Shutdown Thursday and the Ryan Vote

It's slightly ridiculous to see another White House midnight meeting to avoid a government shutdown. By now it's clear that--with three wars and a deep recession--the Republicans actually want a shutdown of the government. Yesterday, a ragtag band of teabaggers protested for a shutdown. The Christianists like Pence,King and Bachmann want a shutdown over abortion, planned parenthood and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Now an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll is out that shows 56% of Republicans want a government shutdown,only 30 some want a compromise. The numbers are quite different for Independents and Democrats. 66% of Independents want a compromise and a deal. 64% of Democrats want a deal. According to the Gallup poll, over 58% of all Americans want a compromise and a deal, while only 30% want a government shutdown.

House Republicans are playing games again to pass a short-term budget resolution. The political reason for this is that a government shutdown would mean our troops don't get paid and this might hurt the national security credibility of the Republicans. If Democrats can't seize this opportunity and go on the warpath, then we are in for a long period of conflict in our politics.

The Kervorkian Budget Plan. The Republicans are actually going to vote on their Paul Ryan 2012 Budget next week. This will include the proposal to eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers.

That's right, Republican members of the House will now be on record for voting to eliminate Medicaid and Medicare. The problem with this is that this puts this crazy notion into the whole budget negotiating process and the Democrats will have to be more artful than they have been in rejecting this and facing the Republicans down.

In case you have missed it, Paul Krugman is now on fire, writing blogposts after blogposts on different aspects of this crazy scheme.

The Economic Policy Institute says that the Medicaid cuts alone will cost 2 million private sector jobs. Also, they note that Medicaid overhead is low--much like Social Security--and 96% go to benefits.

The Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a poll recently where 39% of Americans felt that Medicaid was very important and 20% thought it somewhat important. The Poll also contained some interesting perspectives on American attitudes toward reductions in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Social Security 64% want no reductions 27% minor reductions 8% major reductions Medicare 56% want no reductions 35% minor 8% major.
Medicaid 47% want no reductions 39% minor 13% major.

I've been disappointed with people like Andrew Sullivan who do not seem to understand the fundamental restructuring of our political economy that the Ryan Plan calls for and how counter it is the last century of our politics. Sullivan and people like David Frum talk about its flaws but say that is dramatizes the extent of our debt problem. But so did the Bowles-Simpson Catfood Commission, the Peterson Foundation's roadshow. I would expect some push back by self-styled conservatives that the Ryan Plan is so radical and it destroys any sense of a social compact.

This is the first time in my lifetime that anyone has proposed to accelerate the disparity in wealth and to make permanent the economic muscle of the 1%, while overtly arguing for a lesser quality of life among the middle class and the poorer Americans.

While everyone was laughing at Boehner opening the House with the reading of the constitution and the basic illiteracy of the Repeal The "Job-Killing" Heathcare Bill, few noticed an ominous procedural move by the Republicans, which made Paul Ryan the sole arbiter of the budget and the budget negotiations in the future. In other words, this is not just another crackpot supply-side idea, this Budget is the sanctioned policy of a once major party and really is the thing that will be negotiated in 2012.

The Ryan Budget does absolutely nothing for the deficit and it does nothing about increasing revenues for the government. Instead it is an ideological statement aimed at dismantling the social welfare system in the United states completely and entrenching corporate power as the sole arbiter of economic policy. The reason Ryan didn't put in the details on Social Security was that this would have been like launching a flare in the sky and signalling what this whole thing was about.

I agree that this proposal should kill House freshmen and it should severely wound the Republicans. But outside the Beltway, who is going to understand the deeper implications of this plan? I am sure there is a calculus that with enough corporate money they can buy and spin their way out of this. And pity those hapless Teabaggers. 82 of them received contribution from the Koch Family,people who utterly detest America. Are we going to see defections and public confessions of guilt?

Of course,you too can solve the deficit and debt problem. Just go to the New York Times and look up their interactive story months back on the deficit. This was at the time of the Bowles-Simpson Commission. I solve it with 50% tax increases and 50%budget cuts. I am sure you can solve it too without surrendering the country to the Fortune 500 and dismantling all our social programs.