The debt deal is seen as a big loss for the middle class and the poor and revelatory of a president who believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that catering to Wall Street will create jobs. “The deal includes no new tax revenue from wealthy Americans and no additional stimulus for the lagging economy. It has a provision to create a joint committee of 12 legislators charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit cuts. The committee must hold its first meeting in 45 days and is expected to set in motion a lobbying frenzy.”
Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research speaks with Democracy Now.
DEAN BAKER: Well, the leadership of Congress are going to pick the members. And we don’t know—I mean, actually, Representative Boehner and Mitch McConnell made it clear they’re only going to pick people who refuse, under any circumstances, to raise taxes, so we know where that goes. If tradition follows, we’ll probably see the most conservative Democrats picked to the committee, so we’ll either get a really bad deal or no deal. And if we get no deal, then the most likely story then is you get this sequestration process, which will take very large cuts out of the domestic discretionary portion of the budget. So these cuts, overall, are not that large a share of the budget, but of the share of the budget that’s got most education spending, infrastructure spending, student aid, a number of other important programs. We might see cuts on the order of 25-30 percent, and that doesn’t look like a really good picture to me.
AMY GOODMAN: What’s your overall reaction to the debt agreement?
DEAN BAKER: Well, I mean, what’s really infuriating is this is unbelievable nonsense. I mean, we had a collapse of epic proportions when the housing bubble burst. We’re sitting here with 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or out of the workforce altogether, and that’s what caused the budget deficit. That’s what’s astounding. It’s amazing President Obama doesn’t just get up there and say that. In fact, he deliberately misrepresented the story to the nation a week ago Monday, when he said that we had a deficit of over a trillion dollars, then the economy collapsed. No, that’s not true, and he knows that. The deficit was relatively small until the economy collapsed. So we’re looking at the wrong problem. So, it’s very hard to be very happy about this, because we have an enormous problem that people in Washington aren’t paying any attention to, and instead we’re focusing on a problem that isn’t there and making things worse.
It is hard not to see some parallels between this Super Congress and the commissioners’local advisory committees
