The Effects of a Government Shutdown and What Could Prevent It
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-02-28/effects-government-shutdown-and-what-could-prevent-it
Washington's battle over the budget has intensified as the March 4th deadline for an agreement nears. Democrats over the weekend signaled a willingness to accept a stop-gap measure offered by Republicans. If approved, it would keep the government operating until mid-March. But the underlying conflict would remain. Republicans want $61 billion in spending cuts, which Democrats believe are too severe and would hurt economic recovery efforts. Complicating prospects for a longer-term solution are tea party lawmakers. They say even the Republican plan does not go far enough. The budget showdown.
Guests
Norman Ornstein
resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and coauthor of "The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track."
Naftali Bendavid
national correspondent, The Wall Street Journal.
Daniel Glickman
senior fellow, Bipartisan Policy Center; former secretary of agriculture under President Bill Clinton; former Democratic congressman, representing Kansas.
Matt Kibbe
president and CEO of FreedomWorks and co-author with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of the book, "Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto."
Comments
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Diane,
Your guest said something to the effect that the teaparty says "everything needs to be on the table", but his list didn't include increasing income taxes on the very high income earners.
Please correct the one speaker who brought up President Obama's Deficit Reduction Commission. They did not make any final recommendations. They did not meet the deadline they had been given and they did not meet the number of required votes to pass any recommendations. It is wrong to classify the ideas the commission generated as recommendations when they didn't meet the requirements to be a recommendation to the President. Thanks.
Diane,
Seems like the easiest way to raise money is to raise taxes on the higher end earners and corporations.
I wonder why the topic of restoring fair taxes to the ultra rich is not being mentioned. As the majority of Americans suffer the rich are doing better than ever. Please include this common sense concept in your discussion.
Matt Kibbe was one of the folks who worked with Jack Abramoff in the 1990s and the early part of the last decade. He took trips paid for by Abramoff to Saipan to help protect Chinese owned sweatshops. Then as now he ran astroturf front groups to support the goals of men like Abramoff.
His current boss, Dick Armey, was one of Abramoff's key Congressional allies in supporting Jack's clients. Newspapers in Texas called Armey, Jack's "Man in Saipan" (http://www.dallasobserver.com/1998-02-19/news/our-man-in-saipan/)
Now, Kibbie has remade himself into a spokesperson for the Tea Party. His involvement proves the astroturf nature of the Tea Party hype. This group is about 20-25% of people at best and yet you have a representative of a front group who claims to speak for them on, but not a voice from any other slice of the electorate, like Unions or the poor or the middle class.
Your guest all skew center right to extreme right. Mr. Ornstein is the only honest voice on the panel.
Your bookers should be ashamed of themselves for presenting a discussion that will be biased by omission.
I expect better of you.
Your Tea Party panelist says that it is assumed that Democrats will "demagogue" issues they don't agree with. Why doesn't someone else challenge his use of that terminology?
Earlier reports on NPR this morning said there are about 25 million unemployed and underemployed Americans at this time. Where will all the jobs promised during the 2010 elections come from in all of the debate about reducing the deficit and shutting down the federal government? It appears that the "greatest recession" has only ended for the financial industry, oil industry, and a few global industries. Will the spending cuts cause businesses to suddenly start investing and hiring? Why does the federal government buying things such as roads, medical care, education, tanks & guns, paying agriculture not to grow as much in a world of rising food prices, etc. stiffle job growth? Is there a source of empirical evidence that supports these claims?
Senator McConnel, the minority leader, says his number one priority is to defeat Obama. What better way to defeat Obama than to stall the economic recovery.
If fiscal responsibility were the number one priority, why would you raise the deficit by cutting taxes of multimillionaires?
Birmingham, AL
Please ask why the definition of "everything is on the table" only includes spending cuts, as opposed to tax increases.
There is no overwhelming "will of the people" to cut everything from the budget that benefits the poor and middle class, while retaining all the tax cuts for the oligarchs.
Mr Kibbe: Please offer some support for your statements rather than just framing your desire for small governement terms of opinion. You do not "believe" what Goldman analysts report, so do not "believe" in Keynesian economics. You also "believe" that any tax increases on the wealthy are not indicated. This all sounds like faith, rather than analysis. By what evidence do you base these beliefs?
It seems like Government never listens to the people.
End the Bush Tax Cuts
End the Wars
when fiscal conservatives talk about leaving our kids with a horrible debt, what about leaving our kids with no public education because of budget cuts. Seems to me that if they really care about our kids future they should pay the proper taxes to make up for all the spending over the past couple years
Diane,
Your guests make constant reference to the idea that federal deficits reduce private sector hiring. Can they please address the logic behind this? Are we to believe that business owners are facing a wave of business that there current work force can't handle (the only condition that would cause any business to hire new employees) thus requiring them to hire new workers but yet decide not to because our government runs a deficit?
The same line can be be repeated ad infinitum, but that doesn't mean it makes any sense.
Diane,
Why do you choose to humor the fringe values of the John Birch's of this generation (ie: Freedom Works) when talking about government shutdown and debt? These people have no solutions and only repeat the same, tired talking points that neither the right nor the left are insane enough to consider. All for what? Cheap political points amongst the conservative, Fox-watching fringe?
This doesn't help to solve our problems and only further empower them to even louder and further pollute reasonable political discourse with their nonsense.
Why arent the Democratics going after programs that are important to Republicans - like the NASA spending in the southern states, oil and gas subsidies? I feel that the Dems are simply trying to save programs that do need to be cut. Saving all programs is not the answer. Wish Obama showed more leadership on this.
Agreed! ---Carl Gibson, the founder of US Uncut, explains that while ordinary Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to use the rigged tax code to avoid paying any federal taxes at all. As he says, if you have “one dollar” in your wallet, you’re paying more than the “combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America“ --- google for source of copypasta above -
I'm troubled by Mr. Kibbe's use of the word "framing." "Framing" is something the right has been doing to turn reality inside out. That's exactly what Mr. Kibbe seems to propose here.
We know that just as private industry investment in jobs helps the economy, so do government investment in jobs rescues a faltering economy. This is not the time to do the kind of belt tightening the Republican propose -- and the tea party are trying to force on us. They are doing it out of combination of ignorance and fear that a growing economy could favor their opponents politically. Ignorance and prevarication shouldn't be allowed anywhere near economic decisions. We had that during the Reagan era; we had it up to our scuppers with the Bush 2 administration.
I agree with you. Also, why are these neoliberal mouthpieces allowed to call themselves conservative? when asked about raising taxes on the rich the reply was a nonsensical statement to the effect of: "That would hurt the economy" ----Nonsense! trickle down has failed. Spectacularly! over and over!
I really do not understand why the media has even dignified the Republican House's $61 billion in discretionary non security cuts and their unfortunate potential for bringing the government to a halt, given that these cuts have no redeeming value in reducing the deficit/debt dealing as they do with
only a sliver of the total deficit, reducing the badly needed growth rate, as per Goldman Sachs and representing as they do slashes in programs the Republicans have always opposed, deficit or no deficit, and which have been thrown out there essentially to placate their base. If the party was truly interested in deficit/debt reduction, they would be addressing a wider array of deficit reduction issues such as defense spending, stimulative programs designed to create jobs and therefore increase tax revenues, oil and gas subsidies, and tax loopholes and above all the Bush tax cuts, cessation of which could, per Alan Greenspan, largely wipe out the deficit. The party does not do this because they continue to be unconcerned about actual deficit reduction and the media by their lack of analysis/questioning allows them to perpetuate this fraud on the country.
Diane, please congratulate the Tea Party for their utter domination of your guests' thinking! That does not seem an easy task -- yet they're in complete control.
The rich continue to get richer; they've already bought all the votes they need to prevent Congress from seeking the required revenue: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-cha...
Cutting programs will continue to bring greater shame to America: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/02/19/opinion/19blowch.html?ref=o...
I recommend a more realistic show entitled, "How will US states be re-partitioned after the Federal shutdown? How many partitions will qualify as third-world countries?"
Why are you talking only about domestic cuts? We need to cut our military budget drastically, eliminating all military bases worldwide and stopping fighting two entirely unnecessary wars, which can not be won.
Mr. Kibbe says that this is a bad time for a tax increase, but I, as a lower middle class retiree, have recieved a tax increase. That is, the "making work pay tax credit" has been cancelled, and my property tax is no longer deductible in addition to the standard deduction. I will also begin paying state taxes on my pension here in Michigan. By Tea party/Republican definition, eliminating a tax break is a tax increase. I am cutting back on spending due to these tax "increases". Does Mr. Kibbe approve of this?
When we hear "everything is on the table", why do we not hear that the Bush tax cut cost $3.5 trillion, that the Bank Bailout still goes on via the Fed and the corporations, esp. oil and finance are making money hand over fist. Exxon made $19 billion in 2009 yet paid no U.S. income tax. They got a $156 million REFUND! What is dragging us down is WEALTHFARE!
This is, as Buffett said, a war between the wealthy few and the rest of us, and the rich are winning.
All we have to do is tax the wealthy at the level when Reagan came into office, take the lid off income subject to Social Security, and close the loopholes in the tax laws that allow hedge fund managers and other to pay a lower tax rate than average working folks.
it costs $1.2 million annually to keep a soldier in Afghanistan. It costs $600,000 plus annually to keep a soldier in Iraq. We have huge, expensive garrisons in Europe, Japan and South Korea. How can everyone in our government keep ignoring the fact that we can easily secure American interests without maintaining these expensive commitments.
We don't have a free market economy since mega corporations that are 'too big to fail' have privatized gains, but socialized losses. This is the problem. The government subsidizes those corporations with the most government ties, while innovation and new markets are lost. The government created our financial problems, expecting the government to fix these problems is therefore, idiocy.
This refers to Ozkar's post about spending.
Excellent point. Military spending should be a central focus now.
What is the Tea Party's evidence that "every dollar the government spends is a dollar the private sector doesn't spend?" Many, many economists would disagree.
The real problem with our economy is all of the really good jobs that have been getting exported from this country. This is not just manufacturing! Lots of Information Technology jobs have been getting exported: Programmers & Developers, Network Engineers, Help Desk jobs. The majority of these jobs for large US corporations are now based overseas. Millions of workers in the US have better experience and training, but it is so much cheaper for countries to send these jobs overseas. Stimulus WILL NOT FIX this problem in our economy. We need to raise taxes on products and services sourced from countries such as China, India, Malaysia.
The best solution is one outside the government.
Diane Rehm and NPR (and the other media outlets that know about it) will not tell you about National Hiring Day. This will help the country and hurt no one. It calls for a modicum of corporate patriotism from all.
There is a solution to the jobs problem and it could quickly put hundreds of thousands of people back to work. It is not pro left or right. It is not from any corporation, it's outside the government control, it's totally voluntary, and helps all with little sacrifice from anyone.
National Hiring Day #2 is suggested for March 15,2011. This is a day that corporations are encouraged to hire new employees. Corporations are called on to put patriotism first and help their country in hard times. Those corporations that cannot hire, are asked to stop firing for that month. The day was suggested by the 18 year old Dallas art and media zine Musea.
Republicans should love this because it's outside the government and voluntary. Democrats should love this because it helps those needing jobs. Independents should love it because it helps all with little sacrifice from anyone corporation, group, or person.
At the same time that the national debt has grown, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the fewest people has accelerated. Please have your guests discuss the relationship between these two developments.