Obama is a terrible leader and lazy

Obama has set the table...

The Big Budget Mumble

In the ongoing battle of the budget, President Obama has done something very cruel. Declaring that this time he won’t negotiate with himself, he has refused to lay out a proposal reflecting what he thinks Republicans want. Instead, he has demanded that Republicans themselves say, explicitly, what they want. And guess what: They can’t or won’t do it.

No, really. While there has been a lot of bluster from the G.O.P. about how we should reduce the deficit with spending cuts, not tax increases, no leading figures on the Republican side have been able or willing to specify what, exactly, they want to cut.

And there’s a reason for this reticence. The fact is that Republican posturing on the deficit has always been a con game, a play on the innumeracy of voters and reporters. Now Mr. Obama has demanded that the G.O.P. put up or shut up — and the response is an aggrieved mumble.

Here’s where we are right now: As his opening bid in negotiations, Mr. Obama has proposed raising about $1.6 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade, with the majority coming from letting the high-end Bush tax cuts expire and the rest from measures to limit tax deductions. He would also cut spending by about $400 billion, through such measures as giving Medicare the ability to bargain for lower drug prices.

Republicans have howled in outrage. Senator Orrin Hatch, delivering the G.O.P. reply to the president’s weekly address, denounced the offer as a case of “bait and switch,” bearing no relationship to what Mr. Obama ran on in the election. In fact, however, the offer is more or less the same as Mr. Obama’s original 2013 budget proposal and also closely tracks his campaign literature.

So what are Republicans offering as an alternative? They say they want to rely mainly on spending cuts instead. Which spending cuts? Ah, that’s a mystery. In fact, until late last week, as far as I can tell, no leading Republican had been willing to say anything specific at all about how spending should be cut.

The veil lifted a bit when Senator Mitch McConnell, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, finally mentioned a few things — raising the Medicare eligibility age, increasing Medicare premiums for high-income beneficiaries and changing the inflation adjustment for Social Security. But it’s not clear whether these represent an official negotiating position — and in any case, the arithmetic just doesn’t work.

Start with raising the Medicare age. This is, as I’ve argued in the past, a terrible policy idea. But even aside from that, it’s just not a big money saver, largely because 65- and 66-year-olds have much lower health costs than the average Medicare recipient. When the Congressional Budget Office analyzed the likely fiscal effects of a rise in the eligibility age, it found that it would save only $113 billion over the next decade and have little effect on the longer-run trajectory of Medicare costs.

Increasing premiums for the affluent would yield even less; a 2010 study by the budget office put the 10-year savings at only about $20 billion.

Changing the inflation adjustment for Social Security would save a bit more — by my estimate, about $185 billion over the next decade. But put it all together, and the things Mr. McConnell was talking about would amount to only a bit over $300 billion in budget savings — a fifth of what Mr. Obama proposes in revenue gains.

The point is that when you put Republicans on the spot and demand specifics about how they’re going to make good on their posturing about spending and deficits, they come up empty. There’s no there there.

And there never was. Republicans claim to be for much smaller government, but as a political matter they have always attacked government spending in the abstract, never coming clean with voters about the reality that big cuts in government spending can happen only if we sharply curtail very popular programs. In fact, less than a month ago the Romney/Ryan campaign was attacking Mr. Obama for, yes, cutting Medicare.

Now Republicans find themselves boxed in. With taxes scheduled to rise on Jan. 1 in the absence of an agreement, they can’t play their usual game of just saying no to tax increases and pretending that they have a deficit reduction plan. And the president, by refusing to help them out by proposing G.O.P.-friendly spending cuts, has deprived them of political cover. If Republicans really want to slash popular programs, they will have to propose those cuts themselves.

So while the fiscal cliff — still a bad name for the looming austerity bomb, but I guess we’re stuck with it — is a bad thing from an economic point of view, it has had at least one salutary political effect. For it has finally laid bare the con that has always been at the core of the G.O.P.’s political strategy.

Paul Krugman

 

http://www.politicususa.com/cost-obama-christmas-vacation-bush.html

Bush Spent 5 Times More On Flights To Texas Than Obama‘s Christmas Vacation Costs

Those who criticize the cost of Obama’s Christmas vacation don’t want you to know that George W. Bush spent at least $20 million taxpayer dollars just on flights to his ranch in Crawford.

The right wing has been outraged at the four million dollar plus price tag for Obama’s family Christmas vacation, and they constantly hold George W. Bush up as an example of how thrifty a president should be when going on vacation.

The problem is that W. wasn’t thrifty. He was the most expensive vacation president in US history. Not only did Bush spend more days on vacation than any other president, but he used Air Force One more often while on vacation than any other president.

During Bush’s two terms, the cost of operating Air Force One ranged from $56,800 to $68,000 an hour. Bush used Air Force One 77 times to go to his ranch in Crawford, TX. Using the low end cost of $56,800, Media Matters calculated that each trip to Crawford cost taxpayers $259,687 each time, and $20 million total for Bush’s ranch flights.

If cost of the flight was the only expense involved to taxpayers Bush’s vacations would still seem rather economical, but there is more, much more. Unlike the Obama’s $4 million Christmas vacation price tag, which includes the cost of everything from transportation to accommodations for the First Family, the White House staff, and the White House press corps, Bush’s numbers only include the cost of flying the president to Crawford. The cost of transporting and accommodating staff, media, friends and family is not included in Bush’s vacation numbers.

In response to growing criticism that the president was on vacation too much, the Bush administration adopted the Rovian tactic of scheduling, “work events,” while the president was in Crawford so that they could claim that President Bush’s vacations were working vacations. During his infamous pre-9/11 August vacation, the AP reported that, “Using the ranch as a base, he will promote White House initiatives in Rocky Mountain National Park, Denver, Albuquerque, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and San Antonio.”

 

Oh, I am not saying Obamacare makes that much sense. Far from it---it is a compromise meant to delay greater things.

What I am saying is that negotiations are between two parties, and as long as that second Republican party is sinking in its absolute non-sensical grasp of policy, Obama can go make it rain and wait it out. All the pressure is on Republicans (as attested by the sunny Hawaii vacay!), so just gonna have to wait until they get to their senses and crack.

 

As I have pointed out (three times now), Obama can fulfill HIS part of the process anywhere in the world, assuming that Congress actually generates and passes a bill that he is willing to sign in the next 20 days (somewhat unrealistic).

You tried to answer one of my points (unsuccessfully), care to try addressing the other?

 

http://cnrs-scrn.org/northern_mariner/vol11/nm_11_3_23to32.pdf

FDR was a turrible leader!

 

What exactly do you think Obama's role is?

 

now now, the manipulators in the banking sector, the traders that push commodities prices to and fro (sometimes causing mass starvation), and the military-industrial complex already do a pretty nice job of the last two.

You should stop worrying texxx, and just take a vacay. It is a good way to celebrate a national election victory, or a mild end of the year bonus, whatever the case may be.

 

Ohhh, personal insults, texxxx. Watch yourself.

Bonus is quite nice though, actually, thanks for asking! I hope yours is well-found too, doing whatever resource extraction you do.

But enough about me and you, more about the man who won a national election, and a party that still has not realized how hopelessly stuck it is, if that is what you wish.

 

Taking a vacation now is a brilliant negotiating strategy.



"I'll walk out of here right now!"

 

Are those insults?!?

 

Signing and enforcing the legislation that Congress generates. You can find this out simply by reading the Constitution.

 

Based on recent history, Obama seems to believe his role is to allow the Republicans to look like idiots who don't have any actual solutions, just talking points and vitriol. I would agree with him on that, they look just as devoid of ideas as I have long believed.

Care to address my other point since you have given up on the first?

 

It doesn't but consider how solidly the control the South that gives them a pretty strong base to build off of.

It's not that hard In a low turnout off year it wouldn't take much for the Republicans to capture the Senate. All it takes is for them to not nominate crazies like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdoch in right leaning states outside the South and then get lucky with moderate candidates against poor Democrat candidates in other states.

In a presidential year while they took a pasting their are better Republicans out there than Mitt Romney and the Democrats need to be very careful about over reach too. I could see a moderate conservative type Republican beating a very liberal Democrat in the general.

 

I heard somewhere that posting insults are a sure sign that you've lost an argument.

But then, I think that was posted by somebody not very smart, so I usually ignore that rule.

 

Dems made gains in states where Obama had no coattails. In Montana and North Dakota, the Democrats had flat out superior candidates. In both states, Republicans nominated sitting congressmen who had no real ties to the tea party. (as a bonus, in Montana, Congressman Rehberg voted against the Ryan budget so a lot of the traditional Democratic attacks didnt apply) Ostensibly, that shouldve been enough to win in both states. Rehberg in particular had been a Congressman for a while now.

I think 2014 wont do much for Democrats but its not a given for Republicans to win out because of low turnout.

I do think that Republicans have learned their lesson and will go out of their way to nominate popular candidates that wont run terrible races. We'll see if the primaries cooperate for them