Who Knows Defense Best?

Congress or the Secretary of Defense?

A Rocky Road

Here's a chunk from Slate's Today's Papers detailing the problems his budget might face in the coming weeks as it heads to Congress. Remember, Congress holds the purse strings:

The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how President Obama's budget faces "a rocky road" in the congressional debate that is set to formally start next week. On top of a slew of recent developments, the chairman of the Senate budget committee said the deficits could be $1.6 trillion higher over the next 10 years than what the Obama administration had calculated, partly because of the worsening economic climate. The Congressional Budget Office is expected to reveal similar numbers today. The budget debate will "force Congress, for the first time this session, to make tough choices between competing priorities," notes the LAT.

Obama's Budget Meets the Committee Chairs

After years of diminished strength, congressional committee chairman have additional strength and are using it to force changes in Obama's proposed budget:

What the Democratic barons of Congress liked best about President Obama’s audacious budget was his invitation to fill in the details. They have started by erasing some of his.

The apparent first casualty is a big one: a proposal to limit tax deductions for the wealthiest 1.2 percent of taxpayers. Mr. Obama says the plan would produce $318 billion over the next decade as a down payment for overhauling health care.

But the chairmen of the House and Senate tax-writing committees, Senator Max Baucus of Montana and Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, have objected to the proposal, citing a potential drop in tax-deductible gifts to charities.

Billions in savings from cutting government subsidies to big farmers and agribusinesses? No dice, said Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, who heads the Senate Budget Committee.

Mr. Conrad also panned the limit on tax deductions. And his criticisms of those savings proposals aside, Mr. Conrad said Mr. Obama’s 10-year plan would not do enough to reduce future debt.

Congress is, after all, the legislative branch.

Shrink spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security? Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, chairman of the House Budget Committee, suggested Mr. Obama’s proposals did not go far enough.

Cap industries’ emissions of the gases blamed for climate change? Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, who leads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, will have to contend with dissent on a panel with Democrats from coal and manufacturing states.

Potential Split in the Democratic Party

Though unified for now, the Democratic Party is generally fraught with internal divisions.

Joel Kotkin wonders if Obama's focus on environmental issues will drive a wedge between the "gentry" and the "populists."

Broadly speaking, there is a long-standing conflict inside the Democratic Party between gentry liberals and populists. This division is not the same as in the 1960s, when the major conflicts revolved around culture and race as well as on foreign policy. Today the emerging fault-lines follow mostly regional, geographical and, most importantly, class differences.

Gentry liberals cluster largely in cities, wealthy suburbs and college towns. They include disproportionately those with graduate educations and people living on the coasts. Populists tend to be located more in middle- and working-class suburbs, the Great Plains and industrial Midwest. They include a wider spectrum of Americans, including many whose political views are somewhat changeable and less subject to ideological rigor.

...

Gentry politicians tend to favor developing only alternative fuels and oppose expanding coal, oil or nuclear energy. Populists represent areas, such as the Great Lakes region, where manufacturing still plays a critical role and remains heavily dependent on coal-based electricity. They also tend to have ties to economies, such as in the Great Plains, Appalachia and the Intermountain West, where smacking down all new fossil-fuel production threatens lots of jobs -- and where a single-minded focus on alternative fuels may drive up total energy costs on the farm, make life miserable again for truckers, and put American industrial firms at even greater disadvantage against foreign competitors.

In the coming years, Mr. Obama's "green agenda" may be a key fault line.

The Proposed Budget

Here's a link.

We will wade into this soon enough.

A Sharp Turn to the Left

That's the obvious consensus regarding Obama's proposed budget.

Here's a few paragraphs from Slate's Today's Papers:

President Obama presented his budget and left no doubt that he was being serious when he promised change. The $3.55 trillion spending plan included broad goals and few details but outlined how Obama plans to finance more spending in health care, energy, and education while increasing taxes on the top 5 percent of taxpayers, the oil and gas industry, and hedge-fund managers, among others. In short: Bye-bye, Reaganomics. The 134-page budget "is unprecedented in size, breathtaking in scope and sure to have a major impact on millions of Americans," declares USA Today. The Wall Street Journal notes that the spending plan "marks a significant change in nearly 30 years of governing philosophy."

The Washington Post declares that "Obama's agenda seeks to foster a redistribution of wealth, with the government working to narrow the growing gap between rich and poor." In order to achieve this, though, Obama "laid down controversial markers on almost every major issue facing the country," notes the Los Angeles Times. The WSJ predicts that the spending plan "is likely to herald one of the fiercest political fights Washington has seen in years." Republicans were quick to raise their objections yesterday, and in what was clearly a "worrisome sign for the president," as the New York Times puts it, Sen. Olympia Snow of Maine, one of the few Republicans who voted for the stimulus package, declared that while the president's goals are "worthy" she lamented that the budget "falls woefully short" on fiscal restraint and reducing the deficit.

The budget made it clear that changing the way Washington works doesn't come cheap. This year's deficit would reach $1.75 trillion, which amounts to more than 12 percent of the economy and is the highest level since 1945. The administration says it will begin to trim the deficit, partly by reducing the costs of fighting the Iraq war but also "by assuming a rate of economic growth by 2010 that private forecasters and even some White House advisers consider overly rosy," points out the NYT. The White House was quick to counter criticism saying that it plans to raise taxes during a recession by pointing out that none of the increases would take effect until 2011. Still, some economists think that might be too early and could hurt the economy. And while the administration insists it plans to halve the deficit by the end of Obama's first term, analysts said the budget doesn't contain a plan to keep bringing it down in the long run.

Congressional Quarterly reports that Republicans will attack the proposal by calling it European styled socialism:

GOP congressional leaders Friday vowed to oppose President Obama’s budget priorities, comparing them to those of socialist governments in Europe.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio — speaking to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington — targeted their barbs at Obama’s fiscal 2010 budget blueprint, including his proposal for a new cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions allowances.

The charge of socialism was used against Obama during his presidential campaign. The lawmakers also abandoned rhetorical references to bipartisanship — often heard during debates in the House and Senate — in their remarks.

The lawmakers said they also opposed Obama’s vision for broadening government health care programs and attacked the pending fiscal 2009 omnibus spending measure (HR 1105) and the newly enacted economic stimulus measure (PL 111-5). They criticized a number of Democratic domestic priorities aimed at the party’s liberal base, such as a proposal to allow unions to organize without a secret ballot, a process known as “card check.”

It'll be a useful debate. A clearldistinction between the parties will allow for a clear evaluation of the startegy come 2012, if not 2010. In my opinion, this is how the process is supposed to run.

$1.75 Trillion

Thats the deficit contained in the budget for 2010 submitted by Obama today.