Congress has now achieved the remarkable feat of making itself less popular than Wall Street bankers.
And the way it is heading, it hasn’t hit bottom yet — there’s still 9 percent of the public that approves of the job the legislators are doing.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and publisher of the Nation magazine, vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column for The Post.
The entire country is terrified about the economy. There are 24 million people in need of full time work, wages are declining, one in four homes is under water, workers entering the workforce outnumber the jobs being created, Europe and China’s economies are slowing. People understandably want Congress to focus on jobs and the economy.
So how is it that after a few weeks of inching toward talk about jobs (with the president proposing a modest jobs plan and Republicans filibustering to block even a discussion of it), some members of Congress have turned their attention back to cutting spending and raising taxes — both actions guaranteed to destroy jobs, not to create them?
We’re headed toward the deadline of the supercommittee’s Gang of 12 — the despicable offspring of the debt ceiling deal. It must report its plan to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion (on top of the $900 billion in spending cuts mandated in the deal) before Thanksgiving. If nothing is passed before Christmas, deep automatic cuts in discretionary spending will begin to kick in — in 2013.
Last week, the majority of Democratic representatives on the supercommittee offered up an even larger deal — suggesting $3 trillion in deficit reduction, with a ratio of 6-to-1 spending cuts to tax hikes, according to the most reasonable Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline, or nearly 2-to-1 cuts to tax hikes on the CBO’s current policy baseline. Whatever the measure, the offer was markedly worse on spending than either the Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission’s recommendations or the ideas ladled out by the bipartisan Senate Gang of Six.
A large chunk of the spending cuts would come from Medicare and Medicaid (some $475 billion over 10 years) and the newest establishment fad — a chained Consumer Price Index that would cut a medium earner’s Social Security benefits by about 9.2 percent in real dollars by 2042.
While Democrats reportedly also included some $300 billion in stimulus — largely by extending the Social Security payroll tax cut and extending unemployment benefits — they have decided to get into a bidding war with conservatives about cutting government — at a time of mass unemployment, when spending cuts and tax hikes will simply cost jobs.
And to make the offer enticing, they casually decided to throw in the core legacy of the Democratic Party — and the core obligation of the nation — to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
House Speaker John Boehner once more scorned the preemptive Democratic concessions, opposing any tax hikes. There may be logic to his insidious intransigence. Republicans keep saying no and Democrats keep offering more concessions. Supercommittee Republicans suggested instead a package based largely on cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, combined with magical hundreds of billions they say would be produced by slashing assistance to the elderly and the vulnerable, by selling off government assets, and by the growth sparked by tax cuts.
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