The battle lines are drawn

From the New York Times' preview of Obama's deficit reduction plan:

In laying out his proposal, aides said, Mr. Obama will expressly promise to veto any legislation that seeks to cut the deficit through spending cuts alone and does not include revenue increases in the form of tax increases on the wealthy. 

 Glory hallelujah. That has been the missing piece all along.

But does that mean Obama is willing to pull the trigger (or see it pulled) if the supercommittee deadlocks?  He'd better be.

That sick "Obama's sliding" feeling

Bitterly disappointed as I was in Obama for letting himself be hijacked in the debt ceiling deal, I have been willing to reserve judgment through the next round -- the supercommittee negotiations -- and possibly through the endgame of the Bush tax cut expirations.  But this from Obama today triggered that "there he goes again" reflex:

Last week, we reached an agreement that will make historic cuts to defense and domestic spending.  But there’s not much further we can cut in either of those categories.  What we need to do now is combine those spending cuts with two additional steps:  tax reform that will ask those who can afford it to pay their fair share and modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare (my emphasis).

Couple that with this warning from Panetta:

Buckley goes wobbly

Christopher Buckley is always very funny and generally fair-minded. But his equivocal indulgence in the audacity of nope in response to Obama's budget strikes me as knee-jerk conservatism:

One thing is certain, however: Government is getting bigger and will stay bigger. Just remember the apothegm that a government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away. And remember what de Tocqueville told us about a bureaucracy that grows so profuse that not even the most original mind can penetrate it.

If this is what the American people want, so be it, but they ought to have no illusions about the perils of this approach. Mr. Obama is proposing among everything else $1 trillion in new entitlements, and entitlement programs never go away, or in the oddly poetic bureaucratic jargon, “sunset.” He is proposing $1.4 trillion in new taxes, an appetite for which was largely was whetted by the shameful excesses of American CEO corporate culture. And finally, he has proposed $5 trillion in new debt, one-half the total accumulated national debt in all US history. All in one fell swoop.

It's that big government bogey -- government as Santa. But what is Obama proposing to 'give' us? Marginally adequate health insurance, so that tens of millions are not bankrupted by health care bills? Schools that aren't falling down, or that graduate more than 70% of teenagers (with something better than the 8th grade reading levels with which many are now passed through)? A few tax breaks to the working poor to subsidize our Dickensian minimum wage? A modernized electrical grid, and infrastructure that's not on a third world trajectory?

And about that debt before which Buckley professes to quail: how much of that is unavoidable bailout? Consensus-level (among the reality-based community) stimulus? Down payment on a long-term budget fixer like breaking health care inflation? War costs actually counted as part of the budget?

As for that $1.4 trillion tax bogey: over the ten years from 2001-2010, Bush cut taxes by $2.35 trillion, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Obama's increases are in fact too modest -- after eight years of Bush and nearly thirty in the grip of Reaganism this nation is seriously under-taxed.

I'll cop to a bit of Buckley's anxiety. The one thing about Obama's budgeting and long-term economic and political strategy that troubles me is his oft-repeated promise not to raise taxes on households earning less than $250,000 -- that is, on 95% of the country. That can't stand. I wish he hadn't been so read-my-lips about it. It's also true, as Buckley warns, that Obama's growth projections are too rosy.

But with all there is to fear out there, Obama's budget is low on my list.

Too narrow a tax base?

After praising Obama's willingness to tackle health care reform, impose a cap-and-trade program on carbon emissions, and do away with accounting gimmicks like placing war spending off-budget, Clive Crook offers a major caveat about the Obama budget:

In this "new era of responsibility", as the budget document is called, it would have been better for Obama to signal that huge and desirable initiatives like universal health care will impose at least some costs on all Americans. It is literally impossible to make the rich pay for everything, and telling 95% of voters that they can have all these things at no cost is not good leadership. It has even less to do with shared responsibility.

True, that. My chief worry about the governing compact Obama forged during the campaign is his promise not to raise taxes on any household with less than $250k in income. Obama's core domestic policy premises were that the U.S. needs to repair its safety net, reduce income inequality and improve opportunity through education. That means higher taxes for the affluent and some tradeoff of tax and benefit for the middle class, if lower tax burdens for the poor. I fear that on this point David Brooks was right: Obama boxed himself in on taxation during the campaign.