NRO Andrew Stiles
... Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) didn’t want to cut anything at first. But bowing to political reality, eventually ponied up about $4.7 billion in cuts. He ended up with $33.8 billion less spending than he wanted. And he called it an “historic” accomplishment. (Not surprisingly, the left is appalled).
House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio), on the other hand, initially proposed $32 billion in spending cuts. House Republicans, led by an undaunted freshman class, bumped that number up to $61 billion ($100 billion off the president’s budget), before settling on $38.5 billion. That’s $6.5 billion more than Boehner asked for to begin with, and $5.5 billion more than the $33 billion that Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats claimed had been agreed to less than two weeks ago.
Jonah Goldberg at NY Post
This "end Medicare as we know it" line -- and many like it ("end Medicaid as we know it," "end carbon-based life as we know it," etc.) -- is the lead-off talking point for the entire Democratic Party in response to Rep. Paul Ryan's just-released budget proposal, "The Path to Prosperity."
Here's the thing: Of course he wants to end Medicare as we know it. You know why? Because the way we know it right now, the program is barreling toward insolvency.
Personally, if I were on a plane that had one engine out and was belching smoke, I would certainly hope somebody with some judgment and competence might calmly remove his oxygen mask long enough to suggest "ending this flight as we know it."
-----------------
On the left Ezra Klein says so in Wash Post:
If you were just tuning in, you might’ve thought Boehner had been arguing for moderation, while both Obama and Reid sought to cut deeper. You would never have known that Democrats had spent months resisting these “historic” cuts, warning that they’d cost jobs and slow the recovery.
Boehner, of course, could afford to speak plainly. He’d not just won the negotiation but had proven himself in his first major test as speaker of the House. He managed to get more from the Democrats than anyone had expected, sell his members on voting for a deal that wasn’t what many of them wanted and avert a shutdown. There is good reason to think that Boehner will be a much more formidable opponent for Obama than Gingrich was for Clinton.
So why were Reid and Obama so eager to celebrate Boehner’s compromise with his conservative members? The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.
And policy defeats are what will matter...
----------------
On the left Jonathan Chait at The New Republic
----------------
... when in our contemporary history has a Speaker of the House made the sanctity of human life such a priority as this one has?
Planned Parenthood and D.C. abortion funding are both spending issues, but also the most fundamental of conscience issues.
The House got an agreement out of Harry Reid and the White House to prohibit taxpayer funding for abortions in the District of Columbia, and to allow a vote in the Senate over Planned Parenthood funding (and Obamacare). ...
Honorable Harry Reid promised? Don't bet a nickel on his word.
No comments:
Post a Comment