Got Liberalism?
by digby
Joe Conason:As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has demonstrated—with startling graphs that can be found on his organization’s website at http://www.cbpp.org/—the Democratic position on cutting this year’s budget has shifted markedly toward meeting Republican numbers over the past several weeks.
Since last December, when the Republicans reneged on last year’s budget deal and threatened a Senate filibuster, they have kept increasing the pressure for greater cuts—and the Democrats have repeatedly sought to reach a compromise despite their misgivings about slashing federal spending in a stalled economy.
Indeed, at the moment, President Obama seems to be willing to accept additional cuts of $23 billion in his own proposed 2011 budget. That would mean overall cuts of $74 billion, which, as Greenstein notes, is precisely the amount that House Republican leaders agreed to pass in early February. But the Republicans have escalated their demands significantly over the past two months, reflecting the Tea Party slogan of “no compromise” with the president and the Democrats.
It's very rude to say I told you so, but, well, I told you so. And I would imagine they'll find a way to throw some scrap the liberals' way and then instruct us all to overlook the 75 billion dollars in cuts because of it.
This is absurd. We have to put huge amounts of energy into getting the Democrats not to agree to do things we should be able to take for granted they won't -- like Planned Parenthood funding -- and when they "come through" that's supposed to be a big victory. It's intensely frustrating.
No Democratic president should sign on to draconian cuts in government spending when he's got nearly 9% unemployment, a housing crisis that isn't getting any better and is engaging in wars of choice that nobody really understands. This is not liberalism in any sense that we have ever known it before.
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