{"id":14408,"date":"2013-02-15T17:17:12","date_gmt":"2013-02-15T22:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2013\/02\/15\/14408.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:05:01","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:05:01","slug":"what-we-want-is-to-pay-for-wha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2013\/02\/15\/what-we-want-is-to-pay-for-wha\/","title":{"rendered":"What we want is to pay for what we want"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger gets really cranky about things, you know? Here’s one of them: when people talk about the two Parties and their positions on the budget, particularly when we are in the lead-up to yet another Deadline with a Bad Law booby-trap<\/a>, they are likely to suggest that the Other Party wants spending cuts, and My Party wants revenue increases, and that therefore a compromise will have some spending cuts (for the Other Party) and some revenue increases (for My Party). This talk is typical even for Left Blogovia, as in Greg Sargent’s GOP approach to sequester jumps shark<\/a>:\n

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats unveiled their own replacement plan for the sequester today<\/a>. As expected, it contains roughly a 50-50 split of cuts and new revenues via the closing of various loopholes enjoyed by the rich and corporations.

So here are the politics of this in a nutshell. Democrats want the sequester to be averted through a mix of roughly equivalent concessions by both sides.<\/blockquote>\n

I understand, as a practical matter, it makes sense to talk about it. It gives the impression, though, that Our Party is simply pro-revenue. This, I think, feeds into what Paul Krugman calls<\/a> the mirror-image fallacy, that since the Other Party knows they want lower taxes, we must (in their eyes) want higher taxes. And in point of fact, I think (and many of us in the Party think) that total revenue levels should be higher than they are now, but not because I like high revenues. No. I like the things that the money is buying, and I am willing to raise revenues enough to pay for them.\n

Digression<\/i>: Actually, I feel much the same way in my own life. I would gladly make less money (by working fewer hours, or even at a different job), only I want to use<\/i> more money for various things. Including investments (or savings, which are at this point investments) as well as bread and roses. And actually, the investments are really only so that I can have more bread and roses later. I’m not maximizing revenues, I’m balancing spending (on things I want) with revenues (which are generally obtained through unpleasantness of some kind). While it’s clearly an error to confuse household incentives with government incentives<\/a>, I suspect that my instincts on money, bread and roses for my own use have something to do with my instincts on government policies. End Digression.\n

So the compromise here is that the Other Party wants spending cuts, and My Party wants fully-funded programs. Or, even more accurately, My Party wants bridges and tunnels, subsidies and grants, courthouses and officers, railways and airports, hospitals and medicines, power and water, inspectors and regulators, markets and money, and all sorts of things. Well, not all sorts—we like subsidies that encourage consumers to buy low-energy refrigerators and insulating windows, and we don’t like subsidies that encourage energy companies to despoil the land. But on the whole, it’s not wrong to say that we like fully-funded programs.\n

So, instead of calling it a compromise between cuts and revenues, we could say it’s between cutting programs and funding them. The problem is that we can’t then call it a 50-50 split between cutting programs and funding them—that compromise doesn’t cut our spending in half, so the cuts are a small percentage of the total funds. On the other hand, the 50-50 thing isn’t really working out very well as persuasive rhetoric, now, is it? Not much of a loss. And we could probably call it a 50-50 split between program cuts and new funding for programs, if we had to use that even split language.\n

And, of course, this is all complicated because the Other Party wants to more than a hundred billion in funding from the budget, but doesn’t want to talk about cutting anything popular, like most actual programs. So Eric Cantor talks about<\/a> a $266,821 political science grant. Awesome! We’re .0002% there! Even the whole budget for grants in the social sciences is $250 million—leaving only $99,750,000,000 left unspecified. When we point out the Other Party’s intransigence when it comes to paying for popular programs, they shrug and say that they are in favor of those popular<\/i> programs—it’s those other unpopular ones they want to get rid of.\n

Well, and that’s politics, too. It’s My Party’s business (and my business) to try to nail them down to some actual policy preferences. We don’t have to accept it, but we can only fight it by actually fighting it. And while we’re at it, we don’t have to accept their frame around the budget fight, either. We don’t like new revenues, and higher taxes isn’t a victory for us. Having the things those taxes pay for—the national bread and roses—those would be the victory.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger expects the other side to use their language, but would rather our side use our language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14408"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16718,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14408\/revisions\/16718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}