We have no money. That is the basic argument I keep seeing from everyone across the political spectrum.
We can’t afford to provide health care, can’t afford an expanded jobs program, are willing to let state and local governments starve and slash programs — but we apparently have plenty of money to escalate a war in Afghanistan.
I’d laugh, as U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) told Rachel Maddow last night in a slightly different context, “if we weren‘t in so much trouble.”
President Barack Obama hosted a “jobs forum” at the White House yesterday at which he essentially undercut his own formerly ambitious agenda, admitting that “our resources are limited.”
The Times, in the way it framed its story, appeared to buy into this line of argument — despite some fine analysis in the paper by its own Paul Krugman. Here is how the Times framed the issue:
Mr. Obama’s jobs event captured the political and policy vise now squeezing the president and his party at the end of his first year. It came on the eve of a government report that is expected to show unemployment remaining in double digits, and two days after Mr. Obama emphasized as he ordered 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that he did not want the financial burdens of the war to overwhelm his domestic agenda.
Both the domestic and the military demands on the administration are raising costs unanticipated when Mr. Obama took office, even as pressures build to arrest annual budget deficits now exceeding $1 trillion. Those demands are also eroding the broad support that swept Mr. Obama into office, especially among independent voters, and igniting a guns-versus-butter budget debate in his own party not seen since the Vietnam era.
While liberals are calling for ambitious job-creating measures along the lines of the New Deal and Republicans want to scale back government spending programs, Mr. Obama talked at the White House on Thursday of limited programs that he suggested could provide substantial bang for the buck when it comes to job creation. Among them was the weatherization program.
Called “cash for caulkers,” it would enlist contractors and home-improvement companies like Home Depot — whose chief executive was on the panel — to advertise the benefits, much as car dealers did for the clunkers trade-ins this year.
Yet that relatively modest proposal underscores the limits of the government’s ability to affect a jobless recovery with the highest unemployment rate in 26 years — and Mr. Obama acknowledged as much. Just as he said in Tuesday’s Afghanistan speech that the nation could not afford an open-ended commitment there, especially when the economy is so weak and deficits so high, Mr. Obama emphasized at the jobs forum that the government had already done a lot with his $787 billion economic stimulus package and the $700 billion financial bailout that he inherited.
“I want to be clear: While I believe the government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth, ultimately true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector,” he told his audience, which included executives and some critics from American Airlines, Boeing, Nucor, Google, Walt Disney and FedEx.
The key phrases are “costs unanticipated when Mr. Obama took office” — unanticipated by whom? — and “the limits of the government’s ability to affect a jobless recovery.” The assumption here — and throughout Washington — is that the federal deficit must be an impediment to domestic discretionary spending, and that there is an unlimited supply of cash for the war in Afghanistan (not to mention the war that continues in Iraq or a massive and bloated military bureaucracy with bases around the world).
The assumption is that military spending is not discretionary, and that is a dangerous assumption — not just because of the budget implications, but because it uses the budget (the place where our priorities are measured in dollars and sense) to endorse the further militarization of our nation.
Basically, our budgets show us to be a nation that prizes power and brute force over compassion, that believes we need more guns and more advance weaponry at all costs, even at the expense of making sure that our citizens have food, shelter or health care.
It is guns over butter for us and the change from Bush II to Barack Obama has done little to change that.
Hank Kalet 