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The president’s FY 2013 budget has just been released, and before you read much of anything else about it, you should check out (speaking of JournoList!) Ezra Klein’s introduction to it in this morning’s WaPo.
As Ezra indicates, the hallmark of this budget is a bit more honesty than is customary in such documents. It seeks to implement the intentionally-vague and indirect spending “sequesters” in last year’s deficit reduction deal. It no longer pretends that repealing or extending the Bush tax cuts is any thing other than an explicit policy decision rather than continuation of a “baseline.” And it also doesn’t pretend Obama can or should keep a 2009 pledge to reduce the budget deficit by half—any more than George W. Bush kept any of his periodic deficit reduction promises.
Now the Kabuki Theater of budget politics will begin, and you may be excused for ignoring most of it. The odds of anything other than stopgap decisions during this election year are very low, and Republicans are probably not foolish enough to present honest accountings of what their own budget blueprints would produce in the way of specific funding levels and policy changes for the popular federal safety net programs they’d like to turn inside out and upside down. Green-eyeshade season in Washington is never a lot of fun for non-wonks. This year in particular, it’s going to be that least interesting of commodities: a boring circus with tedious clowns and wild animals who hide their fangs.
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T2 on February 13, 2012 12:23 PM:
The President's Budget...an admirable exercise in responsible governance destined to be immediately rejected by "Congress" (the new Media term for Republicans in Congress). In a week or two, those foolish enough to devote a Sunday morning to Meet the Republicans...err... Meet the Press will hear our GOPers intone the following: "Obama has been in office three years and has yet to submit a budget to Congress". The moderator will remain silent.
c u n d gulag on February 13, 2012 12:23 PM:
Ed,
I think you're underestimating Rush, FOX, Glenn, on the right, and the nincompoops and morons in the MSM.
The goal of any Kabuki Theatre production where the right has any input, is to get rid of that FascistSocialistCommunistHeathenAtheistMuslim Nigra in the White House.
They'll find something to tear at their hair, rend of their garments, gnash of their teeth, and whine and howl and shriek about.
They always do.
Example:
Contraception.
They want to take this country back to the 1950's, but then, they don't even want to 'Leave It To Beaver's' to decide about birth control on their own.
After all, "Father Knows Best!"
jjm on February 13, 2012 1:10 PM:
The entire country has to be getting tired of the reactionaries. This morning's paper had two editorials on how the GOP's House transportation bill was an exercise in bile, in thumbing their collective noses at the environment and protections for it, in favor of drill baby drill and lay out highways without regard for anything in their way. And both found their proposals ludicrous.
Now I have to ask myself why the GOP insists on these disgusting things? It is not popular or populist in the least; indeed, the EPA is everyone's favorite government bureau.
No, it has to be that they are licking the boots of the Koch Brothers and the oil and coal industries under threat, presumably, of being defunded if they don't go for the whole enchilada.
Time to end this oilogarchy's tyranny.