My guess is neither “side” expected a different outcome.

Why do we want so badly to take D.C. kabuki at face value, when so doing screws us and our future generations?

It is not about Republican v. Democrat but about the plutonomy versus everyone else. That is the way it has been since at least 1980, if not 1680.

And Obama and the rest of the Democrats in D.C. are very much part of the plutonomy.

Obama, Romney Both Promise An Increase In Military Spending

Posted: 10/23/2012 3:56 pm EDT Updated: 10/23/2012 11:42 pm EDT

NEW YORK — As President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney furiously lobbed jabs and zingers at each other during Monday night’s foreign policy debate, it would have been easy to miss one basic point of agreement: neither candidate favors decreasing the Pentagon’s base budget.

Even as Obama mocked Romney’s call for more ships to add to the Navy’s fleet as akin to playing “a game of Battleship,” the president made careful mention of his own expansionary defense policies.

“Our military spending has gone up every single year that I’ve been in office,” Obama said. “We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined.”

He was right — and when he said it, it almost sounded like a brag. Aside from a brief proposed dip in 2013, Obama’s budget calls for military spending to continue to increase.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/23/military-spending-obama-romney_n_2006266.html

The whole reason we are in this current situation is that congressional Republicans already concluded keeping taxes low is more important than throwing money at the Pentagon.

The whole reason we’re in this situation is because President Catfood wants to grand bargain away Social Security, etc.

x2

This is the end result of the Cat Food Commission and Jack Lew.

the already-wealthy double down on those with less.

x3.

Yet the progressives in congress still support his policies.

Boxturtle (I hope one day he needs the government help he wants to cut)

Where is the President’s FY 2014 Budget? Yes, it’s DOA in Congress, but the pro forma exercise usually happens in February.

BTW, reckon Kent Conrad’s pension gets sequestered? This mess is his baby. It would be only fitting.

Exactly. They aren’t even trying to disguise the fact any more. He is doing what he was elected (by big money) to do.

I just spent a week cruising down the ditch in Fla. on the yacht of an ex. Exxon-Mobil Ex. VP listening to him moan on and on about taxes and how high they are for American Corps.. When I handed him an article from the Wall St. Journal showing how the top ten earning Corps. ( including Exxon) had paid way under the 35% rate he was complaining about he seemed confused. The odd thing was the more I probed and parried with this man the more his real views came out and to my astonishment they were almost all standard Progressive positions. What I found was the paradox that when polled these so called Fox Conservatives are only that Fox Conservatives in that they recite the party ( FOX line) well enough , but have a severe case of cognitive dissidence when it comes to their actual bedrock beliefs. He was actually a Progressive looking at the world through Fox colored glasses.

This is not the second time, but I will agree it is not charming. This is the umpteenth time the charade has been mounted to persuade the public yet again that attacking and diminishing social programs is a lesser evil than whatever else bogeywise is paraded before us. And it is an unified charade on the part of the PTB.

We do not have opposing political parties. Stop pretending that we do.

We do not have a Congress, a Supreme Court, a President.

We have a Corporatocracy, a Military, and a CEO ( Chief Extermination Officer).

We need to rebuild from the Constitution up.

Now that Republicans are again presented with the same basic choice, they have come to the same basic decision. To have ever expected a different outcome was silly.

Exactly. And that GOP intransigence against tax hikes is the only thing preventing severe cuts to Medicare and Social Security, the pride of the Democratic Party, at the hands of a supposedly Democratic president who is obsessed with cutting them. Go figure.

Good point. It’s often misinformation rather than blatant ill will that motivates the crazies.

I sincerely don’t understand why anyone would accept the fact that the military budget would actually be cut at all. I thought if there were one thing we learned, that money for wars can always be hidden in other parts of the budget. Remember when Nick Turse poured through the budget a few years ago, and what he found was actually (iirc) half again as much as the ‘official military budget’? And then there’s the whole other category of Dark Money behind the Shadow Military. Am I seeing this all wrong?

If not, then it may be exactly why the R’s (and likely plenty of D’s) are willing to accept the cuts in lieu of increased taxes, which most can find loopholes to avoid in any event.

In terms of political economy, the Republican position is better. Low tax rates lead to deficit spending, which the federal government SHOULD be doing during a depression. Cutting Social Security will reduce consumer spending, exactly the wrong step to take during a depression.

So true. I think many of these people are just confused.

During the debt ceiling fight President Obama wanted Republicans to agree to tax increases but they refused to.

Why does Obama need the Republican’s agreement on getting new revenue when:

a) in 2009-2010, he could have increased taxes with his Democratic supermajority if Reid et. al had abolished or curtailed the filibuster (or used reconciliation). No limit to the amount of revenues he could have gotten, and moreover if he had coupled that with a *real* stimulus we’d be at full employment now.

b) At the end of 2010, he could have gotten $4 trillion in new revenues BY DOING NOTHING. The Democratic lame duck Congress could have taken the debt ceiling off the table *permanently*, no hostage-taking possible.

c) At the end of 2012, he could have gotten $4 trillion in new revenues BY DOING NOTHING. Instead he whittled that down to a comparative pittance.

So why does Obama seem determined to get Republican agreement when none was needed?

Sounds like Obama’s desire for “new revenue” is just kabuki theater to divert the base away from his main objective, which is slashing social insurance programs.

-stewartm

In fact, until January 2013, Obama could have gotten a serious tax increase by refusing to extend the Bush tax cuts. All he would have had to do was restrain his hand from signing an extension.

So, clearly that’s not what any of this is about. He is obsessed with reforming cutting entitlements. And, cutting SS on account of deficits makes even less sense that attacking Iraq on account of 9/11.

It’s a Look At The Wookie strategy. Time and time again Obama and the Democrats could have achieved their stated goal of revenue increases by simply doing nothing so that we’d automatically revert back to prior Democratic economic policies. Instead Obama and the Democrats argue for Republican policies as an excuse to go after Medicare, Social Security, etc.

Not entirely unrelated all this, Duke Energy is quitely giving the DNC a $10 million dollar gift:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-duke-energy-democratic-convention-20130213,0,3763176.story
Our government is for sale with the White House open for business.

Boxturtle (I hope one day he needs the government help he wants to cut)

I wonder if some day you may need the economic prosperity your excessive statism has squelched?

As for the Republicans’ negotiation strategy, I think the post is exactly right. Republicans made the choice to put military spending at risk in order to get overall spending cuts they thought were essential. I’d like to think that they never intended to escape the spending cuts by offering higher taxes. I was disappointed when they agreed to $600 billion in tax hikes in December 2012, but I saw that as bowing to the inevitable, since the alternative was even greater tax hikes by default when the Bush/Obama tax cuts expired automatically. Now that they’ve agreed to those hikes, why did anyone think they’d agree to more, just to avoid a sequester to which they were already resigned as the best spending cut available?

But I’m still on the edge of my seat, wondering if they’ll cave anyway. I hope not.

“Duke Energy is quitely giving the DNC a $10 million dollar gift.”

Eddie Murphy as he is being strangled by Dan Akroyd: “It was the Dukes, it was the Dukes…..”

I was disappointed when they agreed to $600 billion in tax hikes in December 2012, but I saw that as bowing to the inevitable, since the alternative was even greater tax hikes by default when the Bush/Obama tax cuts expired automatically.

But did you note how the “statist, liberal” Obama whittled a $4 trillion dollar tax increase down to $600 billion?

Raising taxes aren’t really Obama’s thing any more than it was Reagan’s thing. They both fed deficit hysteria with the true objective of not lowering the deficit, but of slashing helpful domestic spending as to funnel it to military waste. In fact, the only truly serious deficit reduction plan that has been put forth is not Paul Ryan’s, nor Simpson-Bowles with its magic asterisks, nor even Obama’s, but the CPC’s–which in fact *increaeses domestic spending* while doing that.

Obama is the Son of Reagan. He channels him.

-stewartm

Obama whittled it down until it was of a size that he could get with the Congress he’s got. That’s disappointing if you wanted a bigger tax hike, but it’s no credit to Obama if you dislike statism. He’d have been thrilled to get $4 trillion in tax hikes if he thought he could get away with it. He knew he couldn’t get away with a tax hike that big unless most voters saw it as landing exclusively on “the other guy.”

He’d have been thrilled to get $4 trillion in tax hikes if he thought he could get away with it.

If he wanted bigger tax hikes, he could have gotten LOTS bigger by the simple “NOTHING” option. Instead, he vented histrionics about the horror of having the CLINTON tax rates (not the Eisenhower, mind you) return and practically gave away the store to whittle them down.

That’s disappointing if you wanted a bigger tax hike, but it’s no credit to Obama if you dislike statism.

“Statism” being that a (supposedly) democratically-elected government, say, actually collect in taxes for the money it spends, for the things needed and wanted, and not it meaning it not, say, engage in widespread spying on citizens, infiltrate dissident groups, suspend habeus corpus, and claim the right to murder its citizens at the whim of whomever El Presidente is at the moment.

That’s one helluva definition of ‘statism’ you got going there.

-stewartm