Useful Idiot David Brooks

David Brooks at the New York Times is considered a moderate pundit, but he puts out columns that in some ways make me more infuriated than anything coming from the hard right.  It's not that he's in favor of crazy policies or that he scores cheap political points; it really comes from the way he defnes himself and the way common political wisdom defines "the sensible center"- as the political center point between the two poles, no matter whether one of the poles is completely insane.  The centrist punditocracy just can't seem to accept this into their worldview- they search for comity, they want "people to work together", and then when an important Democrat points out that the other side is dedicated to policies that are terrible, the Democrat is punished for being too "partisan".

Today's column is a great case in point.  He starts off bemoaning how Obama comes off when he's being critical of the Ryan budget.

It should be said at the outset that the Ryan budget has some disturbing weaknesses, which Democrats are right to identify. The Ryan budget would cut too deeply into discretionary spending. This could lead to self-destructive cuts in scientific research, health care for poor kids and programs that boost social mobility. Moreover, the Ryan tax ideas are too regressive. They make tax cuts for the rich explicit while they hide any painful loophole closings that might hurt Republican donors.

But these legitimate criticisms and Obama’s modest but real deficit-reducing accomplishments got buried under an avalanche of distortion. The Republicans have been embarrassing themselves all primary season. It’s as if Obama wanted to sink to their level in a single hour.

First, there was his tone. Obama cast himself as the fiscal moderate who embraced the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles approach. (Perhaps we were all asleep during the Simpson-Bowles-Obama consciousness tour.) Then he unleashed every 1980s liberal cliché in the book, calling the Republicans a bunch of trickle-down, Trojan horse-bearing social Darwinists.

OK, let's start with the "fiscal moderate" meme.  Who is more moderate fiscally, right now, the party that has proposed closing the budget deficit with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases (from a current tax rate that is at its lowest level in decades), or the party that has just proposed cutting the deficit without any tax hikes at all, requiring cuts that would basically end nearly all discetionary spending?

Now it's true that the "trickle down economics" thing is an '80s liberal cliche, but it's also completely true right now.  The Ryan budget destroys the social safety net and counts on wealth trickling down to the masses- that's the plan!  When you propose turning government into little more than a defense force plus some services for the elderly, you're saying pretty explicitly that the poor will need to fend for themselves- that's Social Darwinism as far as I'm concerned.  (Jon Chait puts it well here).

Brooks goes on to point out that the Obama and Ryan budget proposals aren't that different in terms of how they'll affect the deficit.

Obama exaggerated these normal-sized differences into a Manichaean chasm. Under Ryan, Obama charged, 10 million college students would get their financial aid cut by $1,000, Alzheimer’s research would be slashed, 200,000 children would lose their chance to enter Head Start.

Where did Obama get these specifics? He imagined them. He imposed some assumptions that are nowhere to be found in the Ryan budget. He compared Ryan’s reduced spending increases with proposed growth, not current levels.

Now why would Obama have to make up specifics? Because the Ryan plan doesn't give any specifics!  It refers to hikes in defense spending, deep tax cuts, continued spending on entitlements, elimination of unnamed tax breaks, and making up the difference by reducing overall spending by a massive amount.  When one does the Math, it means that the programs Obama is talking about have to be cut out.  Saying so isn't hyperbole.

Then the president turned to Ryan’s Medicare proposal. The Ryan plan, he charged, “will ultimately end Medicare as we know it.”

In 2011, when Ryan first proposed a version of this budget, Politifact, the truth-checking outfit, honored this claim with its “Lie of the Year” award. Since then, the Ryan Medicare proposal has become more moderate and much better. Obama’s charge is even more groundless.

Well, Ryan's plan does end Medicare as we know it, and proposes changing it into a very different program in which seniors get a voucher to purchase health insurance instead of getting the health insurance directly from the government.  If they can't afford the difference between the two, then they won't have health insurance.  That sure sounds like a big change to me.

As I say, I have my own problems with Ryan’s plan, which Obama identified. But Ryan has at least taken a big step toward an eventual fiscal solution. He’s proposed necessary structural entitlement reforms, which the Democrats are unwilling to do. He’s proposed real tax reform, which the Democrats are also unwilling to do.

The first truth is that we will have to do these big things to avoid a fiscal calamity. The second truth is there is no one party solution; there has to be a merger of respectable ideas. The third truth is that gimmicky speeches obscure the president’s best character and make it seem as if he doesn’t understand the scope of the calamity looming in front of us.

This just makes me want to tear my hair out.   Ryan's plan is completely unworkable.  It's not a big step toward a solution to the deficit because it includes tax cuts that increase the deficit, and then use much of the rest of the plan to compensate for those revenue cuts with even more spending cuts.

We have to do things to avoid a fiscal calamity, but it's not all that complicated.  If Congress just does nothing the medium-term deficit goes down considerably. 

The fact is that the solutions to our budget problems are staring us in the face: a combination of spending cuts and the sunsetting of the Bush tax cuts.  That's actually a moderate solution.  It's proposed by the center-Left.  Centrists like David Brooks should be pointing out that Republicans are refusing to compromise to solve this problem, but instead they throw out this crap.