Look what the GOP can get for $300 billion

In July 2011, Obama was reportedly ready to sign off on a grand bargain for deficit reduction that would include $800 billion in new revenue and somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 trillion in spending cuts over ten years. David Brooks said that Republicans would be crazy not take such a deal.  And that decision may pay off for them.

If Republicans can stomach the sequester and withstand pressure from defense contractors and other constituent groups, they can close the books on ten-year deficit reduction with some $2.7 trillion in spending cuts and the measly $600 billion in new revenue that Obama unaccountably settled for on Jan. 1 (plus additional interest savings).

The double catch is that even Republicans profess to dislike the sequester's indiscriminate swing of the meat ax, and Republicans also purportedly want to cut and "reform" entitlements -- though they would prefer to induce Obama to do the dirty work on that front.  And the funny thing is that he will -- if Republicans would only give ever so little on revenue. My educated guess is that if they would agree to say $200 billion worth of tax loophole closures or tightenings, Obama will go quite far in altering the structure of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

There's one other catch. Republicans would have stop doing their utmost to strangle Obamacare in the crib. That's their ticket to privatizing Medicaid and Medicare.

Consider the Rubicon on Medicaid that's been stealthily crossed in the last month. Sarah Kliff explains:

Obama the centrist

It's been a while since I checked in on Obama's weekly address. This week, the headliner is another call on Congress not to play chicken with the debt ceiling -- though based on recent polling, he's going to have to do better to explain to the public that raising the debt ceiling does not authorize new spending (not withstanding that poll's limitations).  A few other tidbits caught my eye, though:

1) While Obama paired job growth and deficit reduction, his emphasis again was on deficit reduction. That's partly a function of his focus on looming budget battles, but he still positions himself as a centrist who cuts spending while investing in the future (infrastructure, education, energy). He also invoked the confidence fairy.

2) When talking about cutting spending while preserving essential investments, Obama does not emphasize preserving Medicare and Social Security.  It's no secret to anyone not in the grip of right-wing paranoia that Obama is open to entitlement reform (though his preferred means of Medicare savings would work by squeezing providers and reducing unnecessary care by ending away from fee-for-service payments). He not only aims to transfer wealth from the wealthy to the poor and middle classes, but also, to some degree,  from the (nonpoor) elderly to children, parents of children, and broadly, "the future", via infrastructure and R&D.