I have a new column up at Kaiser Health News about the president’s failure to seriously address the debt crisis in the newly-released 2012 budget proposal:
It’s like the president and his team woke up after the November 2010 mid-term election with a bad case of political amnesia. What deficit? What debt commission?
This isn’t what the president promised when he ran in 2008, nor is it what he told voters as recently as one year ago. Over and over, he has promised not to “kick the can” down the road, as he says his predecessors did before him. Instead, he would provide real leadership to tackle the looming threat posed by out-of-control borrowing and debt accumulation. That was supposedly the reason for appointing the Bowles-Simpson National Commission On Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in the first place, to lay the predicate for engaging in a bipartisan effort to narrow medium and long-term budget deficits and reduce the risk of a debt-induced crisis.
But now, all of that kind of thinking is out the window. If the president won’t show leadership on the budget, there’s zero chance congressional Democrats will. Some moderate Democrats in the Senate may make some noise about going farther than the president. But when push comes to shove, the rank and file Democrats in both chambers are far more likely to take a pass, too. Why would they take on large political risks when the president of their own party won’t and is likely to pull the rug out from under them if they do?
So, realistically, the Obama “punt,” as House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has aptly described it, means the odds of a serious deficit reduction effort before the next presidential election are now low and falling.
Read the full column here.