The president's budget is an ambitious document, essentially a picture of what a truly liberal agenda would look like and how it would work. But as I wrote in the Guardian last week, anyone who has been watching Barack Obama since the campaign shouldn't be surprised by the programs he proposed; each one has been part of his platform since the campaign.
But immediately on its release, people lost it. Roger Cohen thought we were all going French. David Brooks thought it "represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new." But today Brooks engaged in the novel idea of reporting, and after speaking to some White House staff, he comes back to say that the president is going to cut the deficit down to 3 percent of GDP by the end of his term and that he is hawkish on long-term debt. Brooks observes that the plan "raises taxes on the rich to a level slightly above where they were in the Clinton years and then uses the money as a down payment on health care reform. That’s what the budget does. It’s not the Russian Revolution." Andrew Sullivan writes that Brooks' column is "Pepto-Bismol ... a little something for my collywobbles."
It's frankly embarrassing that anyone mistook the president's proposal as the Russian Revolution in the first place. All of the facts and ideas that Brooks notes in his new column were available when he wrote his crazy piece on Tuesday. But apparently Brooks or his assistants needed four senior White House aides to walk him through the public record before he could climb down from his roof and stop freaking out about the return of state socialism.
But that does get to the question: What is this budget -- transformative or same-old-same-old? Well, it's a little bit of both. It's bold in a liberal sense because it puts emphasis on programs like health care reform, fixing education and enacting a carbon cap and trade plan. It's also a liberal budget because it rejects the trickle-down economics of Reagan and attempts to turn around the increasing economic inequality in the country, not through a massive redistribution program but through a relatively small tweak in tax rates. It's a budget that progressives can get behind, but it's not changing the fundamental nature of our society, as this person, operating cheerfully on the edge of both fact and sanity, would have you believe.
But this budget is also bold in a moderate sense because it proposes how to pay for those programs. Unlike virtually every major policy initiative of the Bush years -- the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the tax cuts, the Medicare prescription bill, etc. -- the president has said, 'this is how I will pay for [program x.' The elimination of the various off-the-books budget gimmicks is bold but from a pragmatic tradition as well: let's see what the real balance sheet looks like as we try and make the right decisions. And Obama's commitment to long-term fiscal health is also real, and it starts with health care reform.
Ultimately, this budget is a lot like our president: it's liberal, and it is pragmatic; bold and cautious. Whether it will work -- or even survive Congress -- remains to be seen. But it's a shame that people like Cohen, Brooks and Sullivan reflexively lose it at the sight of this plan without even looking at the facts. I can't remember where I saw this, but when Paul Krugman wrote his column praising the budget, a conservative observed something like, if Krugman likes it, then it must be bad. That's the kind of through process we should steer clear of, especially in times of crisis.
-- Tim Fernholz
