Frankly, failure was the best thing that could have come out with this. Actually, this failure is a good start, but if you really care about deficit reduction, you are hoping that regular Congress does nothing but play Ultimate Frisbee on the Capitol Mall until 2013. Doing absolutely nothing, thereby letting the Bush tax cuts expire, would do more to fix the deficit than anything this committee could have come up with. Plus, despite what Congressional leaders and President Obama say, changing the “trigger” is always an option. A current legislature can’t bind a future legislature through statute, as much as people repeatedly try to do so.

Apparently, the lack of a deal caused the stock market to drop. Really? Either the financial wizards who run the world didn’t price into the market something as certain as the sun rising in the east, or the market just acts irrationally with or without regard to external news. Either way, it doesn’t make the “experts” look right. The most believable explanation is that the market knows this will lead to expansion-crippling austerity, just like the rest of Europe.

Good riddance to the Supercongress. I look forward to the next edition of the “Duh” files: keeping the Euro together requires rich countries subsidizing poor countries? Who knew?!

• Current Mood: Monday

Probably the most telling part of the debate was when everybody onstage was asked if they would accept a deficit reduction package of 91% spending cuts and 9% taxes. They all said no, every single one of them. For all presidential candidates in the Republican party, any tax increases are off the table. Think about that for a moment. This is a minority view in the U.S. by a big margin. According to Nate Silver, this is even to the right of the average Republican voter. At least when it comes to budget politics, the spectrum of the beliefs of the Republicans presidential candidates runs from far right to far right.

Notice what else Nate Silver’s analysis says: that average Democrats support a mix of both spending cuts and tax increases, with more cuts than taxes. This is consistent with what Democrats have proposed both at the state level and nationally. No Democrat has proposed a budget anywhere close to 91% tax increases and 9% cuts, let alone stated that a budget with any cuts whatsoever would be off the table. Nevertheless, the Republican presidential candidates are showing how far out of the mainstream they are, and how unwilling they are to compromise on anything.

The budget reality is this: Baby Boomers are retiring, and for some crazy reason they expect to get the Social Security and Medicare benefits they have been promised. Paying for this is going to require tax increases, along with spending cuts elsewhere. There is no getting around this fact. One party’s leading candidates want to wish it away. How seriously can you take these people?

• Current Mood: Friday
• Currently Listening To: "all in the name of grace", Eddy Burke
• Just Watched: Kramer vs. Kramer

You’ll notice that the defeatism has something in common: it’s coming from the Republican party. No, we can’t raise the debt ceiling, even though Reagan raised it repeatedly and the consequences of not doing so would be catastrophic. We can’t put people to work even with 9+% unemployment because the inadequate stimulus didn’t work, much like giving a person a quarter of a chemotherapy treatment doesn’t cure cancer. And we have to cut Social Security and Medicare and limit our federal government spending to some arbitrary number…well, just because. And once that is done and we cut taxes so much our deficit doesn’t go down at all, then the Jobs Unicorn will give us all jobs again!

So enough of this negativity. We can afford to fulfill the promises we made to workers through Social Security and Medicare, and that means we can’t afford to cap spending right before Baby Boomers retire. We can put people back to work improving our nation’s infrastructure and education. We can raise the debt ceiling while getting our deficit under control without plunging the country into another depression.

I shudder to think what life would be like today had this negativity gripped the country in the past: We can’t defeat the Axis, Japan destroyed our navy and Germany has almost defeated the Soviet Union! We can’t build a nationwide road infrastructure, it’s too expensive! We can’t put a man on the Moon, the Soviets beat us to space! The Iron Curtain will never fall, Solidarity is a flash in the pan, and the Soviet Union will never crumble!

That’s not the attitude that made this country what it is.

• Current Mood: Fire and brimstone
• Currently Listening To: "The Burning of the Midnight Lamp", Jimi Hendrix

There are few more direct funding mechanisms than the gas tax. It pays for pavement, pure and simple. More gas tax, more pavement. Fewer potholes. Better bridges. And yet, despite the fact that people seem to want to improve our transportation infrastructure, they don’t want to pay for it. It just boggles the mind.

You can’t get better roads without more revenue. Despite all the whinging about government “inefficiencies”, the last time I checked we weren’t building gold-plated highways. It’s not as if half of our road spending is lost to waste. Road spending is, however, lost to the fact that there isn’t enough money. If you want better roads, you have to pay for them. It’s that simple. If you don’t want to raise the gas tax, then stop complaining about the quality of our roads.

• Current Mood: Hot
• Currently Listening To: "Casey Jones", The Grateful Dead

In Greece, which is also in full meltdown mode, the sanest, most humane outcome for the Greek people would be a default on Greek bonds. Painful in the short term, but better overall in the long term. Instead, we get round after round of austerity that is supposed to improve the economy, but instead is leading to a potential death spiral. The latest idea is selling off state assets, which I guess makes sense in a perverse way: if your house is on fire and you manage to sell off the bedroom and kitchen, you can say that you now have fewer things on fire, and so you’re improving!

In both instances, the rational choices were not taken, both for ideological reasons and because it meant that the banksters would have to lose some money (the fact that at least in the U.S. there were no strong voices actively pushing for things like cramdown was also a huge problem). What’s good for the people in general isn’t what’s important; what’s important is what is best for those who already have most of the money.

As for the current deal-making on the federal deficit, the easy thing to do would be to let the Bush tax cuts expire (and winding down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq won’t hurt either). Thus, we will end up doing anything but that. It’s only reasonable!

• Current Mood: Full
• Currently Listening To: "Life In A Glasshouse", Radiohead

Everybody wants to believe that we can cut taxes and reduce the deficit while not negatively impacting any programs by simply eliminating fraud and waste. Sorry, folks, but it doesn’t work that way. If you want to cut spending, you need to make tough choices. Most of the federal budget is defense spending, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest. We aren’t spending hundreds of billions of dollars on websites for singing forest rangers. At the state level, over two thirds of the state budget is spending on K-12 education and health care for the poor and elderly in nursing homes. The expensive programs are the ones that people like, and cutting them has consequences.

There’s fraud and waste in government, sure. But not enough to mean we don’t have to make the difficult decisions about programs that people value.

• Current Mood: Cleaning
• Currently Listening To: "Over The Hills And Far Away", Led Zeppelin

Sometimes, politics is frustrating. Sure, it can be frustrating when you are losing. Political fortunes rise and fall, and I’ve seen both sides. But a lot of the frustration these days isn’t quite that, I think, especially the frustration I’m feeling. It’s the kind of frustration you get when people are playing Calvinball with reality, changing the rules of the game and the debate. Add to that a healthy scoop of ignorance about how government works both nationally and locally, and you get pretty close to the state of political discourse in the U.S. today that is leading to these general funk. How did we get here? I’m no historian, so I can’t really answer that. How did I get here personally? Ah, now that’s a question I can answer. Perhaps.

I don’t come from a political family. No activists, elected officials, union members, or anything like that. Two memories do stand out from my early childhood, however. The first is that when I was in first grade, I was the only person in my class to vote for Walter Mondale in our mock election in my private Catholic grade school. Why did I vote for him? I have no idea. The second is that one day in daycare, one of the other children used the word “f—-t” as an insult. Not knowing what it meant, I didn’t understand why it was meant to be an insult. When I was told what it meant, I still didn’t understand why it was meant to be an insult. This made me realize that hatred and fear of the “other” is something that has to be taught, it isn’t learned. I wasn’t taught to hate and fear, and for that I can thank my parents and, for the most part, my education.

Time passed. I went to Catholic schools that emphasized social justice, not waving pictures of fetuses and gays around, so fortunately I took away values like compassion and empathy. I read Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County (come on, they were good). Finally, I was handed a book by a good friend that would change my life forever: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson. For those who don’t know, it’s a book about the Democratic primaries, and then the general election in the 1972 presidential campaign, where Richard Nixon handily defeated George McGovern and sowed the seeds of his own destruction less than two years later. Written from the inside, it made politics fascinating, a game of strategy. Of course, it was also made that much more interesting by being written in Thompson’s own style. I took away a strong interest in the political process and the idea that it could be as complex as chess. Other snippets that I remember from that time are mocking Allen Quist‘s reactionary run for governor in 1994, and an extra-credit assignment I did for a current events class that required me to go to a precinct caucus, showing me how grassroots politics works in Minnesota. I also took pleasure in tweaking the establishment that was my high school administration, especially with regards to its viewpoints on things like abstinence-only education and gay rights. All of this added up to a pretty liberal outlook for me.

After high school, I went to college at the University of Minnesota. I had no desire to stay in the homogenous, conservative town that was Saint Cloud, and relished the chance to live in a more pluralistic environment. I got involved with College Democrats, and I read a lot of books on political science. Sure, I read some because that was my major, but the vast majority of them I read because I would wander over to Wilson Library, head to the section on politics, and grab every book that looked remotely interesting. I also had an instructor who helpfully put together a list of books that everybody with even a passing interest in U.S. politics should read, from a variety of perspectives. That includes a couple of books by conservative authors. Then there’s my big secret: I also read Ayn Rand.

I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, more than once. I even bought into it at some level for about a week. Once reality set in, however, and I realized that an ethos that makes selfishness its number one ideal and sees any kind of altruism as fiercely immoral, I saw it for what it was: profoundly ridiculous. Humans don’t work that way and aren’t meant to. You need aliens to capture it fully: the raw logic and lack of emotion of the Vulcans coupled with the unbridled capitalism of the Ferengi. The marriage is about as likely on Earth as it is in the Star Trek universe. Although, if the movie version of Atlas Shrugged had Vulcans and Ferengi, maybe people would have actually seen it.

Objectivism thus tried and discarded, I went back to where I had been before. And as time went on, and I went through more elections, read more (especially liberal-leaning blogs as they started up, but also a few conservative ones), followed politics, and in general lived my life, my views became what they are today: Liberal, in all the good senses of the word.

I believe in responsibility, both personal and communal. I believe in giving everybody the opportunity for a good life, through a good education, safe neighborhoods, and good health; the rest is up to them, with helping hands when people are down on their luck through no fault of their own. I believe in equality no matter who you are. I believe in true justice, not just punishment or vengeance. I believe in honesty in both the public and private spheres. I believe that we are all in this together, and that nobody is an island unto themselves.

Practically, I believe everybody should have access to health care. How this happens, I don’t care, be it single-payer, private insurance, or a mix. I believe that seniors should have a retirement of dignity and shouldn’t have to live in poverty. I believe that no matter where you live or what your parents do, you should be able to get a good education that won’t leave you illiterate and unable to be a productive member of society. I believe in welcoming people to this country who want to work and improve their lives. I believe in an economy based not on moving money around and creating financial vehicles with three-letter acronyms that nobody can understand, but one based on creating useful goods and services that actually benefit people. I believe in progressive taxation for a host of reasons, from economic to moral.

Most importantly, I believe that we should sit down and decide what kind of society we want to create, and then how we are going to pay for it. I think our currently system has it backwards: we get a number, and then figure out what it will buy. Polls seem to show that Americans don’t want to cut Social Security and Medicare, and don’t want to hurt the most vulnerable. They also don’t want to raise taxes, they want to eliminate the deficit, and they don’t want to raise the debt ceiling. Those goals aren’t simultaneously achievable. Something has got to give, but it’s generally not politically wise to point this out.

This is the root of the frustration that I am feeling today, and that many other people are feeling, I suspect, as well. I’m not old enough to remember if this was always the case. Perhaps it was. But to me, at least, it seems that the unwillingness to sit down and talk about the kind of society we want is more extreme than it has been in the past. The willful ignorance of facts feels worse. The instinct to simply change the rules when people don’t get what they want at first is much more immediate; this also goes along with smearing organizations like the Congressional Budget Office that are supposed to be non-partisan and generally are, unless people think their findings are wrong. Some of this is fear and hatred of the “other”, something I was not raised to believe (see: birthers). Some of this is the balkanization of media. Some is perhaps the lack of an overarching narrative, such as the Cold War. What is clear, though, is that this frustration can’t last forever, because with every passing year the issue of what kind of society we want becomes more pressing. We have to decide. And I know what kind of place I’d like to live in.

• Current Mood: Sneezy
• Currently Listening To: "Third Stone From The Sun", Jimi Hendrix
• Just Watched: Reality Bites

This approach to budgeting has it backwards. Instead of starting with some numbers and working to determine what we, as a state and nation, can afford, we should figure out what we want, and then how to pay for it. Do we want to provide some level of retirement income and health care for retirees? How strong do we want our military to be? Should everybody have access to health care? How about funding our schools? Should we have reasonable access to parks? How about our roads? What do we truly value?

Saying that we’ll “spread the pain” by cutting everything by some arbitrary amount is the easy way out, not only because it doesn’t require anything other than a simple algebra calculation, but because it shelters the public at large from considering exactly what is valuable to them and what isn’t. A 10% cut is a mere abstraction (and government is full of waste and fraud anyway, so a 10% cut won’t actually change things, right?). I’d be far more comfortable with eliminating programs entirely if we decided that something else was a higher priority, rather than just cutting the important and unimportant equally.

Ultimately, I put most of the blame for our current method of doing things not on elected officials, but the people themselves. Poll after poll shows a huge disconnect between what government actually pays for and what people think it pays for, as well as a huge chasm between the notion that taxes are too high, and the notion that nothing expensive should be cut. If we are going to have retirement security, a large military, access to health care, a decent infrastructure, and a first-class education system, it’s not going to be free. In fact, it will take more money than we are paying now.

So let’s be honest about our values here: what is really important?

• Current Mood: Schooled
• Currently Listening To: "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)", Jimi Hendrix

Predictably, the Republicans who are in charge of the legislature are saying it is “detached from reality”. However, they have yet to release the details of their budget proposal, which they say will not rely on new state revenues. As for property taxes, they pretend to wash their hands of them. The fact that the Minnesota Department of Revenue says that LGA cuts lead directly to property tax increases is one of those inconvenient truths that are best left ignored.

What can’t be ignored, because it is the stark reality, is the state of the MN budget. I touched on this last year apropos of Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer’s budgetary beliefs; although Emmer lost, the Republicans who took over the legislature are govern by and large in his image. Again, the quick rundown: 40% of the General Fund budget is K-12 education, 30% is health care, 10% is LGA, 10% is higher education, 10% the rest (corrections, public safety, ag, environment, the works). With a more than $6 billion budget deficit, if you are going to eschew new state revenue, you have a few options: cut funding for schools, throw granny out of the nursing home and poor people off health care, cut aid to cities and raise property taxes, raise tuition at the U of M and MnSCU schools, or just forget about our parks and prisons. None of those sound particularly good, which is why Republicans aren’t exactly champing at the bit to lay out their own budget hacks to Minnesotans.

Dayton’s budget isn’t perfect, but at least it lays out a vision for Minnesota that I can believe in: a Minnesota where the things we cherish, such as education, health care, the environment, and keeping a lid on property taxes, are prioritized. A Minnesota that acknowledges that the very wealthiest in this state haven’t been pulling their weight when compared to the middle class. A Minnesota that emphasizes community and mutual aid, instead of a playground king-of-the-hill fight. Whatever the Republican budget plan turns out to be, I can guarantee it’s not going to represent a Minnesota that I believe in.

• Current Mood: Headache
• Currently Listening To: "You Shook Me", Led Zeppelin

Of those people who said that they have not used a government social program, almost two-thirds enjoyed a 529 plan, three-fifths took advantage of the home interest mortgage deduction, and more than half used federally guaranteed student loans. Even more bizarrely, 44% of those on Social Security, 40% of those on Medicare, 28% of those on Medicaid, 27% of those on welfare, and over a quarter of those on food stamps also don’t believe they are using government programs. The first few examples are probably better described as government benefits instead of programs, but all the same, they are specific benefits created by the government available only to a certain subset of the population. Without the government, they would not exist.

If you were to add in federally guaranteed mortgages, I’d bet you’d see an incredibly high percentage who don’t realize that is also a government program. This is pretty important considering that the Obama administration wants to cut back on government support for mortgages. This would inevitably lead to more expensive mortgages, with the tradeoff of less taxpayer exposure to risks. How many people are aware of this tradeoff currently? How many people understand how the government helps the mortgage industry by keeping rates lower? Incidentally, I support the administration’s proposal, specifically the second option that essentially eliminates government support except in emergencies when credit markets freeze up.

Even though people don’t always understand when they receiving government benefits, by and large most people don’t want to cut them. A recent Pew poll shows that the only category of spending that a plurality of people support cutting is foreign aid. The only problem is that foreign aid makes up a miniscule fraction of the national budget. The big pieces: Medicare, Social Security, defense spending…they should be left alone for the most part, according to the people. At the same time, a large majority of people apparently oppose raising the debt ceiling, despite the catastrophic consequences.

What does all of this mean? Mainly that we are nowhere close to having a serious, national discussion on our budget priorities and how to pay for them. Most people have no idea what the government pays for or what government benefits they enjoy. Most people have no conception of how the budget works, or how our national debt works. Combine that with a powerful Tea Party contingent in Congress, and who knows what will happen. Government shutdown? U.S. default? It’s all coming to a head.

As the old saying goes, any road will get you there when you don’t know where you are going. The U.S. public wants to travel on the road of government benefits at no cost. That road is approaching a dead end. The question is, do we turn around or run off a cliff?

• Current Mood: Friday!
• Currently Listening To: "Brain Damage", Pink Floyd