Sen. Kerry boasts of the willingness of Supercommittee Democrats to cut “entitlements”

Photo from Kerry's website.

Speaking of entitlements, Sen. Kerry, why doesn’t the supercommittee follow Rep.  Giffords’ advice and cut the salaries of members of Congress?

That would likely be too hard to pass, unlike slashes to Medicare and Social Security that both Democrats and Republicans are so fond of debating these days.

Guess it makes our congressional leaders seem courageous and bipartisan to go after society’s most vulnerable.

In a post by Bryan Tau at Politico, Kerry boasts of the willingness of the Democratic members of the Supercommittee to cut “entitlements”- note how Kerry's use of this derogatory term avoids mentioning specific safety net programs that benefit seniors and other low income folks.

Tau’s post concludes:

Democrats made an unprecedented offer to cut entitlements, and Republicans refused, Kerry said.

"We are not a tax-cutting committee. We're a deficit-reduction committee," Kerry said. "Everybody out there has said to us 'Go big. Do $4 trillion.' We Democrats put a $4 trillion deal on the table and it included huge, hard, tough, horrible reductions on the sacred cows and things that we have been accused of not being willing to do. We put it out there."

Read the entire post:

The worst bet in all of politics

Gale  Russell Chaddock at the Christian Science Monitor offers a lucid analysis of where Congress is now with debt ceiling negotiations, and it’s not pretty.

Washington

 

After a night of high drama on Capitol Hill, a legislative solution to the debt crisis now shifts to the Senate, where leaders of both parties must now try to guess what will pass in the House – perhaps the worst bet in all of politics.

The situation is the result of strategic mistakes in the buildup to Friday's debt-ceiling votes, which produced an outcome exactly the opposite of what GOP leaders had hoped. Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio had hoped to win support from House Democrats this week by scaling back the House's earlier “cut, cap, and balance” bill. With Democratic support in the House, the bill would have had a credible shot in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Instead, his proposal alienated not only House Democrats but also the president and GOP conservatives. After an aborted attempt to hold a vote Thursday, an amended bill did at last pass the House Friday, 218 to 210, but without a single Democratic vote and without 22 Republican defectors. Later Friday, it failed in the Senate, which voted to table Mr. Boehner's bill, 59 to 41, effectively derailing it.

Read more:

Debating the term “entitlement” with NewsHour Economics correspondent Paul Solmon

PBS NewsHour Economics correspondent Paul Solmon.

Finally, someone else in the media is protesting the use of the word "entitlements" for Social Security and Medicare. Art Pronin at TaylorMarsh writes:

The term “entitlement” is one of late I have begun using and should not. And you should not. Obama calls SS, Medicare and Medicaid “entitlements,” but this a term no Democrat should use. Why?:

“Entitlement” is a misleading word because it masks the ugly reality of reducing medical aid for the poor, the disabled and anyone over 65 as well as cutting Social Security. Calling such programs entitlements is much more comfortable than describing them as what they are–Medicare, Social Security and money for good schools, unemployment insurance, medical research and public works construction that would put many thousands to work.

It’s also a Republican word. It implies that those receiving government aid have a sense of entitlement, that they’re getting something for nothing. 

Well, Art, entitlement may be a Republican word, but it’s been a popular one in recent months among our faux liberal pundits at major online news sources and the self-righteous PBS NewsHour crew. Last February, I complained to the PBS ombudsman regarding the repeated use of the term by NewsHour correspondents to describe the self-funded Social Security and Medicare programs. As a result, NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solmon and I exchanged emails on the issue, and despite our disagreement, I do appreciate the courtesy, time, and patience demonstrated by Solmon throughout our debate.

Solmon replied to my initial complaint as follows:

Dear Ms. Bergman,

As a NewsHour "regular" for a quarter century now who has covered "government entitlements" the whole time, I've been asked to respond to your complaint to the PBS Ombudsman. The plain fact is, "entitlement" implied a legal RIGHT to a benefit for more than a century, long before it acquired any "derogatory" tinge whatsoever. Indeed, "entitlement" was a term meant to cement that right, not stigmatize it, as MIT political scientist Michael Wallerstein noted in an article in 1978.

 Even today, the term "entitlement" is generally defined as "a right granted by law or contract" (wordnetweb.Princeton.edu) or "right to benefits" (Merriam Webster). Princeton's wordnetweb lists 14 definitions from different web sources, of which 12 carry this meaning. Two suggest "privilege," although even they do not mention a pejorative connotation. In Merriam Webster, this is the third of three definitions: "a belief that one is deserving of or entitled to certain privileges."

Paul Solmon

To which I replied:

Dear Mr. Solman,

I appreciate very much the great lengths you went to in order to prove that NewsHour regulars mean no disrespect to America's seniors in their use of the word 'entitlement.'

And I suppose you would also defend the punditry back in 08 who accused Hillary Clinton of feeling 'entitled' to be the next president - always said, of course, with contempt.

I would argue that words acquire different meanings over the years and 'entitlement' has definitely acquired negative connotations. I was startled the other night when the NewsHour's Gwen Ifill repeatedly badgered Jacob Lew, director of the United States Office of Management and Budget, in an attempt to provoke him into explaining why the Obama Administration’s budget didn’t address those 'entitlement' programs. Ifill repeated the word 'entitlement,' at least four consecutive times until Lew finally explained to her the Administration’s rationale for dealing with the issue. I'm sure there's a video of the interview somewhere - check it out.

I came away suspecting that NewsHour regulars are determined to cut Social Security and Medicare to defend their own 'entitlement' to government funding.

Sincerely,

Virginia Bergman

Finally Solmon rather grudgingly acknowledges that “entitlements” may have acquired negative overtones in recent years:

Dear Ms. Bergman,

You are, I can't resist acknowledging, entitled to your opinion. I simply submit that you're wrong when you impute derogation of social security to me and my colleagues on the basis of a word all of us have long used to describe it, in my case for three decades or more.

I understand that what you think you hear and what we consciously mean don't jibe. In responding, I hoped to reassure you that your fears were unwarranted. My failure notwithstanding, your persistence is instructive: 'entitlements' seems to have acquired an overtone of which I was unaware. To my considerable surprise, I was told the same about 'homosexual' just last week. It's now a pejorative, I was told. If confirmed, the word will leave my casual vocabulary, as has the 'Negro' and 'colored people' of my youth, 'Indians,' 'patsy' and 'hooligan' (anti-Irish) and who knows how many more. As may 'entitlement' with regard to retirement benefits, if the meaning has widely morphed. But if I do so it will be because I can't know what's in the heads of others until they tell me, any more than anyone can know what's in my head -- until I tell them.

As for economic motivations, both I and my wife are seniors, counting on social security and Medicare.

Sincerely,

Paul Solman

A turning point in the Obama presidency?

In the aftermath of John Boehner’s decision to put the nation’s economy at further risk with his refusal to negotiate any further with President Obama, Virginia smacks a 2008 Democratic party leader in the head and exclaims, “You could’ve had a Clinton!”

In the meantime, Howard Kurtz at the Daily Beast is speculating that the hope and change artist from 08 maybe, just maybe, has had enough:

As debt talks hit the skids yet again, the Great Compromiser seemed to finally lose his cool—has he reached his breaking point?

There was a moment—after he appealed for reason, blamed the Republicans, recited the numbers, invoked Ronald Reagan—that President Obama seemed filled with fervor.

He was not going to be party to “driving a bunch of poor kids off the Medicaid rolls,” or penalizing the “working stiffs out there,” the people who “don’t have lobbyists.”

These are standard Democratic talking points, to be sure, but when you strip everything else away, when you try to locate the remnants of the audacity of hope, this is why Obama thinks he ran for president.

As he announced the collapse of the debt negotiations Friday evening after House Speaker John Boehner pulled the plug, Obama appeared to offer an answer to those, many of them in his own party, who wonder: Does he have a breaking point?

To some diehard Democrats, Obama always seems willing to meet the opposition more than halfway in the service of getting a deal done. He put their sacred programs, Medicare and Social Security, on the table without securing a Republican commitment to raise a dollar in taxes. His own partisans weren’t clear whether he had a line in the sand that he would refuse to cross.

Read more:

The game of chicken between the Republicans and Obama

Photo credits: Public Domain

In a recent post titled “The End Game: Saving Obama from Himself,” Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of the American Prospect, offers some disturbing insights into the game of chicken being played out over the budget deficit between the Republicans and President Obama. 

The most likely losers in this game? You guessed it, the unemployed, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor.

Kuttner writes:

As the debt doomsday of August 2 draws closer, what sort of end-game can we imagine? The worst scenario would be for an outbreak of common sense and self-interest to overtake the extremism of the House Republican caucus. If the Republicans were to accept Obama's proffered deal, they would weaken Social Security and Medicare -- and put the Democrats' fingerprints on the deed -- depriving Democrats of their traditional defense of America's best loved social programs. They would also get a ten-year deficit-reduction agreement that is mostly program cuts. And they would get an austerity package that guarantees high unemployment as Obama heads into a difficult re-election. And a Democratic president is offering this deal!

The Republicans would also get to savor the spectacle of a badly divided Democratic Party, as the White House twists arms of unwilling House and Senate Democrats to vote for a right-wing package.

It's quite a drama. Who will save us from a perverse approach to deficit reduction that is bad economics and worse politics -- the unreality of the Republicans, or the principled resistance of rank and file Democrats?

Obama and his advisers, weirdly, believe that his stance as "the only grownup in the room" who forces his own party to abandon its core principles for the sake of an austerity program will somehow win the gratitude of voters struggling with declining incomes and rising joblessness.

The unemployment may be stuck near ten percent, but good old Obama brokered a deal to balance the budget in 2021. So re-elect this man.

On which planet is this?

Read more:

Obama and Boehner in sync on a debt limit deal – who knew?

So I sat through the NewsHour this evening and listened to the analysis of David Brooks and Ruth Marcus with Jim Lehrer. 

Discussing the ongoing debt limit negotiations between Democratic and Republican leaders, both Brooks and Marcus visibly brightened at the prospect that Obama and Boehner were ready to make a big deal on the debt limit in which Obama would sell out Social Security and Medicare. Brooks even went so far as to happily mention that Obama is “sticking the knife in Pelosi.”

We all knew that, right?

Here’s the transcript of most of the erudite threesome’s remarks on the debt limit:

JIM LEHRER: Why is there -- are the prospects for the biggest deal better than for the medium deal or the little deal? What's happening?

RUTH MARCUS: Well, I'm not sure they're better, but the argument for the bigger deal and the reason that we might see a bigger deal is, bigger isn't just better in this circumstance. It actually might be easier, because you can trade off more different parts and more different constituencies.

And the Republicans -- Boehner, in order to get his Republicans, needs some Social Security cuts. And, so...

JIM LEHRER: And that takes -- the Democrats can get -- they can get some...

RUTH MARCUS: And then Democrats -- and the Democrats need a trillion dollars in tax revenue. And so maybe you can play around and make it look like less than a trillion. And then you whisper to your friends that it is actually a trillion.

It is going to be -- what's going on behind the scenes is absolutely fascinating. The oddest couple around is the president and the speaker. They are completely in synch in wanting to get this done.

DAVID BROOKS: Everyone else...

RUTH MARCUS: Whether they will -- everybody else, not so much.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Everyone else is miserable here.

JIM LEHRER: How do you explain that? What -- what has happened to make Obama and Boehner -- beyond just being golf partners?

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Two things. One, I think they both seriously think the country has a problem, a deficit problem.

JIM LEHRER: OK. They agree that the debt limit, too, is a problem.

DAVID BROOKS: They agree, right.

And, third, incumbents have mutual incentives. The party of the incumbents wants to get reelected. If Obama cuts a deal, he's very likely to get reelected. If Boehner changes the trajectory of spending, he can say, we came to Washington. We did it.

And so, secretly, what's going on here is that Obama is really sticking the knife in Nancy Pelosi, making it unlikely that she's going to get -- get the speakership. And Boehner, if he cuts a deal, is hurting Mitt Romney or whoever the Republican nominee is.

And so the party of the incumbents are sticking together and hurting the party of the outs.

JIM LEHRER: Wow.

RUTH MARCUS: Do we have time?

JIM LEHRER: ... do you agree?

RUTH MARCUS: I mostly agree.

JIM LEHRER: You mostly agree?

That is as far as we can go. Sorry, Ruth. Good to see you.

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: Nice to see you

To read the transcript in its entirety, go here.

Nancy Pelosi defends traditional Democratic values, or not?

There’s a lot of ambiguity in this story from Politico on Nancy Pelosi’s attempts to hold the line against the Obama Administration’s gradual caving to Repubs on sacrificing Social Security and Medicare in order to continue subsidizing the wealthiest Americans who are apparently entitled to huge tax breaks.

As “torn” as she may be, though, Pelosi does at last seem to grasp that Barack Obama, her idol of  2008, the inheritor of Camelot and all, is best described as a chameleon who changes colors to fit whatever context in which he finds himself.

Politico’s Jonathan Allen has the scoop:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is back at the bargaining table — but it’s not yet clear whether she’s willing to make a deal.

Burned by President Barack Obama’s decision to keep her out of negotiations on last year’s tax deal and this spring’s budget bill, sources close to the California Democrat say she is torn between playing deal-maker on a debt limit increase and fully protecting the priorities of Democrats’ liberal base.

On Thursday, in advance of a Friday meeting with the president at the White House, Pelosi lit into Obama’s budget director, Jack Lew, in what is becoming a habit of sending sharp messages through his top aides. Pelosi sought to impress on Lew — and no doubt his bosses at the White House — that House Democrats expect to be consulted more now than on past deals and that the president can’t expect to win passage of a debt limit package without support from House Democrats.

Read more: