The news came down in the past few hours that GOP and democrat party congressional leaders reached an agreement on the 2011 budget at the last minute to avoid a government shutdown. Both sides will spin and declare a victory this weekend, but don't believe them.I wouldn't call either side a clear winner here. Both parties appear to have taken a hit in the polls (the republicans the bigger hit) for letting things get so close to the deadline. The democrat party didn't want to cut anything in the budget, yet appears to have given and given, and conceded and conceded, a huge amount throughout this process to the republican's budget cut demands.
But republicans had wanted (and had campaigned on) cutting at least $60 billion from this budget, while the agreement is only for $40 billion. So the republicans gave plenty of way too.
Also some of these apparently policy-based aspects of what the republicans wanted (some more based on right-winger social policy than a sincere interest in cutting the budget in my opinion) -- such as defunding "Planned Parenthood" -- went by the wayside, representing a small victory for the democrat party (a small victory since the democrat party traded a concession of allowing such a measure to come to a vote in the Senate, which they otherwise would have blocked).
BTW, if the republicans had shut down the government over "Planned Parenthood" funding (funding that neither I nor many Independents could give a rat's ass about one way or the other), I would have been very critical and it likely would have been disastrous for the republicans. Abortion is a largely a right vs. left pissing match issue that the average American, while perhaps having an opinion on the issue, just says "yawn" to as right-winger social conservatives and 20 percenter leftists fight endlessly about it.
And here's the reason why I say that while there's no clear winner here, the republicans appear to be the ones who avoided the biggest loss: All indications to me, from polling data and myriad instances of conventional political wisdom from various pundits on both sides, are that a shutdown -- for whatever reasons -- would have been blamed much more on the republicans by the majority of the American public.
That's how it went down in 1995, and while today is much different from 1995, a lot of the same dynamic remains: The majority of the public doesn't want something so drastic as a government shutdown to occur if the democrat party is willing to go a majority of the way that the House republicans are looking for in terms of budget and/or governmental cuts.
For that reason, I have little doubt that plenty of 20 percenter leftists out there really wanted a shutdown to occur and are disappointed that it didn't. As well, plenty of the leftists are very clearly disappointed in how much their party conceded in the way of budget cuts.
I think House Speaker John "Party Time" Boehner actually in all likelihood did a fairly effective job here in bleeding just as many budget concessions as he could from the democrat party right up to the deadline, but still not taking things to a shutdown. My guess is that the general pundits' reviews of his performance this weekend (if not from the deranged right-winger tea partiers) will be fairly positive.
Finally, and purely political analysis aside, I think my own personal views on current budget and debt issues have been well alluded to previously in this space: We have a $14.2 Trillion national debt which only continues to grow. Unless we have a serious effort and plan to reduce that debt through our annual budgets and deficits, that debt will completely run this country into the ground within a matter of years, if not sooner. Them's just facts, regardless of your political persuasion.
Some (although truth be told, not very many) in the republican party have a serious conviction towards tackling that debt. Congressman Paul Ryan is one of those few republicans, and he's put forth a plan. Leftist 20 percenters criticize various aspects of that plan incessantly as being "extreme" and "draconian" -- as predictable as the morning sunrise.
And while some if not many of those criticisms may actually have some small or even pretty decent merit, they still largely fall on deaf ears with me, since the democrat party has no alternative plan. So if cut or reform X, Y or Z is so "extreme" and "draconian", then what do they propose as an alternative cut? Entertain me. Hell, in some or many instances, I might agree to the alternative!
But the leftist 20 percenters have none, and frankly likely won't in the future. Because their world view is devoted to growing spending and the size of the federal government just as much as they can possibly get away with -- with any necessary "reigning in" of the national debt coming through redistributions of wealth and taxing the holy hell out of the wealthy and raising taxes as much as possible on everyone else as well. The phrase "tax and spend" may be cliched and stereotypical, but you know why most cliches and stereotypes arise, don't you? Out of a whole hell of a lot of truth.
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