Government. because of that, there is an unwiliness with the house and leadership of the republican party to do anything along those lines, because that will be sold as a retreat to be really fiscally conservative. we saw that under george w. bush, laying the seeds of the tea party. but wasn t what happened in the previous decade, they made a bunch of decisions around spending because they wouldn t touch taxes, and blew up the deficit, that was at least part of the narrative. underneath that is the other question, when they are looking at a deal like this and saying we don t believe that our leadership can come to a better deal, they don t have to undo the sequester until a deal is done. it just seems to me, underneath all this is the weird decision to treat all spending in the tax code as a tax increase and not be willing to break this pledge. but ezra, is your problem is that the sequester exists or is it just that the cuts are not smart enough? i think in the conservative
And making a 500 billion cut is not necessarily a bad way to reduce the deficit. when the democrats talk about tax reform and say they want to replace the sequester and almost all the defense cuts with revenues, what they are saying specifically is they want to limit itemized deductions for the rich. now those words, that is kind of policy term. doesn t mean much to most people. but when you hear it, this is what you should hear politicians say. they want to limit tax policies, to donate the charity, pay their state and local taxes and to buy homes. that is what the itemized deductions are for the rich, the state and local tax deduction, overwhelmingly. we re talking about cutting them for rich people when we talk about the deficit. that is what president obama wants to do in the compromise. and the republican s response to it is absolutely not. they completely prefer the sequester to that. i don t understand either side s position here.
Republicans who are interested in defending defense spending. who have been preaching for the past several years how important it was to protect that, to isolate it away from any cuts. and those republicans, while they still occupy the leadership and still hold positions of power don t necessarily represent the base, for whom the financial crisis is really their equivalent of 9/11 now. really the single way they analyze policy. i buy that the new generation of republicans don t care that much about defense spending, i think you re right about that. but going back to the sequester. sure. that leaves one, two, three, and four, there is no doubt you can get more deficit reduction, total money shaved off the deficit if you go to the bigger deal and include tax increases. there is no doubt the two sides can come together, the offer, 1.8 trillion, is significantly larger than what is in the sequester alone. and then second to that, they
It was about $700 billion, way more than double. now, here is something else kind of amazing. that is a bigger increase in total in spending than we saw in either the vietnam war or the cold war, and here is where it left us. we re spending more than china, the uk, france, indiana, saudi arabia, india, and canada, combined. we re spending more on our military than the next dozen high spenders combined. our wars, now, however are ending. officially the war in iraq is over. the war in afghanistan is drawing down, osama bin laden is dead. spending dropped somewhere between 43 and 33%. now speak about that after you listen to these warnings about the military sequester. i can t over state what the cuts would do to our military, essentially hollowing out our
Nothing at all. and that is changing, the president made a concerted push to make them trace back this pole, specifically by releasing state by state estimates of what is going to happen, the agency estimates, and i looked at local papers in virginia, where i m from. and now they re all running big stories about how this will impact their regions, specifically. that is the sort of thing that will get people s attention. and let s face it, if the sequester really does go through and is not altered where you don t restore funding and defense in particular, they are going to see changes that will be noticeable in a lot of communities. and steve, why did the white house wait so long to launch a real public education around the sequester. i mean, a lot of people complained and said they were not actually having the agencies going out saying here is what will be hit the worst. releasing things state by state,