A Deal? You Can’t Handle a Deal!

The GOP has a shortage of a few good men

Ezra Klein had a short piece last week that gets to the root of the false equivalence syndrome that has infected so much of the Beltway media. Pundits like to distribute the blame for gridlock in Washington evenly; it preserves their reputation as bipartisan, straight-shooting pragmatists, even though all the evidence points to the absolute Republican intransigence on taxes as the real stumbling block. Thus, columnists like David Brooks can write, with a straight face, that while Republicans refuse to compromise on taxes, Democrats and President Obama are similarly stiff-necked about cutting spending, particularly spending on entitlements. As Derek Thompson writes at the Atlantic, “When negotiations between Republicans and Democrats are breaking down (which is to say, on weekdays), Washington centrists savor being above the fray and blaming each side. But occasionally they float so far above the fray that they disappear into the exosphere of evenhandedness and lose sight of the details on the ground.”

The problem is, this convenient penchant for evenhandedness doesn’t stand up to even the mildest scrutiny. James Fallows points out that “Obama has already conceded certain points that had been vaunted as game-changers, without any change in the game.” Republicans have taken all revenues, ever, off the table; even closing tax loopholes is now verboten, as every dime of those savings must be used in pursuit of their ultimate goal of lower marginal rates. Obama is not only willing to make spending cuts – his latest offer includes $1.1 trillion in cuts for a paltry $680 billion in revenue – but more than willing to make a deal on entitlements. Indeed, he has been so willing to curb Medicare spending that Mitt Romney just spent the last election demonizing the president for taking money from seniors. The inability of the media to admit that Obama has more than met Republicans halfway plays right into the hands of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, who do their best to perpetuate the myth that Democrats are just as stubborn. The sequester-mandated cuts will persist, proclaims Paul Ryan, “until the president is willing to do an agreement that deals with the entitlement problem and the debt crisis.They ignore the spending cuts the president proposes, characterizing his plan as all tax hikes. The meme is picked up by ostensibly fact-hungry journalists, like those at the Wall Street Journal, who write “President Barack Obama’s demand for new revenue is a central reason the two political parties haven’t come to agreement on a strategy for replacing the cuts” when it could just as easily be said that “Congressional Republicans’ demand for not a dime of new revenue is a central reason the two political parties haven’t come to an agreement on a strategy for replacing the cuts.” Likewise, Politico describes the situation thus: “Both sides have fiercely clung to their starting points — Obama has insisted that a solution include a balance of spending cuts and new revenues, while Boehner has dismissed any tax hikes out of hand.” It fails to note that Obama’s starting point already includes a concession to Republicans; if his position were equivalent to Boehner’s, he would be refusing to entertain any solution but tax increases.

You can legitimately criticize the president for being a poor negotiator; there’s a valid case, made by Bill Keller and others, that Obama should have driven a harder bargain in December prior to the “fiscal cliff,” when taxes were set to automatically increase and he had maximum leverage over Republicans. Instead, he cut a deal that included barely half the revenues he wanted and pushed the fight over the sequester three months into the future, when the playing field would tilt in the GOP’s favor. Now, the default setting is spending cuts, not tax hikes, and the pressure to cut a deal has been lifted from Republican shoulders. The administration has also suffered from serial underestimation, first of the GOP’s willingness to discuss further revenues after the fiscal cliff, and then of the power of the sequester’s defense cuts to force Boehner and McConnell back to the bargaining table. It might have been a savvier political move to allow the sequester to take effect in January, when there were still three months for the country to feel its pain before the March 27 deadline for Congress to pass a continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown. This might have given Obama more room to press for higher taxes as part of the CR; instead, the president has caved and consented to pass a CR fixing spending at the low levels of the sequester. Paul Begala writes at The Daily Beast that Obama has repeatedly underestimated the opposition, saying prior to the debt ceiling crisis that “I’ll take John Boehner at his word” that he wouldn’t put the credit rating of the United States at risk just to score political points. Begala suggests that the president’s “cardinal political error has been that at times he seems to lack the imagination to even conceptualize how truly nihilistic, irresponsible, partisan, and, yes, crazy his Republican opponents areAll these fine points, however, amount to strategic errors. They paint the president as a lousy negotiator, not a dishonest one. And they assume that any amount of leverage would have been enough to extract further tax increases from a party whose only cohesive identity rests on preventing tax increases. How does even the best negotiator in the world negotiate with an opponent whose idea of negotiation is shooting the hostage?

The Atlantic’s James Fallows passes on a front page that he describes as “False Equivalence: The Pictorial Edition.”

It’s in the GOP’s best interest to promote itself as willing to negotiate yet stymied by the refusal of the president to engage on, say, meaningful entitlement reform. It absolves the party from ever having to confront its own inability to compromise. Hey, it’s not our fault, the other guy won’t give an inch either! Americans would be a lot more likely to blame Republicans if they realized the reality of the situation, and Republicans might be forced to admit that, well, yes – all they really care about is low taxes, and no matter what the president offers them, from a straight repeal of Obamacare to the elimination of Rick Perry’s notorious third cabinet department, will force them to budge. If responsibility for gridlock is distributed equally between the Party of No and the Party of Compromise, if complete intransigence is rewarded just the same as meeting the opposition halfway, what is the incentive for moving toward the middle? are Incidentally, this also shields them from a public far more willing to raise taxes on the wealthy than the far-right representatives they elect. Thus, we have the ridiculous spectacle of Republicans calling for reforms – Medicare cost-sharing, etc. – that they insist the president will never stomach . . . but that are listed on the White House’s own website as reforms the president is quite open to. “Republicans are debating their strategy as if President Obama’s offer consists solely of making rich people pay more taxes,” Jonathan Chait marvels at New York Magazine. “They won’t acknowledge his actual offer, which includes large cuts to retirement programs.”

Take a look at this amazing back-and-forth between John Boehner and David Gregory, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Props to Gregory for holding the Speaker’s feet to the fire, but the real story here is Boehner’s utter inability to answer the question. Instead, he dodges, returning to his talking point of “but we already got higher taxes” (never mind the pesky $1.5 trillion in cuts that preceded them). The president is willing to cut spending, Gregory says. Boehner, as if not hearing Gregory at all, responds: When is the president going to cut spending?

Gregory: Again, and the president has laid this out, he is serious about tackling the long-term spending problem, including dealing with Medicare, but he said it here. There’s an ironclad rule that Republicans have. No new revenue. And without that, there can be no deal.

Boehner: David, the president got $650 billion of higher taxes on the American people on January the first. How much more does he want, one. When is the president going to address the spending side of this?

Gregory tries again. “But the president, is he not committed to spending? Does his deal that we saw on the table not include over $900 billion in spending cuts over 10 years?” Boehner’s reply is no reply at all. “We’ve got a long-term spending problem that has to be addressed.” Does he think $900 billion doesn’t begin to address the problem? Does he have an alternative proposal? He never bothers to say.

Another portion of the interview is even more surreal, as Gregory points out that Obama has offered many of the same proposals that the GOP identifies as necessary for a deal:

Gregory: But he’s for means testing for wealthier Americans. He’s got that on the table according to the White House. And he’s for what’s called in this town chain CPI, which is basically a reduction in benefits over time. How is that not being serious about the long-term entitlement problem?

Boehner: Well, then why haven’t Senate Democrats passed the President’s plan? The House has passed a plan twice, over the last ten months, to replace the sequester. Senate Democrats have done nothing. It’s time for them to vote. It’s time for us to get back to regular order here in Congress.

Why hasn’t the Senate passed the plan? Well, Mr. Boehner, you may not understand this, but the Senate works a bit differently than the House, which you run as your personal fiefdom. Unlike Harry Reid, you don’t have to give a flying fig about the minority party unless you can’t muster sufficient votes in your own caucus — as has happened, to your abject embarrassment, more than a few times this year. You see, there’s something in the Senate called the filibuster. Senate Democrats have been united behind the president’s plan. It’s time for them to vote? They’ve voted. They’ve won a majority for the president’s plan. But because it takes 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate, a handful of Republicans have been able to block it. That’s what passes for “regular order” in the Senate. And as for the plan you’ve supposedly passed to replace the sequester? Both votes were in the last Congress, and died when that session expired. Why won’t you vote on a replacement plan again? Well, because you wouldn’t even be able to get a bare majority of your party to vote for it. Boehner executes a similar dodge when he attempts to deny that the president has a plan to replace the sequester. Reminded that, actually, the president does have such a plan, he blathers, “Well, David that’s just nonsense. If he had a plan, why wouldn’t Senate Democrats go ahead and pass it?” Again, see: filibuster, abuse of.

Boehner is able to avoid talking about the president’s concessions on the CPI and means-testing by simply refusing to respond to Gregory. Other Republicans, when asked the same questions, come off sounding just as lame. The Times reports on an interview with Sen. Susan Collins:

“The president has to go first with plans for Medicare and Social Security,” she said. “Then I think you will see more receptivity on the Republican side to an overhaul of the tax code” that raises more revenue.

Right. Until he puts forward those plans, at which point it will be revealed that Collins’ language is really just code for signing on to the Republican plans for Medicare. She and her colleagues don’t want a plan, they want a concession: premium support or nothing. Thus are the goalposts moved, and the scary day on which the GOP might actually have to admit that it has no price for compromise at all – new revenues are a no sale, no matter the collateral. And then perhaps even centrist pundits will have to acknowledge that what is standing in the way of a grand bargain is not the administration’s unwillingness to meet Republicans halfway but Republicans’ own constant shifting of the very definition of “halfway.” They’re not waiting for the president to move halfway; they’re waiting to get their way.

This is why Sen. Lindsey Graham can go on Face the Nation and say things like “I’m willing to raise $600 billion in new revenue, if my Democratic friends would be willing to reform entitlements” when the members of his party who actually set the agenda — McConnell and Boehner — are on the next channel over declaring the GOP to be “done” with tax increases. Graham can “have it both ways,” as John Dickerson writes at Slate. He comes off as sounding reasonable, but ultimately benefits from his ability, aided and abetted by a press corps that won’t call him on it, to “proclaim the desire for a compromise approach, but then raise the bar on specific measures well beyond any reasonable standard.”

It would be nice if someone would actually hold these liars accountable, and Ezra Klein makes a worthy stab at it. He sits in on an off-the-record briefing with “one of the most respected Republicans in Congress” who seems genuinely clueless that Obama has endorsed every one of the savings and spending cuts that the GOP champions. Here’s a sample exchange:

Would it matter, one reporter asked the veteran legislator, if the president were to put chained-CPI — a policy that reconfigures the way the government measures inflation and thus slows the growth of Social Security benefits — on the table?

“Absolutely,” the legislator said. “That’s serious.”

Another reporter jumped in. “But it is on the table! They tell us three times a day that they want to do chained-CPI.”

“Who wants to do it?” said the legislator.

“The president,” replied the reporter.

“I’d love to see it,” laughed the legislator.

He can see it at the White House website, where the president’s plan — a one page summary, hardly heavy reading for the busy legislator — clearly lists $130 billion in “spending savings from Superlative CPI with protections for most vulnerable.” (The red box in the graphic.) In fact, during a speech to the National Association of Business Economics, administration economist Alan Krueger recently showed the audience how Obama’s proposal popped up on a page of Google search results and joked, “You can try this at home.”

It’s a bird, it’s a plane . . . It’s Obama’s plan!

Klein delves into some other policies that Republicans list as prerequisites for a deal on the sequester, like means-testing Medicare and reducing entitlement spending, that the GOP flat-out denies are part of the president’s offer. Mitch McConnell wants Obama to get behind “serious means-testing for high-income people” on Medicare . . . and the president has done just that. His online plan includes $35 billion in savings from “asking[ing] the most fortunate to pay more,” which refers to the goal, outlined in the White House’s most recent budget (also online, for your reading pleasure) of increasing income-based premiums for wealthy seniors by 15 percent until a quarter of all beneficiaries pay the higher prices. (See the blue box.) Part of the $35 billion would also come from “encourag[ing] beneficiaries to seek high value health care,” a reference to surcharges on Medigap supplemental insurance policies that insulate seniors from health care costs by covering medical expenses without co-pays or deductibles. Medigap is a favorite Republican target; Klein points to Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch as a particular champion of curtailing the policies, which he believes encourage beneficiaries to “use about 25 percent more services than Medicare enrollees who have no supplemental coverage.”

Though Klein’s efforts to get to the roots of the false equivalence dilemma is commendable, the conclusion he draws — that “some of the gridlock in Washington is simply the result of poor information” — is far too charitable, suggesting that “what we have here is a failure to communicate.” He acknowledges that the real stumbling block is the GOP’s refusal to compromise on taxes; as McConnell said on Sunday, “I haven’t heard a single Senate Republican say they would be willing to raise a dime in taxes to turn off the sequester,” a statement that would be inconceivable coming from Harry Reid, who would hardly say that not a single Seante Democrat would be willing to cut a single dime of government spending. Yet Klein continues to maintain that “what shouldn’t be holding an agreement up is that top Republicans simply don’t know the compromises the White House is willing to make on Medicare and Social Security.”

This is nonsense. As David Firestone writes at the New York Times’ editorial page blog:

There isn’t a Republican in Washington — or even a casual viewer of cable news — who doesn’t know what Mr. Obama’s plan is, and what it has been ever since Republicans started the debt-ceiling crisis in 2011. He wants a mix of tax revenues and spending cuts to lower the deficit. He’s not pushing a plan of all tax hikes, and he’s not buying the Republican demand for all cuts. He’s the one willing to compromise.

Klein is too generous in extrapolating from the professed ignorance of one Congressman to conclude that the GOP leadership is really in the dark about the president’s negotiating positions. I’m willing to accept that there are a lot of stupid Republicans in Congress – Michele Bachmann and Paul Broun (the intellectual light who described evolution and the Big Bang Theory as “lies straight from the pit of Hell”), among many others, are living proof. But Boehner and McConnell, to say nothing of self-professed budget wonk Paul Ryan, are not that stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing when they deny, in a flat contradiction of the “reality-based community,” that Obama is as stiff-necked as they. Ryan, in fact, tells Post columnist Ruth Marcus that the sequester-mandated cuts will continue “until the president is willing to do an agreement that deals with the entitlement problem and the debt crisis.” What part of Obama’s willingness to give on entitlements — the same entitlements that Ryan and his running mate spent the last election vowing to preserve — and reduce the deficit has Ryan missed? Jonathan Chait is similarly skeptical, noting that “One of the most useful sentences of all time was uttered by Upton Sinclair, who said, ‘It is impossible to make a man understand something if his livelihood depends on not understanding it.'”

People’s understanding of reality is filtered through a prism reflecting all sorts of things other than reality, self-interest being among them. The information floating in the heads of members of Congress isn’t just the collection of the best data available to them. They read news largely from conservative news sources dedicated to framing issues from the perspective of the party’s decisions. They rely on like-minded partisans to help them make sense of the issues – especially on fiscal policy, which is complex. All this is to say that, if Obama could get hold of Klein’s mystery legislator and inform him of his budget offer, it almost certainly wouldn’t make a difference. He would come up with something – the cuts aren’t real, or the taxes are awful, or they can’t trust Obama to carry them out, or something.

Ezra Klein may not be fooled, but he’s one 28-year-old with a blog at the Washington Post, and the rest of the False Equivalence brigade has effectively fallen for the ploy. As Brad DeLong would say, Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?

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UPDATE: In a depressingly hilarious follow-up to his “Failure to Communicate” post, Klein relents: “File this under ‘Jonathan Chait is right.'” What disabused Klein of his sunny optimism? An eye-opening Twitter spat with Republican strategist Mike Murphy that showcases just how dishonest the GOP has become. Informed that the president has indeed volunteered every item that Murphy lists as a prerequisite for negotiations, Murphy proceeds to lard on more requirements, moving the goalposts instead of risking the prospect of admitting that there is nothing Obama could ever offer to spur the GOP to compromise. “Their objections to the deals on the table aren’t sincere,” writes Paul Krugman. “If convinced that Obama has met their demands, they just make more demands.”

Murphy, who has worked with John McCain and Mitt Romney, penned a Time column in February in which he wrote that “six magic words can unlock the door to the votes inside the Republican fortress: Some beneficiaries pay more and chained CPI, budgetary code for slightly lowering benefit increases over time.” Klein documents a Twitter exchange that begins with New York Times reporter John Harwood pointing out that, lo and behold, the magic words have been spoken! Murphy then denies this.

Oh, dear. Obama did propose chained CPI as part of the cliff deal — and he’s proposed it as part of that pesky online proposal to replace the sequester. The Twitterverse reminds Murphy of this, at which point he decides that the “six magic words” just aren’t magical enough anymore. (Or maybe there are now seven magic words. Who knows.) He does just what Chait predicted in Part 1 of his thesis; he “comes[s] up with something: the cuts aren’t real, or the taxes are awful.”

Then Murphy retweets something that proves Part 2 — “or they can’t trust Obama to carry them out” — as well.

Next is the most revealing tweet of all, in which Murphy reveals his real goal all along: Obama should just knuckle under and do what the GOP wants. The six magic words were never going to be enough to “unlock the door” to Republican votes. The magic words he actually needs to hear from Obama number only five: “I give up, you win.”

Klein points out that Obama did move first on spending — see the $1.8 trillion in cuts signed into legislation in 2011, with no accompanying tax increases — but that “it didn’t seem to build much trust.” He admits that “the bottom line on American budgetary politics right now is that Republicans won’t agree to further tax increases and so there’s no deal to be had.” Klein’s return to reality — no, the GOP really isn’t interested in compromise — is worth quoting at length. It’s not much different from what Chait and others, like James Fallows at the Atlantic, have been writing for months, but it does highlight Klein’s knack for boiling down big issues. Since both the Republican negotiating stance — no compromise, and thus no deal — and the Republican policy stance — cutting entitlements instead of taxing the wealthy — are unpopular, it is “important for Republicans to prove that it’s the president who is somehow holding up a deal.” He continues:

This had led to a lot of Republicans fanning out to explain what the president should be offering if he was serious about making a deal. Then, when it turns out that the president did offer those items, there’s more furious hand-waving about how no, actually, this is what the president needs to offer to make a deal. Then, when it turns out he’s offered most of that, too, the hand-waving stops and the truth comes out: Republicans won’t make a deal that includes further taxes, they just want to get the White House to implement their agenda in return for nothing. Luckily for them, most of the time, the conversation doesn’t get that far, and the initial comments that the president needs to “get serious” on entitlements is met with sage nods.

The ultimate takeaway? The hunt for the ever-elusive Grand Bargain has been called off: “As long as the GOP’s position is they won’t compromise, there’s not going to be a compromise.”

One interesting question is how long the president will continue to negotiate in good faith when, no matter what he does or how realistic the proposals he puts forth, he is routinely accused of doing the opposite. Just as Republicans have learned to work the Beltway media’s false equivalence syndrome to their advantage, realizing that they can get away with utter intransigence while still only shouldering half the blame for Washington’s dysfunction, will Obama eventually conclude that there is no use in offering up carrots like chained CPI that infuriate his base? Unlike Boehner, of course, he’s not in danger of losing his job if he strays from the party line. But there are already signs that the president is increasingly frustrated with the willingness of supposed “centrists” to swallow Republican propaganda. By transforming OFA, his campaign organization, into the same sort of shadowy non-profit that he has in the past criticized the GOP for using, he may be shrugging: If they already think I play by the same rules as Republicans, then why not actually play by those rules? And right on cue, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and a chorus of campaign finance reformers are wringing their hands over OFA’s “selling access” to the White House. This makes me roll my eyes. Yes, it would be nice if the FEC would crack down on the 501(4)c organizations that essentially launder money from wealthy donors into political contributions. But until the rules apply to everyone, the president has learned his lesson in unilaterally surrendering and allowing them to apply only to himself.

For evidence that Republicans are slowly catching on to the idea that Obama might start employing their own tactics against them, look no further than the feigned indignation and faux outrage among conservatives over a fairly anodyne Washington Post story on Democrats’ efforts to recapture the House in 2014. Obama, the reporters suggest (and I say suggest, because they have zero direct statements from Obama to back their thesis), has decided that any second-term achievements depend on curtailing John Boehner’s ability to throw up roadblocks at every opportunity. Well, duh. Republicans apparently find this tantamount to Mitch McConnell’s infamous declaration that his first priority was to make Obama a one-term president. Hypocrisy, cry the poor, innocent GOP’ers. They’re shocked, just shocked, to find that a political party is, uh, thinking about how to win the next election. (Can you tell I don’t really understand the kerfuffle? I read the Post story. It was pretty standard stuff, with DCCC chair Rep. Steve Israel pointing out the obvious, that “to have a legacy in 2016, he will need a House majority in 2014, and that work has to start now.” So whatever.) Obama has apparently chosen, at least on the issue of OFA and by thinking ahead to 2014, to fight fire with fire. So far, he hasn’t chosen to do so on the budget; otherwise, we’d be seeing Obama insist that deficit reduction be achieved solely with massive tax increases. If the Republican denial of reality continues, perhaps he’ll adjust his offers to fit the GOP’s version of the world. They say he’s proposing nothing but tax hikes; fine, then why not propose nothing but tax hikes?

I suspect Obama is more reasonable, and has more patience, than that. He is, in his refusal to descend to John Boehner’s level and wrestle in the mud with Republicans, comporting himself with far greater class than I would be able to muster.

Obama-Potter 2012!

Anyone who claims President Obama has “lost that 2008 magic” has obviously not seen this photo:

Seriously, this is not Photoshopped . . . Obama in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Monday. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Huffington Post has already rounded up some of the best captions floating around online, including “HOCUS POTUS,” “Has crystal ball; still doesn’t know what Biden will say next” and “I’m not sure what the Romney/Ryan energy policy is, but here is mine.”

One person who apparently does think Obama has magical powers is John Boehner, who criticized the president’s trip to drought-stricken Iowa yesterday by saying, “The president continues to blame anyone and everyone for the drought but himself.”

Barack Obama, Weather Wizard! Did he cause the hurricane in Joplin, too — just like George W. Bush conjured up Katrina from the Hogwarts Division of the Oval Office? Republican fear-mongering has reached new heights if conservatives are now claiming that a second Obama term will usher in not only a socialist revolution but a new Dust Bowl. Or maybe this is what happens when you dabble in black magic instead of proclaiming three “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas” as Gov. Rick Perry did in 2011. The hand of God is smiting you, Obama.

Student Loans and Deficit Double-Talk

Interest rates on federally subsidized student loans: the topic itself is a mouthful, and it’s a wonkish, unlikely issue to spark political debate. But the battle over interest rates, which are scheduled to increase from 3.4 to 6.8 percent in July, is shaping up to be Round 2 of the fight over the payroll tax cut. As with the payroll tax cut, leading Republicans claim to be for it in principle; they just want it to be paid for. But, as with the payroll tax battle, not everyone is staying on message. A claque of ultra-conservative House freshman are going off the ranch, once again showcasing John Boehner’s inability to control his caucus. When Republican representatives declare that they have “little tolerance” for people saddled with student debt, it illuminates the truth behind Boehner and Romney’s moderate rhetoric: the GOP doesn’t really like the principle of lower student-loan rates at all. In fact, the principle – that education is worthy of public support, that assistance to the working class is anything but money down a rat hole – is anathema to conservative ideology. Perhaps the divergent rhetoric represents genuine philosophical differences between Mitt “Massachusetts Moderate” Romney and the Tea Party, but I doubt it. Romney, ever the flip-flopper, was against low rates before he was for them, telling a student at a campaign event in Ohio that “It would be popular for me to stand up and say I’m going to give you government money to pay for your college, but I’m not going to promise that.” The real difference is that, while the party’s Tea Party element would rather self-destruct than brook an inch of compromise with Democrats (see: debt limit standoff), Boehner and Romney learned their lessons from the payroll tax cut fiasco. Republicans took a bruising in that fight, and the party’s leaders emerged just chastened enough not to relish a repeat.

Boehner and Romney have disguised Republican hostility to lower student loan rates just as they hid their opposition to a lower payroll tax behind professed concern over adding to the deficit. In both cases, statements by rank-and-file Congress members betrayed the truth of the situation. In November, Sen. John Kyl derided the cut as bad economics, saying, “the payroll tax holiday has not stimulated job creation; this week, the Republican Senate candidate for Missouri claimed that federal intervention in the loan market was giving America “stage three cancer of socialism.” (To which President Obama responded, “Just when you think you’ve heard it all in Washington, somebody comes up with a new way to go off the deep end.”) North Carolina Representative Victoria Foxx – who heads the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training, of all things – earned a mention from President Obama himself for declaring that:

I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt, because there’s no reason for that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t sit on your butt and have it dumped in your lap.

Naturally, she voted against the original legislation to cut the interest rate in half, slamming it as “big-government takeover.” The conservative intelligentsia has been opposed to government loan programs for years, preferring to leave the entire enterprise to the private market. The Wall Street Journal editorial page regularly blames tuition assistance for driving up the cost of college – which it possibly does, though the state-level evisceration of public support for universities really hasn’t helped the matter either. At the core of the argument, however, is the standard Republican disdain for anyone they perceive as being “on the dole.” National Review writer Victor Davis Hanson actually has the audacity to ask, “If our students are burdened with oppressive loans, why do so many university rec centers look like five-star spas? Student cell phones and cars are indistinguishable from those of the faculty.” Need I point out that the wealth of the institution, especially institutions like Harvard with billion-dollar endowments, is hardly connected to the wealth of the students? Then there are conservatives who praise the decline of public support for higher ed:

When it comes to higher education, limited state budgets have resulted in tuition increases at public college and universities. These increases, in turn, have rebalanced the undergraduate enrollment away from majors dominated by liberal faculty — sociology, gender studies, environmental science — and toward more practical, ideologically neutral subjects, such as finance, engineering, and computer science.

There’s a silver lining to everything, I suppose.

Boehner’s insistence that he planned to extend low rates all along and that the president is “trying to invent a fight where there wasn’t and never has been one” is belied by the fact that the budget endorsed by 228 House Republicans explicitly calls for rates to double. The necessity of offsetting the cost is also a red herring, as the GOP finds its own pet initiatives well worth “worth borrowing money from China,” as Mitt Romney would say. Want to cut taxes? Pile on the debt. Want to put money in the pockets of people who actually have jobs – instead of those saint-like “job creators”? Whoa, Nelly; we’ve got to pay for that! In the GOP worldview, even disaster assistance for hurricane victims must be offset. There is little logic to these contradictory positions, though I suspect Republicans would try to argue that tax cuts, unlike student loan assistance, “pay for themselves” by increasing revenue. The problem with this theory is that even conservative economists, including current Romney adviser Gregory Mankiw, don’t pretend that tax cuts can pay for themselves; at most, Mankiw concludes, they can make up for one-third of their cost.

This only demonstrates the degree to which Republicans are held intellectually hostage to supply-side economics. They are so enthralled by the notion that tax cuts for the wealthy goose the economy that they refuse to believe that cuts for lower-income people have any impact at all. If the Republican criteria for a program not requiring offsets is potential to stimulate the economy (as they insist is the case for Eric Cantor’s recent proposal to give small businesses a 20% tax break), the argument could easily be made that the payroll tax cut and student loan assistance are stimulus measures as well. Only someone who doesn’t believe that a lack of demand has any role in the recession, despite the fact that consumer spending accounts for three-fourths of the economy, could believe that $1 trillion in debt prevents young adults from spending money on houses, cars or other goods. Somewhere, Paul Krugman is slapping his palm to his forehead.

The campaign for Cantor’s “small business” bill was notable for the absolute absence of any talk of offsets. Boehner praised the Republican proposal to pay for lower student loan rates by slicing money from an “Obamacare slush fund” (a designation labeled a “Pants on Fire” lie by PolitiFact — in reality, it’s the Department Health and Human Services will use establish prevention and public health programs) for “not adding a dime to the deficit.” Meanwhile, Cantor’s jobs bill provoked not a squeak about deficits or borrowing. It wasn’t that Cantor tried to pass off a tax cut as a revenue-booster; he simply didn’t offer any explanation at all, and no one – neither Republican nor Democrat – called him out on it. I can understand why the GOP would be reluctant to point out this inconsistency, but where were Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? For that matter, where was David Axelrod? While leading Republicans were tweeting about the president eating dog meat, the Obama team could have been calling attention to this rank hypocrisy. After insisting that one tax cut be offset, why weren’t Republicans proposing to offset the latest tax cut as well? It proves Steve Benens’s tart observation that conservatives are not interested in real debt reduction: “It’s almost as if Republicans panicking about an alleged “debt crisis” don’t really believe their own rhetoric, and only use the line to rationalize brutal cuts to domestic investments that they oppose anyway.”

Even more inexplicable, however, was how little the media did to break the deafening silence. Not a single interviewer pressed Cantor or Boehner about the discrepancy at the time – and since then, to compound the error, the press has continued to shirk its duty. Days after calling for a bill estimated to reduce government revenue by $46 billion, Boehner is now adamant about offsetting one worth $6 billion. Has the phrase “penny wise, pound foolish” ever been more apt? The closest the fourth estate came to questioning the Republican rationale for the small-business tax break was this, from the AP:

The tax break would cost the government $46 billion in lost revenue – money that would add to deficits that are already huge. Catching Democrats’ attention was an estimate by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which studies tax legislation, that 49 percent of the bill’s benefits would go to employers making more than $1 million annually.

Yet no one called Boehner on the carpet. Plenty of pundits challenged the economics of the bill: Bruce Bartlett noted that any “small” business (a category defined by having fewer than 500 employees), including Paris Hilton and the Los Angeles Dodgers, would be entitled to the 20% break, even if it never created a single job. But the convenient disappearance of once-mandatory offsets never made it into a news article. In recent days, Senator Jess Sessions of Alabama blocked a measure to bail out the U.S. Postal Service because “the bill would increase the federal deficit by $34 billion. In other words, the spending and debt under the postal bill violates the debt limit agreement reached just last summer.” The Budget Control Act prevents the Senate from considering legislation that will increase the deficit, which proves just how cynical Cantor’s small-business tax break really is. It may have given House Republicans a nice talking point, but it never had a chance of becoming law.

Other gaping holes in Boehner’s logic have also gone unnoticed. Attempting to pin the slated rate hike on the opposition, the GOP decried the fact that “Democrats put in place a law that would double interest rates for student loans this year.” It’s a bit like castigating Republicans for raising taxes . . . because, after all, they knew in 2001 that the Bush cuts would expire in 2010.

Democrats are finally going on the defensive, protesting the Republican plan to use health care funds as an offset — though, to my knowledge, no one has brought up Cantor & Co.’s about-face on adding to the deficit. Criticizing the House proposal, Harry Reid said: “They would pay for it by stopping Americans from getting preventive healthcare. That doesn’t sound like a very good deal to me.” Because much of the preventative healthcare comprises services to women — screenings for breast and cervical cancer, prenatal testing — Nancy Pelosi has called the Republican plan “an assault on women’s health.” About the “Obamacare slush-fund,” she said:

Well, it may be a slush fund to him, but it’s survival to women . . . . And that just goes to show you what a luxury he thinks it is to have good health for women.

While it may be a stretch to tie interest rates on student loans into the ostensible GOP “war on women” (and, really, casting every single disagreement as a “war” degrades both parties), at least Democrats are highlighting the costs of offsets. Republicans were indignant when President Obama referred to the Ryan budget as “social Darwinism,” yet days later, the GOP floats a proposal that pits students against women and against the rest of the middle class. If that’s not social Darwinism, I don’t know what is.

Republicans’ Kids Are Probably Brats

I’ve finally figured out the right analogy for the debt-ceiling “option” that Mitch McConnell proposed yesterday. In a Times op-ed, Nicholas Kristof describes it like this: “Congressional Republicans would invite President Obama to raise the debt ceiling on his own, and then they would excoriate him for doing so.” Through some Constitutional gymnastics, Obama would ask Congress to raise the debt limit, conservatives would “disaprove” of the increase, Obama could veto that disapproval, and the the increase would be sustained. To add insult to injury, the President would be forced to come begging to Congress as many as three times before the 2012 elections, as the debt ceiling would only be raised incrementally, instead of in one $2.4 trillion swoop. Oh — and Obama would have to detail spending cuts equal to each increase.

Well. Mitch, why don’t you just take your ball and go home?

At any rate, I have been hunting for a better analogy than the old refusing-to-pay-the-Visa-bill trope that every reporter seems to trot out. The decision to raise the debt limit reminds me of the choice between paying for groceries on credit and letting your children starve. Yeah, racking up debt is bad, but are you going to tell Bobby and Suzie to fast for a week?

The best analogy for McConnell’s proposal, however, is that of the parent who’s too afraid to discipline his child. He wants to be his kid’s best friend, so he makes his wife out to be the bad guy. It’s always Mom who sets the bedtime, Mom who takes away the cookies and puts her foot down when Junior wants to use the family cat for target practice. So Mom gets the blame, and Dad can tell the kid, “Hey, your mother just doesn’t know how to have fun.” Likewise, McConnell and Boehner can’t control their Tea Party colleagues, so they’ve designed a plan that absolves them of any adult responsibility. There won’t be any Republican fingerprints on the debt increase, so GOP candidates can keep telling voters, “Hey, we’re not the ones on a liberal spending spree!”

President Obama wants Washington, D.C., to eat its peas, but at this rate, it looks like he’s going to be having dinner in Michelle’s organic White House garden alone.