NYT Editorial Gets It Right: Lasting Damage From the Budget Fight
The budget crisis manufactured by Congressional Republicans will never succeed at halting health care reform, but it has already caused long-lasting harm. It will preserve the deeply damaging spending cuts, known as the sequester, that are costing jobs and hurting the lives of millions.
Most of the attention given to the House’s temporary spending resolution has focused on the provision in it to defund President Obama’s health law. The Senate plans to drop that wording, and, if the House doesn’t agree, the government will shut down on Tuesday. But even without the provision, the resolution itself is pernicious because it preserves through mid-December all the blunt and arbitrary sequester cuts that began in March, making it much less likely those cuts will be replaced with more sensible cuts and revenue increases for the rest of the 2014 fiscal year.
The only other change to the resolution that Senate Democrats will try to make is to limit the duration of the stopgap resolution to mid-November, hoping to use the next six weeks to negotiate a more responsible budget. Although many Democrats in both chambers would prefer a resolution that repudiates the sequester cuts now, they are resigned to what is known as a “clean C.R.,” a continuing resolution that simply continues the abysmally low spending levels of 2013 into the first weeks or months of fiscal 2014, which begins on Tuesday.
To insist on a fight would mean Democrats would have to bear partial responsibility for a government shutdown if a continuing resolution is not approved in time — a burden now borne entirely by Republicans obsessed with stopping health reform. But any hope that Congress will use the stopgap period to negotiate a better budget is slim. It has already been six months since the Senate passed a realistic budget to replace the sequester with cuts of $975 billion, mostly from agriculture supports and efficiencies in medical spending. It also raises $1 trillion in revenue by removing tax breaks enjoyed by corporations and wealthy individuals.
The House has yet to respond to the Senate budget. Its Republican leaders have refused even to sit down with Democrats if revenue increases are on the agenda. Manipulated by a Tea Party wing that wants cuts even deeper than the sequester, the leaders are no more likely to budge now. They know that once low levels of discretionary spending are enshrined in law, the reduced budgets become the new baseline from which the right wing will demand further cuts each year.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/opinion/lasting-damage-from-the-budget-fight.html?_r=0