Keeping Promises
David Sanger of the New York Times calls it “breathtaking.” Paul Krugman calls it “very, very good.” Frank Rich says that it “delivered” because “[g]overnment must step in boldly when free markets run amok and when national crises fester unaddressed for decades.” Time’s Joe Klein dubbed it a “full blown symphony.”
Others have a different opinion. Senator Jim Demint, a Republican from South Carolina, thinks it’s “socialism.” When asked about it, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee smiled and said, “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer lamented that it would bring us closer to the “regulation-bound, economically sclerotic, socially stagnant, nanny state that is the European Union.”
What is it you ask?
Why of course, it’s Barack Obama’s budget plan. (Cautious applause.)
Introduced close on the heels of the historic passage of the $789 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the President’s budget proposal is astounding in its breadth and vision. Some people think budgets are just numbers on a page. Not this one. This budget is the primary vehicle through which the President intends to carry out sweeping policy changes in energy, the environment, tax reform and health care. It’s change with a big “C.”
Announced last Thursday in an address to Congress executed with exceptional confidence and command, Obama’s budget plan is simple really: it delivers on the same promises he made in the campaign and does so with efficiency, cogency and elegance. Still, it’s surprising, a little scary even. No one was entirely sure whether this Obama guy was actually going to do the things he spoke so eloquently about on the campaign trail, and the stimulus package, whose efficacy and relevance are still unknown quantities, only created more uncertainty. But the President’s ambitious budget marks a new phase.
“I didn’t come here to do the same thing we’ve been doing or to take small steps forward,” Obama said in his Weekly Address, staring into the camera steely-eyed like a well-trained boxer. “I came to provide the sweeping change that this country demanded when it went to the polls in November.”
The blueprint laid out by the President would cut the $1.75 trillion deficit by more than 2/3 by 2013. In efforts to reduce decades of growing inequality, the budget reverses the course set in place by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago on taxes, increasing the tax responsibilities, progressively, on the wealthiest Americans (those couples making over $250k per year, $200k if single) and decreasing them for the rest of us. He called for roughly $100 billion a year in tax increases on the wealthy.
Yet to deflect claims that it’s a return to a fearsome “big government,” Obama is explaining with granular detail how all of the revenue generated from tax increases would be directed to programs and initiatives on which he campaigned, and for which he was elected. The budget plan would implement a comprehensive effort to address global warming, cut oil imports and create a green economy that produces millions of jobs. There would be a cap-and-trade program to limits emissions of heat-trapping gases. The effort would produce $215 billion over 10 years, which would finance renewable energy projects and pay for middle class tax credits. The budget ends subsidies to “large agribusinesses that don’t need them,” and allocates $51.7 billion for the State Department for foreign aid, among other things.
But health care could be the area in which the most dramatic and sweeping reforms are made. With national health expenditures at $2.3 trillion in 2007 ($7,600 per person), increasing at a rate 2 times the rate of inflation, the United States spends 16% of the GDP on health care, compared to 9.7 percent in Canada and 9.5 percent in France. Yet both France and Canada provide insurance to ALL their citizens, while a whopping 47 million Americans are uninsured. Meanwhile, insurance companies boast massive profit margins; as does Big Pharma and so many others in the chain. And, of course, there’s pervasive fraud and inefficiencies throughout the system.
In short, the system is broken, everywhere. But the Administration sees in this crisis an historic opportunity to set the country on a more fiscally responsible and compassionate path. Make no mistake, health care reform is the centerpiece of this budget.
The budget would set aside a whopping $634 billion in a “reserve fund for health care reform.” It would make a down payment toward the goal of covering the uninsured, funded in part by cutting subsidies to hospitals, insurance companies and drug companies. To be sure, the President intends to set in motion a process that will inevitably lead to universal health care, by providing all Americans with an option to get the same health insurance coverage Congress has, which, needless to say, would be the preferable option for most. The budget also increases prescription drug premiums for higher income Medicare recipients and allocates $6 billion to cancer research.
The AP called the President’s proposal “breathtaking in its scope and ambition.” The final lines in his 2/28 Weekly Address reiterating the budget sum up the President’s moxie quite nicely:
I know these steps won’t sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they’re gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this:
So am I.
The system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long, but I don’t. I work for the American people. I didn’t come here to do the same thing we’ve been doing or to take small steps forward, I came to provide the sweeping change that this country demanded when it went to the polls in November. That is the change this budget starts to make, and that is the change I’ll be fighting for in the weeks ahead – change that will grow our economy, expand our middle-class, and keep the American Dream alive for all those men and women who have believed in this journey from the day it began.
Breathtaking indeed.
