The GOP budget shows us the New America that lies ahead

Larry Kummer, Editor

11 years ago

Summary: The first budget by the new Republican majority in Congress shows what lies ahead for America. It’s another tale of the New America rising on the ruins of the old, as the 1% begins the pursuit phase of the battle against us. These tales are entertainment for the outer party, just exhilaration as they boo the other tribe unless they motivate people to political action. {2nd of 2 posts today.}

“There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
— Warren Buffet, quoted in the New York Times Magazine, 26 November 2006.

Brick by brick the New America slowly rises on the ruins of the Second Republic. As we see in this week’s headline “Senate passes Republican budget with deep safety net cuts“. It’s a full-court press to reconfigure the US government to benefit the 1%. Excerpt:

The Senate passed a Republican-authored budget plan early on Friday that seeks $5.1 trillion in domestic spending cuts over 10 years while boosting military funding. … which is similar to one passed by House Republicans on Wednesday. … They also showcase the fiscal vision for Republicans, who now control both Houses of Congress for the first time since 2006 and are eager to demonstrate their ability to govern.

… The Senate budget seeks to eliminate U.S. deficits by 2025 without raising taxes through deep cuts to social safety net programs, investments in transportation and education and other domestic programs. At the same time, it proposes to boost defense spending by adding about $38 billion to an off-budget war funding account, and offers core Pentagon budget increases in subsequent years.

This is just the first step. We can expect more drastic measures in the future, shifting taxes from the 1% to us and cutting government benefits. The Hill explains (Note: block grants are a means to shift spending to the States, for easier slashing):

A conservative budget released by the House Republican Study Committee (RSC) on Monday would balance in five years by cutting $7.1 trillion in spending over the next decade.

… In fiscal 2016, it would give the Pentagon a $570 billion base budget, much more than the $523 billion the Pentagon would have under the House GOP budget. It would also meet President Obama’s nearly $51 billion request for the Defense Department’s war fund, known as the overseas contingency operations (OCO) account.

… The RSC blueprint would lower nondefense discretionary spending for domestic programs next year to $405 billion, $88 billion below the baseline set by the 2011 deal.

Altogether, discretionary spending next year would total $975 billion under the RSC’s budget, much lower than the $1.018 trillion top-line number established by the 2011 law. Over the 10-year window, the RSC budget would cut nondefense spending by $1.3 trillion and increase defense spending by $435 billion.

Between 2016 and 2025, the budget would reduce “unnecessary mandatory spending” by $1.7 trillion. This amount excludes cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The RSC plan would repeal ObamaCare through a budget tool known as reconciliation.

… The conservative budget seeks the same sort of reforms to the tax code embraced by previous Ryan budgets but dropped this year by Price — like … reducing the top individual and corporate rates to 25%. It would also roll back tax increases won by President Obama, such as the hike to the top dividend rate from 15% to 20%. And it would make changes to programs like the earned income tax credit, a tax break for the working poor that Republicans believe has too much fraud.

… the RSC budget would reform Medicare by 2020 by converting it to a premium-support system that would offer a range of coverage options to people born in 1955 or after. The plan would gradually phase in an increase in the eligibility age for those born in 1960 or after and would raise it by two months each year until the eligibility age reaches 67. The budget would also transform Medicaid by combining it with the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which expires later this year, and providing states with block grants.

… For Social Security, the RSC blueprint would eventually raise the full retirement age to 70 and would impose chained consumer price index (CPI) for Social Security benefit calculations. The proposal, which Obama had offered in previous budgets and then dropped, would result in lower benefits.

To address infrastructure issues, the budget calls for shifting the authority to state and local governments, and phase out the federal government’s authority over five years. The plan also says Congress should lower the federal gas tax, which currently funds the Highway Trust Fund.

To balance the budget through cuts, the RSC proposes eliminating or repealing a slew of government programs such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Election Assistance Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Labor Relations Board and a program that taxes Christmas trees.

The plan would also reduce funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, the IRS and foreign governments.

Why do we vote these people into office?

When Thomas Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2005) I considered his explanation to be specious about why the people of Kansas voted against their economic interests. Time has shown that he was right and I was wrong. From the excellent review in The New Yorker:

Kansas, once home to farmers who marched against “money power,” is now solidly Republican. In Frank’s scathing and high-spirited polemic, this fact is not just “the mystery of Kansas” but “the mystery of America.” Dismissing much of the received punditry about the red-blue divide, Frank argues that the problem is the “systematic erasure of the economic” from discussions of class and its replacement with a notion of “authenticity,” whereby “there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.”

The leaders of this backlash, by focussing on cultural issues in which victory is probably impossible (abortion, “filth” on TV), feed their base’s sense of grievance, abetted, Frank believes, by a “criminally stupid” Democratic strategy of triangulation. Liberals do not need to know more about NASCAR; they need to talk more about money and class.