Obama’s Pointless Budget.

What, exactly, is the point of the Obama budget released today? We all know that, in the context of the American political process, it has very little – make that zero – chance of being enacted. People more astute than I tell me that it is a political statement. A matter of positioning. It is an announcement to the world of what Obama would like to see happen. And it dares his opponents, in this case Congressional Republicans, to respond. Which they have done preemptively by touting the much ballyhooed Ryan budget.

Ne’er the twain shall meet.

Obama is playing his silly games again.

His budget is supposed to be ‘serious’. That means, in Washington speak, that it hammers at everyone, that no one will like it, and that it doesn’t pander to any particular class of people or section of the electorate. It also is a signal to other serious people that he is one of them: his concern is about the deficit and our rising debt. So concerned is he that he is willing to be the first Democrat ever to cut Social Security benefits.

Let me rephrase myself: this isn’t a silly game to play. It is an absurd game to play.

This putative surrender to the Republicans of yet more ideological territory reveals, yet again, Obama’s deeper motivation. He is obsessed with the deficit, and wants to make a mark in history by striking a ‘grand bargain’ that eliminates it from the political dialog for a decade or more. He is a committed economic centrist who genuinely wants to solve the budget issue in order to switch attention to other issues for the remainder of his second term. For as long as the budget sits unresolved it will create endless opportunities for Republican legislative mischief, and thus consume valuable Congressional time and severely reduce the likelihood of any of his other agenda items making it into law.

In other words, solving the budget impasse is entirely driven by Obama’s political calculations, not by national economic interest. He is appealing to a very small group self-defined as being serious about the deficit. He wants members of that group to recognize his credibility as being serious also.

My objections to all this are well known:

• We don’t have a budget problem. The deficit is already shrinking – perhaps a little too quickly – as the economy grows. More and quicker growth will reduce it even more .
• The Republicans are unlikely to horse trade. Why would they? Obama has ceded great swathes of valuable political territory in his pursuit of a grand bargain before – the Bush tax cuts were traded for a modest tax increase on the rich, but lost in the confusion was the undoing of the temporary payroll tax cut, which has, arguably, a more direct and negative  impact on the economy. So Obama managed to slam the very 47% he is accused of pandering to, without winning much in the way of political capital with that group
• Social Security is not a cause of our budget imbalance. The loss of revenue due to the recession and the Bush tax cuts are. So why cut something that is not a cause of our problem?
• The economy is still weak in the aftermath of the recession. Monetary policy is largely ineffective, and is close to being a spent force. This leaves fiscal policy as our more effective tool. Yet Obama is proposing, not just ignoring fiscal policy, but throwing it into reverse
• Appeasement never works with extremists. They don’t play the same game. Obama simply refuses to recognize this, and keeps on offering up bits of territory in the forlorn hope that at some point the extremist appetite will be sated. He will fail. Again.

But my friends in the Obama fan club will tell me that I am missing the cleverness of his ploy. They tell me he knows that the Republicans will continue to obstruct. And here’s the total cleverness: by offering up territory that gets refused he will win the great war of public opinion. He will expose the Republicans as the bluffing, insatiable obstructionists that they are. This will give him mystical powers to do other stuff. And quite possibly the occasional nice reference in the Washington Post editorial page. It may even earn him a Place In History. Which, of course, all presidents hanker after.

I am sorry. This is just daft.

The entire world already knows the Republicans are obstructionist. The last four painful years have taught us all that. Their agenda is vastly different from anyone else’s. Feeding them entitlement cuts as bait is not going to change them. It will induce, as it already has today, a call for more such cuts. After all, as the Republicans are now saying, Obama has both recognized that entitlements are a budgetary problem, and that they need to be cut. He has broken with eighty years of Democratic tradition. That’s radical. And, they continue, if entitlements are so much a problem – as Obama now acknowledges – why doesn’t he just cut them? Why propose all that other stuff, when we know what the problem is?

They stole Austria, we gave them Czechoslovakia. Now they want Poland. Who knew extremists were so difficult to appease?

We did. But not Obama. He is still playing games. Pointless and dangerous games.

I have no idea why he keeps this up. I know it isn’t helping the economy.