Destroying the Democratic Party

By Dave Anderson:

Right now the Republican Party is a party committed to wasting 8% to 10% of GDP between excessive military spending for pointless foreign adventures and maintaining the systemic cluster-fuck that is the US health care system.  They are also the party that has no interest in performing basic math if that means it can not cut taxes for its donor class.  

The Democrats are the suckers to the Republican excess as they try to be responsible.  Passing health care last summer would have been possible if either the Democrats were not interesting in pleasing the Very Serious People who wanted comity and bi-partisanship of an era of randomly distributed racists or racist panderers and ideological incoherence or if they decided not to be responsible and pay for the coverage expansion by making tough choices.

Foisting off a $1.2 trillion dollar coverage expansion over 10 years with a start date of May 1, 2010 would have been a political goldmine for Democrats.  Instead they sought deficit neutrality and reduction which means taking goodies and money away from organizing groups that would naturally oppose losing their goodies.  Being responsible is for suckers.  

Right now the Republicans have engaged in a generation long strategy of
being irresponsible douchebags of running up massive debts, decrying
the possibility of actually paying down previous debts in order to get
some breathing room for either the foreseen (Baby Boomers retiring) or
the unforeseen (9/11) and passing large tax cuts that pay off their
contributor class.  They build facts on the ground that are favorable
to their ideology and core party members, and then they count on the
Democrats being responsible.

And now the Democrats are planning on being the biggest set of suckers out there as the Deficit Reduction Commission idea is gaining steam.  Ian Welsh explains its basic mandate:

it seems that Obama is set to appoint a deficit reduction panel. 
Their job will be to come up with a �bipartisan� way of cutting the
deficit by cutting Medicare and Social Security.  There is no other way
to cut the deficit, because the only other large bucket of money, the
defense budget, is off the table, and no one is willing to radically
raise taxes on the rich.

There are only so many big pots of money in this country.  Interest on the current debt is off the table as we won't default and short and long term rates can only go up so we can not refinance and roll-over debt at low costs.  Defense spending really is not spending; it is magical money with no trade-offs implied.  The rest of governmental spending is a mere rounding error.  Looting Social Security and shoveling off systemic risk to individuals instead of the government was Bush's goal in 2005 as that is the biggest pot of "debatable" money, quickly followed by Medicare. 

Paul Krugman notes that commissions only work when contentious details of a broadly agreed upon and supported framework need to be worked out:

It was a game of three-card monte:

1. The Greenspan commission recommends tax increases on
working-class Americans, plus some benefit cuts, even as Reagan is
cutting taxes on the rich. But these tax increases, you see, are
dedicated to Social Security.

2. In 2001, with the US budget in surplus � almost entirely because
of the surplus in Social Security � Greenspan warns that we�re paying
off our debt too fast, and calls for tax cuts (which mainly favor the
rich, of course)

3. A few years later, with the budget back in deficit, Greenspan calls for, you guessed it, cuts in Social Security.

More broadly, you can�t solve big policy issues with an independent
commission unless there is some kind of agreement among a wide range of
people about general values, economic philosophy, etc.. And right now
there isn�t.

Agreeing to massive cuts in Social Security and Medicare, escalating in Afghanistan, and not passing a multi-generational promise on expanding health care coverage and security to more Americans is an extraordinarily effective way to depress people who want a reasonable modern social safety net and regulated mixed economy that is non-imperialistic.  If Democratic base voters wanted all that, they would be moderate Republicans.