it would cut federal support to keep destitute families from having their heat and electricity cut off during one of the coldest winters in recent memory. Preliminary analysis also indicates that Head Start programs may be forced to shut down a month early in many communities across the country. Finally, the bill would deliver a particularly hard blow to struggling local governments, canceling out billions of dollars in assistance to law enforcement, sewer construction, support of local schools, and so forth.

But buried deeply in these 359 pages of ugly surprises is a provision that would mean one community in America would do a lot better than all of the others. The legislation added an estimated $450 million for a particular bit of defense spending that the Department of Defense did not ask for and does not want.

The item is a down payment that would obligate the federal government to future payments that could well be three or four times the increased spending added to this particular piece of legislation, with a big portion of the funds flowing to two cities in Ohio-- Cincinnati, where Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) grew up, and Dayton, the largest city in his congressional district.

The money will go to pay the costs to General Electric Co.’s General Electric Aviation unit and the British-owned Rolls Royce Group for their development of an engine for the new Joint Strike Fighter aircraft-- money that looks, feels, and smells very much like an earmark.

Yes, of course the Republican budget is much, much worse. So does that mean it is our fate to always have to chose between an F and a D or C? Does the whole nation have to suffer because Obama needs some suburban idiots in southern Indiana and the Florida panhandle to vote for him in 2012? Maybe we'd be better off if presidents got one six-year term and then a nice thank you note for their service.