The Carpetbagger Report
It may have seemed at the time like a political coup. Conservative lawmakers in the Republican Study Committee seized an opportunity, hosted a well-attended press conference, and laid out an aggressive budget-cutting agenda to help improve the government's deteriorating budget outlook. They even came up with a clever little name: "Operation Offset."
Under the circumstances, the frugal Republicans appeared "bold." They're willing to make "tough choices" that others are afraid of. They're "taking the lead" in restoring fiscal sanity.
Of course, none of these things is true. As Kevin Drum noted, the proposed spending cuts are "mostly just a standard conservative wish list, and not a very serious one at that." In a partisan sense, however, this is a debate the Dems should welcome. If offers an opportunity to lay out two competing visions of government.
This, in essence, is the right laying its cards on the table. There's a massive deficit, hurricane relief and reconstruction efforts will be exceedingly expensive, and there's at least talk about keeping the budget from spiraling completely out of control. The Republican Study Committee stepped up to explain what conservative Republicans think is the appropriate solution: slash Medicare and Medicaid; cut military quality-of-life programs, including health care; and rely on arithmetic mistakes to find savings that don't exist.
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This is the first real talk about "sacrifice" in a long while. The RSC's report is effectively saying that everyone can't have everything; some folks are going to have to get less. On this, we agree. The trick of it is, for the right, those folks are exclusively Americans who have less, at the expensive of those who have more. It is, to borrow another phrase, Robin Hood in reverse. Why ask millionaires to give up some of their tax breaks when we cut health care for families in poverty?
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