by Robert B. Reich

We continue to hear that the Great Budget Debate has two sides. The president and the Democrats want to cut the deficit mainly by increasing taxes on the rich and reducing military spending, but not by privatizing Medicare. On the other side are House budget chair Paul Ryan and congressional Republicans, who want cut the deficit by privatizing Medicare and slicing programs that benefit poorer Americans, while lowering taxes on the rich.

By this logic, the center lies just between.

Baloney.

According to the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 78 percent of Americans oppose cutting spending on Medicare as a way to reduce the budget deficit. Meanwhile, raising taxes on the wealthy is supported by 72 percent. That includes 68 percent of independents. Even a majority of registered Republicans -- 54 percent -- say taxes should be raised on the rich. A majority of Republicans!

In other words, the center of America isn't halfway between the two sides. It's overwhelmingly on the side of the president and the Democrats.

I'd wager that if Americans also knew that the Ryan plan would channel hundreds of billions of their Medicare dollars into the pockets of private for-profit heath insurers, more would be against it.

If people knew that two-thirds of Ryan's budget cuts would come from programs serving lower- and moderate-income Americans while over 70 percent of the savings fund tax cuts for the rich, even more would oppose it.

And if they knew that combining the tax cuts for the rich with the budget-cuts plan would produce almost no deficit reduction at all, just about everyone would be against it. The plan is little more than a giant transfer from the less advantaged to the super advantaged.

The Ryan Republican plan shouldn't be considered one side of a great debate. It shouldn't be considered at all. Americans of all political persuasions -- including a large percentage of registered Republicans -- don't want it.

Which is why I get worried when I hear about so-called "bipartisan" groups on Capitol Hill seeking a grand compromise, such as the Senate's so-called "Gang of Six." Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and a member of that gang, says the six are near agreement on a plan that will chart a "middle ground" between the House Republican budget and the plan outlined by the president.

Watch your wallets.

In my view, even the president doesn't go nearly far enough in the direction most Americans would approve. His plan doesn't really increase taxes on the rich. It merely ends the Bush tax windfalls for the wealthy -- which were originally designed to be ended in 2010 in any event -- and closes a few loopholes.

But if we're in a budget crisis, why shouldn't we go back to the tax rates we had 30 years ago, which required the rich to pay much higher shares of their incomes? One of the great scandals of our age is how concentrated income and wealth have become. The top 1 percent now gets twice the share of national income it took home 30 years ago.

If the super-rich paid taxes at the same rates they did three decades ago, they'd contribute $350 billion more per year than they are now -- amounting to trillions more over the next decade. That's enough to ensure every young American is healthy and well educated and that the nation's infrastructure is up to world-class standards.

Nor does the president's proposal go nearly far enough to cut military spending, which is not only out of control but unrelated to our nation's defense needs -- fancy weapons systems designed for an age of conventional warfare; hundreds of billions of dollars for the Navy and Air Force, when most of the action is with the Army, Marines and Special Forces; and billions more for programs no one can justify and few can understand.

If Americans understood how much they're paying for defense and how little they're getting, they'd demand a defense budget at least 25 percent smaller than it is today.

Finally, the president's proposed budget -- which, again, is considered the extreme liberal end of the field -- doesn't begin to remedy the scandal of the nation's schools in poor and middle-class communities. Most teachers in these schools are paid less than $50,000 a year, and classrooms are crammed.

These schools can't afford textbooks or science labs, and they've abandoned after-school programs and courses like history and art. The reason: School budgets across America depend largely on local property taxes that continue to drop in lower-income communities. The federal government should come to their rescue.

To think of the "center" as roughly halfway between the president's and Paul Ryan's proposals is to ignore what Americans need and want. A "middle ground" that's halfway between decent and indecent is still less than decent.

 

Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of the book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future.

 

Beware the Middle Ground of the Great Budget Debate