http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e9049900-0692-11de-ab0f-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1
The budget reveals the liberal Obama
Barack Obama’s first budget is a revelation. The US president’s plans will not come to pass in the form he suggests. Congress writes the laws and will make a hash of it. Still, this first full statement of intentions speaks volumes, and leaves me in a paradoxical position. On one hand, I admire much of what the budget says. On the other, I feel I owe Republicans an apology.
As you recall, in the debate over the fiscal stimulus, Republicans accused the president of presenting a measure they could not support, disguising this with an empty show of co-operation. Bipartisanship, they said, is more than inviting your opponents round for coffee and a chat. I did not buy it: I accused them, in effect, of brainless rejectionism and a refusal to compromise, and congratulated the president for trying to come to terms with the other side.
This budget says the Republicans had Mr Obama right all along. The draft contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.
To be sure, there is much in this vision to admire. For a start, who expects a politician to keep his promises? With the economy crumbling and public borrowing through the roof, Mr Obama had every excuse to slither away from healthcare reform.
In the same breath, as it were, that he announces a deficit of $1,750bn (€1,380bn, £1,226bn) this year, he requests a 10-year $635bn down payment toward the cost of that reform. Mr Obama knows that the president who gives the US universal healthcare is assured of his place in history alongside FDR. He means to do it.
One may question the timing, and the method as well, no doubt, once the administration says what that will be. But the goal is worthy, one that any centrist can endorse. Most of the country wants healthcare reform and is willing to pay something for it.
When Mr Obama turns to financing this historic initiative, however, he moves left. His budget pencils in roughly $80bn a year in new revenues from a carbon cap-and-trade system – another welcome innovation, by the way, in my view. Does he use those revenues to pay for the new healthcare reserve, or to close the deficit in outlying years? No, he uses them to make permanent the tax credits in the fiscal stimulus: rebates and subsidies tilted to the working poor. To pay for healthcare reform, the plan curbs Medicare payments to private providers and, unexpectedly, reduces the value of income-tax deductions claimed by the better off.
So as well as reversing the Bush tax cuts for households making more than $250,000 a year, as promised during the campaign, the budget comes up with another way to extract tax from high earners. All but 5 per cent of households will pay “not a dime” for the panoply of public investments in the blueprint.
Take this budget at face value, and when Mr Obama talks about “a new era of responsibility” he does not mean: “We are all in this together.” He means: “The rich are responsible for this mess and it is payback time.” Leftist Democrats are thrilled, and rightly so. The budget has three themes: healthcare reform, public investment and unflinching redistribution. This is indeed a new social contract: we get, they pay. Liberals never had it so good.
Tactically speaking, Mr Obama may have overdone it. If I were advising him, I would say that the elation of his party’s progressive wing is a red flag. It mocks the president’s claim to be a consensus-builder, and tells the centre to watch out. Keep the left unhappy, would be my counsel.
The administration will have many chances to row back, of course, and to succeed it will have to. Despite optimistic assumptions, the budget leaves a full-employment budget deficit of 3 per cent of gross domestic product – not counting the full costs of healthcare reform, which the budget mentions but fails to provide for, and longer-term demographic and other pressures. Spending cuts and new taxes on the broad middle class are going to be needed; and to get those passed, the president will need support from the political centre.
For the moment, though, this budget reveals Mr Obama with new clarity. He is no Tony Blair, ideologically rootless, as I had previously suspected. He is a conviction politician: a bold progressive liberal. Yet his outreach to Republicans is no sham; his civility, I think, is not a front. He respects people who disagree with him, is capable of liking them, and is always willing to listen – but then stays true to his beliefs. This is a rare and devastating combination.
For years in the US, the Democratic left, despite a surfeit of brilliant minds, has neutered itself with its own rage. The fixed expression of progressive liberalism has been anger and contempt – with perplexity at its lack of political success mixed in for comic effect. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Amid an economic crisis, with capitalism under fire and the country looking to government for answers, the liberal left finally has a leader with brains, who shares its convictions, yet is as friendly and as likeable to the politically uncommitted as anyone could wish – so appealing, in fact, that the party almost chose somebody else to lead it.
Whether Mr Obama will be good for the country remains to be seen. We can already be sure that he is conservatism’s worst nightmare.
The budget reveals the liberal Obama
Barack Obama’s first budget is a revelation. The US president’s plans will not come to pass in the form he suggests. Congress writes the laws and will make a hash of it. Still, this first full statement of intentions speaks volumes, and leaves me in a paradoxical position. On one hand, I admire much of what the budget says. On the other, I feel I owe Republicans an apology.
As you recall, in the debate over the fiscal stimulus, Republicans accused the president of presenting a measure they could not support, disguising this with an empty show of co-operation. Bipartisanship, they said, is more than inviting your opponents round for coffee and a chat. I did not buy it: I accused them, in effect, of brainless rejectionism and a refusal to compromise, and congratulated the president for trying to come to terms with the other side.
This budget says the Republicans had Mr Obama right all along. The draft contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.
To be sure, there is much in this vision to admire. For a start, who expects a politician to keep his promises? With the economy crumbling and public borrowing through the roof, Mr Obama had every excuse to slither away from healthcare reform.
In the same breath, as it were, that he announces a deficit of $1,750bn (€1,380bn, £1,226bn) this year, he requests a 10-year $635bn down payment toward the cost of that reform. Mr Obama knows that the president who gives the US universal healthcare is assured of his place in history alongside FDR. He means to do it.
One may question the timing, and the method as well, no doubt, once the administration says what that will be. But the goal is worthy, one that any centrist can endorse. Most of the country wants healthcare reform and is willing to pay something for it.
When Mr Obama turns to financing this historic initiative, however, he moves left. His budget pencils in roughly $80bn a year in new revenues from a carbon cap-and-trade system – another welcome innovation, by the way, in my view. Does he use those revenues to pay for the new healthcare reserve, or to close the deficit in outlying years? No, he uses them to make permanent the tax credits in the fiscal stimulus: rebates and subsidies tilted to the working poor. To pay for healthcare reform, the plan curbs Medicare payments to private providers and, unexpectedly, reduces the value of income-tax deductions claimed by the better off.
So as well as reversing the Bush tax cuts for households making more than $250,000 a year, as promised during the campaign, the budget comes up with another way to extract tax from high earners. All but 5 per cent of households will pay “not a dime” for the panoply of public investments in the blueprint.
Take this budget at face value, and when Mr Obama talks about “a new era of responsibility” he does not mean: “We are all in this together.” He means: “The rich are responsible for this mess and it is payback time.” Leftist Democrats are thrilled, and rightly so. The budget has three themes: healthcare reform, public investment and unflinching redistribution. This is indeed a new social contract: we get, they pay. Liberals never had it so good.
Tactically speaking, Mr Obama may have overdone it. If I were advising him, I would say that the elation of his party’s progressive wing is a red flag. It mocks the president’s claim to be a consensus-builder, and tells the centre to watch out. Keep the left unhappy, would be my counsel.
The administration will have many chances to row back, of course, and to succeed it will have to. Despite optimistic assumptions, the budget leaves a full-employment budget deficit of 3 per cent of gross domestic product – not counting the full costs of healthcare reform, which the budget mentions but fails to provide for, and longer-term demographic and other pressures. Spending cuts and new taxes on the broad middle class are going to be needed; and to get those passed, the president will need support from the political centre.
For the moment, though, this budget reveals Mr Obama with new clarity. He is no Tony Blair, ideologically rootless, as I had previously suspected. He is a conviction politician: a bold progressive liberal. Yet his outreach to Republicans is no sham; his civility, I think, is not a front. He respects people who disagree with him, is capable of liking them, and is always willing to listen – but then stays true to his beliefs. This is a rare and devastating combination.
For years in the US, the Democratic left, despite a surfeit of brilliant minds, has neutered itself with its own rage. The fixed expression of progressive liberalism has been anger and contempt – with perplexity at its lack of political success mixed in for comic effect. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Amid an economic crisis, with capitalism under fire and the country looking to government for answers, the liberal left finally has a leader with brains, who shares its convictions, yet is as friendly and as likeable to the politically uncommitted as anyone could wish – so appealing, in fact, that the party almost chose somebody else to lead it.
Whether Mr Obama will be good for the country remains to be seen. We can already be sure that he is conservatism’s worst nightmare.
