Why is he pushing the discretionary programs to the exclusion of working on things that really need to be changed?

It goes to the whole reason he was installed in 2000 in the first place: To dismantle everything that secures the middle class and to completely cut the working class adrift; to utterly undermine the social safety net and make workers and their families feel despondent while at the same time playing to jingoistic feelings and xenophobia; to smile and portray himself as a servant of God while he allows our freedoms to be eroded, our waters polluted, and our children left in poverty and uninsured.

That was the reason the full court press was on in 2000. They needed the time to finesse the voting system, to talk up the fear in Americans, to undermine what's left of the New Deal, to pilfer the treasury of more of our money, and to repeal the 22nd amendment so the Boy Idiot can be president for life.

The fat lady is in the hall practicing her aria for our country's demise.

Social Security - 2018:

The President, in his State of the Union address, made it sound as though the Government doesn't have any debt obligations to honor with regard to the special issue Treasury bonds provided to the Social Security Administration for the Social Security surpluses spent by the Treasury in Federal Budgets.

While the Government will probably have to borrow marketable Treasury bonds to fulfill its debt obligations to the Social Security Administration, the repayments should not be presented as new, "out-of-pocket" costs.

The facts should not be misrepresented by the President or anyone else who pushes for private accounts.

Perhaps Krugman, Dean, you, and others will address this point.

Or perhaps the Government should stop collecting surplus Social Security earnings if it doesn't intend to honor its debt repayment obligations after it borrows such monies.

The House GOP leadership held up the Intelligence Bill because of the White House, not in spite of it. In order to delete language from the McCain/Lieberman Amendment "prohibiting extreme interrogation measures" and requiring the CIA and the Pentagon to report to Congress what methods they were using the House ginned up some bogus concern regarding chain of command and combat troops. The references to the CIA were deleted at the request of Condileeza Rice by senior House leadership according to NYT reports. Get it right Economist!

The Economist is suffering a bit of a bi-polar disorder in regards to Bush. It wants the United States to succeed, both in order to serve as a beacon for the rest of the world (which the Economist writers proceed to skewer with mildly amusing condescension) and to serve as a club with which to beat the current British Prime Minister, whomever he or she may be. At the same time, the editors and writers (aside from the uber-loyalist Lexington, who seems to have drunk the Koolaid after downing the hook, line and sinker) are appalled at the implications and results of the Bush Administration's least action. They know the phrase “Bush Administration achievements” is an oxymoron. Caught between their desire for Bush to "get it right" and their realization that he never will, they gyrate--condemning and pleading, whining and wheezing...The modus operandi at the Economist is to build Olympian temples halfway between two rabid dogmas. Between the reality-based community and the Bush Administration, however, there is no midpoint—one is either standing on the bedrock of reason, humility, science and tolerance or plunging into the abyss of fanaticism, arrogance, superstition and bigotry.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/national/02health.html

February 2, 2005

Health Secretary Calls for Medicaid Changes
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON - Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, called Tuesday for sweeping changes in Medicaid that would cut payments for prescription drugs and give states new power to reduce or reconfigure benefits for millions of low-income people.

In his first speech as secretary, Mr. Leavitt also said it should be more difficult for elderly people to qualify for Medicaid by transferring assets to their children.

'Medicaid must not become an inheritance protection plan,' Mr. Leavitt said at a convention of health care executives here. 'Right now, many older Americans take advantage of Medicaid loopholes to become eligible for Medicaid by giving away assets to their children. There is a whole industry that actually helps people shift costs to the taxpayer.'

Medicaid helps pay the bills for two-thirds of the 1.6 million people in nursing homes in the United States....

I'm not so good on my modern political and social history, so help me out with this. My impression is that, from the New Deal up through Carter, there was either steady or expanding support for lower income households, in terms of Medicaid, food stamps, AFDC, school lunch programs and the like. Reagan's legacy was to take away from those who did not work, but provide real support to the working poor, in the form of the earned income tax credit. Clinton reduced AFDC, without taking the next step to provide child care subsidies so that poor parents, single mothers in particular, were caught in a vice between the need to work and the need to care for their children. I have the vague impression that studies of the improvement in lower income households' circumstances during the Clinton expansion show that it was mostly the expansion, rather than program changes, that provided benefits.

So we had 20 years of declining support for the non-working poor, the poorest of the poor, but some considerable offsets for those who had work at low incomes.

Now, it seems, the goal is to undo supports for work-a-day households. Massive borrowing to fund tax cuts will eventually mean higher interest rates, higher taxes, lower productivity growth which should lead to lower wage growth. Cutting the defined benefit under Social Security means households which need income insurance for retirement will have less of it. Wealthy households are vastly underrepresented in the military. Middle and lower income households are the ones that have family members in the military reserves, as well as in the regular military, so they are the ones who suffer from military adventurism.

First, we prefered the working poor (and under Reagan, the wealthy) to the non-working poor. Now, we prefer the well off to the middle class. I think that, whatever first order benefits there may have been from Reagan and Clinton policies toward the poor, we ignored the political buffer that the old programs represented. Politicians needed the support of the middle class to undo support for the poor. With anti-poverty programs tamped down, politicians can now afford turn the middle class against itself.

KHarris

A wonderfully well crafted and sad summary statement. From where we came to where we are. we must add to your summary. Could we so easily forget where the New Deal brought us? Thank you, as always.

I'd put it this way.

During the Cold War, conservatives made a social compact to keep the peace and compromised on issues like Social Security and public education.

This was done for at least a couple reasons. First was marketing; we were, after all, trying to prove to the world that a mixed "free market" economy could take better care of its citizens than communism could. Second, we couldn't afford discord at home.

By the 1980s, the cold war was mostly over; the spread of information and relaxing of open hostilities engendered by detente brought awareness behind the Iron Curtain that, in fact, the West had a better system. It was only a matter of time before the Soviet system had to collapse from within. So, it became possible to begin reigning in some of the compromises extended in the aftermath of WWII through the 1960s.

Now, there's nothing left for conservatives to lose attempting to throw the whole compromise out ... except for the fact that the GOP congress has become addicted to winning elections by favoring particular interest groups with benefits, bought with borrowed money.

This grew out of the notion of "starving the beast" but has since morphed into a hungry monster that now has nothing left to gobble up but the Social Security trust plus the revenues out to infinity from OASI revenues. They'd like to write off the trust and borrow one-third of all future SS tax revenues to feed the monster.

This would feed the monster long enough for most current members of the House and Senate to head out to pasture, and for the folks interested in grabbing the loot to globalize their assets before the USA falls from grace.

Think to the Great Crash and Depression, when in a faltering economy a few financiers could not revive the stock market and the economy faltered more and Herbert Hoover was counseled by financiers on the need for fishing. Think to a time when there really was no social security other than a few protective laws gained with Teddy Roosevelt and some hard won union protections. A quarter of the work force could not find work, and Herbert Hoover fished. The New Deal rescued us and formed the ideas that would produce middle class America. Franklin Roosevelt set Americans to work and gave hope with spending program after program. A partly high school country began to become a high school and even college country. The young were given hope from schools to work, the old began to be cared for with Social Security. What was done through the New Deal was continued with the GI Bill that brought us to the college society, that brought us to the home owner society. New Deal ideas led us to flourish after the war. The idea were extended from Truman through Nixon. Now, New Deal ideas are purposely distorted and institutions from Social Security to Medicaid are threatened.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/03/international/asia/03china.html?pagewanted=all&position=

China to Cut Taxes on Farmers and Raise Their Subsidies
By JOSEPH KAHN

BEIJING - Chinese officials are promising to reduce taxes on peasants and increase farm subsidies to improve the lot of 800 million rural residents left behind in the fast-growing economy.

The measures, announced in a government publication called the "2005 No. 1 Document" and described by policy officials this week, are intended to slow the surging wealth gap between urban and rural residents, a major source of social discontent and perhaps the greatest challenge for the governing Communist Party.

China's rapid economic growth has generated widespread prosperity and lifted average per capita incomes past $1,000 a year, pulling the country out of the ranks of the world's poorest developing countries in a single generation.

But the benefits of that wealth have fallen disproportionately on urban residents, a point of severe stress for a society that once preached egalitarianism.

Last year average urban income was 3.2 times as much as average rural income, one of the biggest urban-rural divides in the world, statistics released in January show. China keeps its rural and urban populations distinct through population controls, classifying most rural residents as peasants even when they migrate to cities to find work.

The gap in living standards is actually greater than the income figures suggest, because urban governments and companies often offer health, housing, education and retirement benefits that are not widely available in the countryside.

Many developing countries experience rising inequality in the early stages of industrialization. But China's transition has proven especially volatile, because the authoritarian government has injected hundreds of billions of dollars into developing urban coastal areas while maintaining tight controls over farmland and peasants to ensure steady supplies of grain and surplus labor....

President Bush is destroying the safety net of U.S. society because he CAN. He doesn't understand the full consequences, and wouldn't care to learn about them, anyway. As a White House flack let it out just a couple of years ago, the fiscal situation is a little too complicated for most of the harried, workaday people to understand, and the Administration has figured out how to advance it, a confusing little-bit at a time. And now the K Street Liars are a working part of the executive branch. It is simply about winning cash. Somebody slighted Bushie for being a little jerk way back in the fifth grade, and he's never let it go, and now everybody is going to pay. He's more like a James Bond Villain, than anything else.

i want to join anne in praising kharris' 4:24 a.m. posting.

and i want to note that Lee Arnold's second sentence at 8:14 a.m. perfectly characterizes the shallow little man who occupies the oval office.

So many of us went to bed in October fearing four more years. There is nothing worse than an incompetent with an unlimited checkbook and nobody to tell him no and no way to remove him from power. However, soon we may be joined in this suffering by our erstwhile opponents. Consider:

1- Bush had a plan to change the funding, scope and size of the Federal government. Among the results of that plan is a crippling blow to the Fed's fiscal health and the loss of many competent people in many areas to be replaced by political hacks. The government has no money and no memory.

2- Bush had a plan to force major change in the Middle East to America's benefit. Among the results of that plan is a crippling blow the the finest military force in the world, a ME seething with hate for us, and $50/bbl oil. If we were to withdraw from Iraq today, nothing would change and our military would still need 10's of billion just to get the sand out of its equipment.

3- Bush has a plan to lock in Republican Party dominance for decades.....

Guess what, erstwhile rightists, libertarians, and general wackos? He's going to be *your* worst nightmare, next. You will soon learn that you can't tell this asshole to back off, you can't tell him to change course, you can't tell The Boy King, well, anything. He won't listen to us, do you think he's going to listen to you? He's had his "accountability moment" and don't think for a moment that doesn't include accountablity to you.

He started destroying the Republican Party on the day of his inauguration ("Great things can be done in Washington" or something like that) and you will eventually come to understand our feelings of helplessness - hell, shrillness - as you watch him continue doing it for four unstoppable years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/03/opinion/03dowd.html

Inherit the Windbags
By MAUREEN DOWD

I misunderestimated this ambitious president....

He doesn't just want to dismantle the 60's. He wants to dismantle the whole century - from the Scopes trial to Social Security. He can shred one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal and then go after other big safety-net Democratic programs, reversing the prevailing philosophy of many decades that our tax and social welfare systems should equalize the distribution of wealth, just a little bit. Barry Goldwater wouldn't have had the brass to take a jackhammer to that edifice.

The White House seems to think Social Security was corrupt from the moment it was enacted in 1935. It wants to replace it with private accounts that will fatten the wallets of stockbrokers and put the savings of Americans who didn't inherit vast fortunes at risk.

Mr. Bush and his crew not only want to scrap the New Deal. By weakening environmental and safety protections and trying to flatten the progressive income tax, they're trying to eradicate not just one Roosevelt but two, going after the progressive legacy of Theodore.

With their brutal assault on history and their sanctimonious manner, they give a whole new meaning to Teddy's philosophy of the presidency. Bully pulpit, indeed.

I just want to praise the eloquence of the participants to this thread! I am moved by you, saddened by and for my country.

May we all go in peace.

I think that there is too much made of Bush's agenda: he's not evil, he's just defending the interests of his base. If we had a union leader elected president then we would not be surprised if he (or she) forwarded a program to promote the interests of working people at the expense of monied interests.

However, the real question is why Bush was re-elected when he is generally ineffective and he represents a fairly narrow portion of the population. Defeating him should have been easy. Why did the Democrats lose?

If the Democrats want to know the answer to this question, they just need to look in mirror. Why do they keep nominating mediocre candidates from the Senate? Charisma and leadership matter.

If you want to see an interesting dynamic, just draw up a list of Presidential winners and losers since 1964 (I am admittedly not including JFK). Then beside each name list where the losers political experience came from (are they a President, a VP, a Governor or a Senator.) Some labels (such as LBJ) are mixed, but trends become clear. VP's and Governor's win alot and Senators lose alot.

If you tell me that there is an election between an incumbent President and a Senator, I will pick the incumbent every time. Now challenge a President with a Governor and things get alot more interesting. Alot of Democrates wanted Kerry, not because they liked him, but because they thought he was electable. This turned out to be really bad politics for the Democrats. A lousy President defeated mediocre Senator.

"Yet the gap between Mr Bush's rhetoric and what is actually happening, or is likely to happen, is embarrassingly wide." - The Economist.

Sadly true. The 'Social Security for Dummies' White House game is the perfect example.

Check out this new information:

The Plan - Participants Would Forfeit Part of Accounts' Profits
Washington Post, 3 February 2005

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59136-2005Feb2.html

New Details Indicate Administration Social Security Plan would entail Several Trillion Dollars in Borrowing
CBPP, 2 February 2005

http://www.cbpp.org/2-2-05socsec4.htm

New Details from the President Tonight on Private Accounts Not Likely to Answer Key Questions
CBPP, 2 February 2005

http://www.cbpp.org/2-2-05socsec.htm

Clearly, the President presented a great myth last night. Imagine how many listeners bought into it hook, line and sinker, and will never read the fine print. Many of them have picked out their whale. The private accounts whale. With enough Members of Congress pulling on the line, it will sink any less costly and reasonable reform movement.

It's quite a con job.

Read the links. Carefully. Just once. You'll get it.

"They hope people will think they will take on these accounts and after 40 years, they'll have this huge windfall, but that won't happen," said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. "I think they're trying to confuse people." - (Washington Post article)

We're playing 'Social Security for Dummies'. And the Texas dealer is ahead on points.

OK, let me try this again. Things have changed...

Note the 3 Feb afternoon correction by the Washington Post, and the additional link for the 2 Feb White House embargoed briefing.

Check out this information, too:

White House embargoed for release briefing
February 2, 2005, 3:02 P.M. EST
* (added for clarity)

http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/top_secret.doc

Participants Would Lose Some Profits From Accounts
Washington Post, Thursday, February 3, 2005; 1:51 PM
* (WITH CORRECTION)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59136-2005Feb2?language=printer

Yes, I still believe it's a con job. Adjusted on the fly. More to come.

Keith,

Evil? I don't care. Bush is wrong. He's the most powerful person in the world and he's doing terrible damage. His motives are the least of my worries. His foreign policy is making my children less safe. His environmental policies are putting my children's health, and the climate they will live in, at risk. His fiscal policies are putting my children's economic future at risk, as undermining our social compact by widening the widest G7 income gap even further.

The politics of defending the interest of one's base can be awfully damaging. Ask the majority of South Africans during apartheid what they thought of the parties defending the interests of the minority. "Just" defending the interest of one's base when one has opportunistically cobbled together a base that wants to shift wealth to the wealthy, intrude their own, often fringe value systems on the country as a whole, ignore the interests of long-standing allies in the pursuit of foreign adventures, is not so easy to pass off as politics as usual. Bush has played to the fears, ignorance and lesser instincts of those who became his base. I don't see how that's just another instance of a politician doing what politicians do. We have not been a country of winner-take-all politics, but we are headed in that direction. Look around at winner-take-all countries and see if you are eager to become like them.

Whether he won because he ran against a guy from the wrong institution is intellectually interesting, but far from the point here. The election is over. It's time to stop this guy from doing more damage. Every lie must be called a lie. Every deception must be uncovered. Every effort to cloud issues must be met with clear, unambiguous information and explanation (thank you Professors DeLong, Krugman, Sawicky and company). This, as the president would say, is hard work. And I don't need to think Bush is evil to think that stopping him is work worth doing.

kharris wrote:
"It's time to stop this guy from doing more damage. Every lie must be called a lie."

These two sentences unwittingly capture a huge part of the Democratic party's problem--the inability to understand and appreciate the distinct arts of policy and politics. The first sentence states a reasonable policy goal, but then it is immediately followed it with an ineffective political method.

How many times do Democrats have to fail before they realize that calling Bush a liar doesn't work? The Democrats have the edge in better policy, but they are being beaten so badly at politics. Most Americans like George Bush, and people don't want to believe that a person they like is a liar. Karl Rove probably salivates every time a Democrat gets up on a soapbox and gets "shrill". It's just one more victim for his carnivorous political machine. Some may not care about the election because its over, but the reason that the Democrats lost is repeated every day.

Keith,

You just stepped into the land of hubris. Democrats in office may not have won the last round, but they do politics for a living. We are all frustrated that the wrong people are in power, and the press and blog-land have been full of claims that this or that is the reason Democrats didn't win. Oddly, opinions differ on just what that reason is. If it were as simple as you say, guys who do this for a living would have figured it out.

Meanwhile, I respectfully note that I did not say we should call Bush a liar. We can call lies lies without calling the liar a liar. It takes a few more clevers than simple name calling, but going to that extra trouble means we have truth on our side. We can and should show that they are lying without stooping to name calling. To do otherwise means that the Social Security debate will contain its own equivalent of "Iraq can attack the US mainland" because nobody stood up and said it ain't so.

California's Junior Senator did a pretty good job on Rice. She baited Rice into admitting that here integrity is the issue. Lots of these guys have the same problem. Let's get 'em.

Keith - Given your analysis, what is it exactly you are suggesting Democrats do? Promise bread and circuses?

As for the Junior Senator's hazing of Rice, it is sad that the encounter had to take place in the Senate. In a rather spicier venue, say the House of Commons, the exchange would have been far more viperous: Rice - "I really hope that you will refrain from impugning my integrity." Boxer - "No, no I would never dream of doing so. I cannot impugn that which does not exist."

So these comments make very depressing reading.

That said, I'm beginning to take a very contrarian view of the situation. I calculate the odds that Bush's current popularity can survive the next 20 months until the 2006 election are really pretty low. He cheated death for the 2004 election, but nothing that has happened since then makes good news in the near future more likely. If the US goes into a recession in the next 15 months, I think we could spike the deficit up to the trillion dollar mark, and the GOP would lose 50-100 seats in the house. This is not an outcome I would look forward to, but I think I can give it a probability of about 1/3 at this point.

kharris,

Regarding your hubris comment:
This blog is all about second-guessing what public figures do. George Bush is constantly under the microscope as are other figures such as Alan Greenspan or Secretary Snow. Why should Democrats be immune to this? I agree that the national Democrats do politics for a living, but it sure seems to me that national Republicans do it for a living better.

Regarding your second paragraph on goals: I think we agree on most of what you say. I agree that points must be clearly rebutted, and hopefully in simple, civilized terms.

MTC:
You seem to yearn for a more bitter political environment, and the American people have said in many polls that this isn't what they want. So what to do? Well, here's a simple example--Part of Bush's personna is this "I'm just a simple straight-shooter from Texas" attitude. I don't think he is vulnerable for being untruthful, but he is vulnerable for being not bright. Why don't Democrats make comments such as,

"Its great that the President is interested in insuring Social Security's future, and this is something that we should all care about. But I don't think the President's policies have been completely thought through. The President wants to add quite a bit of debt when we are already wrestling with big deficits. What's the point of reforming Social Security for the future if the government goes bankrupt before then?"

The Repulicans make statements like this all of the time, and they do it in unison. The Democrats just aren't as organized.