The Great Debate

President Barack Obama’s budget, released Wednesday, is getting a lot of criticism from ideologues on the right and left. That is one of the most encouraging things about it.

Though the president’s budget falls short in several important ways, it demonstrates his willingness to compromise — something most Democratic and Republican legislators have resisted. Now comes the critical stage in any real effort to achieve a “grand bargain,” when the president can show true leadership by bridging the divide between the parties and using the bully pulpit to address the American people in a constructive fashion that can lead to a deal.

The most helpful thing about the Obama budget is that, for the first time, the president has publicly proposed reforms to two key social insurance programs. By adopting a GOP-backed change in the inflation calculator — the so-called chained CPI — the president is accepting adjustments in the cost of living payments for those receiving Social Security.

He is also renewing his verbal offer to Republicans from last December’s negotiations for more than $400 billion in healthcare savings – including roughly $370 billion in Medicare spending over the next 10 years. His budget proposes to expand means testing for Medicare premium subsidies.

These proposals don’t go far enough. But they put social insurance programs on the table for discussion. That is a positive step.

By Keith Hennessey
The opinions expressed are his own.

I cover three topics in this post: what important players won in this deal, the core concepts and tradeoffs within the deal, and what the different strategies might be this Fall under this bill when it becomes law. The President’s priorities

The President knows he will get debt limit increases through early 2013 no matter what House conservatives/Tea Party members do. Those Members can no longer “hold a debt limit increase hostage” before the 2012 election.

We could also describe this as eliminating liquidity risk through 2012.

Assuming someone doesn’t find a way out of the enforcement mechanisms in the bill (1 in 3 chance), there will be at least $2.1 T in deficit reduction over the next 10 years as a result. While I think that’s a big policy benefit, I’m not sure how important that is substantively to the President. (Is he for stimulus? Austerity? Who knows at this point.)

The following is a guest post by Russ Roberts taken from his co-authored blog, Cafe Hayek. The opinions expressed are his own.

Both Arnold Kling and I (and probably a few million other people) have wondered why it was necessary for Federal money to be given to the states and cities to prevent job losses. For states that have been irresponsible or unlucky and find themselves short of revenue, why not reduce salaries some, say 10% and save that money?

One answer is that state and city employees are under union contracts that are not easily adjusted on short notice.

There's something scary about big numbers. It's one reason we in the media often like to put the biggest number we can find into a headline.

So it was no surprise that most media outlets went gaga over the Obama administration's projection that the nation's debt will grow by $9 trillion over the next decade. And sure enough, critics of the administration's efforts to reform healthcare were quick to seize on that scary number as another reason to advocate doing nothing.

But without wading into the muck of the current debate over healthcare reform, it's worth taking stock of just how much hypocrisy there is when it comes to the subject of government spending and those big bad deficits.