When Paul Ryan proposed The Path to Prosperity in March 2012 (more commonly known as the Ryan Budget) commentators from across the political spectrum loudly and correctly criticized the plan for right wing extremism; even conservative Appropriations Committee Chair Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) called the plan “unrealistic and ill-conceived.” The plan cut discretionary spending in half, repealed the Affordable Care Act, and slashed Medicare, Medicaid, and countless state grants, all solely to reduce the deficit without having to raise taxes. Just this August, on the first viable opportunity to implement part of the Ryan Budget—on the Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development (THUD) spending bill—less than half of the House Republican Caucus supported the bill, and thus it didn’t get a floor vote.
Compare that proposal to the Murray-Ryan budget agreement for FY2014, which spends $100 billion less than the original Ryan Budget. The Murray-Ryan budget “saves” that money by further cutting food stamps, early education, cancer research, and every other non-entitlement spending program. If the Ryan Budget was unrealistic and ill-conceived, this plan achieves a uniquely extreme level of naïvety.
While this agreement might be bipartisan, it’s an extremely conservative proposal that would have been a libertarian pipedream less than a year ago. Democrats can no longer keep agreeing to these so-called compromises that continually shift the center of our fiscal debate towards the conservative fringe. If Senate Democrats agree to the Murray-Ryan Budget and the continued starvation of basic social programs, the Democratic Party will once again forego its commitments to the poor and working classes and abandon their role as advocates of welfare-state progressivism. Liberal voices in the party need to crusade against the fallacies of the budget’s shift towards smaller government, lest they sacrifice the long-term struggle for a strong American social contract and allow the far-right to frame future fiscal debates.
The Murray-Ryan budget agreement has garnished support among Democratic lawmakers who accept the sequestration spending levels as the null hypothesis. From that frame of reference, their argument makes some sense: we’ll recover a little more than half of sequester cuts in FY2014 and a little under a fourth of the cuts in FY2015. This would then seem like a move towards slightly bigger government and more liberal social programs.
While this reasoning might make it seem as though liberals “won” the budget discussions, accepting this gambit surrenders the larger struggle for a productive welfare state. Setting the budget for the next year at historically and dangerously low levels grants a libertarian victory for the foreseeable future; at least through the rest of the Obama administration, it would be highly unlikely to retain any spending levels comparable to those before the sequester. Every year, the previous year’s budget will serve as the starting point in creating the next budget, and without monumental and politically impossible adjustments, this status quo will maintain wildly insufficient non-defense discretionary spending. Democrats will continue with Pyrrhic victories until we have nothing but a shell of our earlier entitlement programs.
The sequester, liberals should recall, may have been the worst legislation for progressive fiscal policy in recent memory. Somewhere between 700,000 and 1.6 million workers lost their jobs—numbers so large that they may desensitize us to their human cost—and programs ranging from Head Start to Medicare lost essential funding. The Ryan-Murray budget accepts this as the new normal. The agreement’s minor spending increases force us to stomach a new, weakened social contract, void of the robust progressive programs Democrats have championed since the New Deal.
Conservatives continually redefine the political center by maintaining their principles, and it’s about time that liberals do the same—if Democrats keep laying down and accepting Republican legislation, whether on tax policy or budget deals, the center of the American economic debate will continue its rightward trend. As a percent of GDP, government spending has decreased in every budget since President Obama’s inauguration, and as a result we’ve suffered from a stagnant economy and poor government services. For decades, many of the youngest Millennials will suffer from poor early-life nutrition and subpar early education, and tens of thousands of people still die every year when Medicare and Medicaid don’t cover necessary operations. The long-term ramifications are immeasurable, and the short-term costs are abhorrent.
American budgets arrived here because conservatives keep offering a prisoner’s dilemma to the Democrats: take a right-wing deal, or no deal at all. In the latest deficit reduction negotiations, Harry Reid finally called the Republican bluff; while this led the country into the first government shutdown in almost twenty years, the Democrats eventually got the deal they wanted. Liberals merely had to employ their own brinkmanship and hold on longer than Republicans, and the ends justified the means. At nearly every other major economic negotiation in the past five years, though, ranging from deficit negotiations to budget deals, the Republicans seized the absolutist position of power. In the process, they’ve moved the left to the center, the center to the right, and the right to the fringe. Current “bipartisan” agreements, therefore, end up as moderately conservative bills, and Republicans walk away with their desired policies.
Despite some speculation that the Tea Party will destroy the electoral hopes of the Republican Party, their ideology shifted the entire spectrum of debate and consequently achieved the right’s desired ends. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait writes extensively on how Republicans, in sticking to their principles, have shifted the economic center of our political debate over the past few decades, and his argument seems pretty correct: through constantly caving, Democrats—the “liberal party”—eventually supported the lowest levels of taxation and social spending since the Great Depression. In recent years, the Tea Party accelerated this rightward shift and enforced ideological discipline within what otherwise could have been a diverse, big-tent party.
In caving on the Murray-Ryan budget agreement, fiscal policy once again inched right. While Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) told her caucus to “embrace the suck,” John Boehner (R-Ohio) proudly announced that the agreement “advances conservative policy and moves us in the right direction.”
And Republicans nonetheless look to shift the debate further toward their desired extreme. Prominent conservative voices announced their opposition, ranging from the top three Senate Republicans to most conservative think tanks. If they force their leadership to push further and further right, their theatrics shift the backroom negotiations. The Democrats may attempt to act like the adult party, but the children end up winning the long game.
It’s time the Democrats join in the childish theatrics and oppose any budget that doesn’t restore near pre-sequester spending levels. If conservatives want to get a large chunk of the defense cuts that many conservatives desperately want restored, the price tag should be steep. Democrats have a majority in the Senate and enough votes in the House if Boehner once again breaks the Hastert Rule, and as shown in the recent shutdown, even Republicans have a breaking point. Fighting for core Democratic principles will maintain the frame of reference instead of letting the Tea Party continually push discussion further and further right, and thus prevent the continual chipping away of entitlements and discretionary spending. Liberal groups such as the Center of American Progress should not accept this bill because it’s a “relative success,” when success is only relative to abject and utter failure. If we need to stare a shutdown in the face once again to preserve basic support for our country’s working class, liberals should prepare to weather the fight. We shouldn’t worry about government shutdowns when we keep agreeing to governments that are barely worth keeping open.
If we keep accepting these short-terms losses for the greater good, Democrats are going to keep letting this country’s welfare state suffer. We’re the party of big government, and it’s about time we act like it. Prolonged budget fights damage our credit and our political system, but one party can’t continue sacrificing its mission without ultimately having any mission at all. If we see progressive voices like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) loudly opposing the bill, we’ll know the Democratic Party still stands for something. If not, the era of progressive government will truly be over, and it’ll be time for a left-wing equivalent to the Tea Party that challenges Democrats in Name Only (DINOs)—it might be time to build a Democratic Caucus that still stands up for the poor and working classes.