South By North Strategies, Ltd.

James Kwak of The Baseline Scenario doesn’t think that the Democratic Party believes much in preserving social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare.

But those tax cuts came at the expense of future federal tax revenues, which means they came at the expense of—you guessed it—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In other words, Obama and the vast majority of the Democrats in Congress chose goodies for low-, middle-, upper-, and very-upper-income families today (the only people not getting goodies are the super-upper-income families that make more than $450,000*) over the fiscal capacity required to preserve our social insurance and safety net programs.
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That’s the problem with the tax deal—not the fact that the threshold was set at $450,000 rather than $250,000, which Krugman correctly notes doesn’t make much of a difference. And you can’t say the tax cuts were a necessary choice to keep the economy from slipping into recession. If that were the case, they should have been temporary, not permanent, and Obama has been trying to make them permanent since 2010.
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The Democratic Party today, as I’ve said countless times over the past year, has become the party of smallish government and tax cuts for most people, while the Republican Party is the party of tiny government and tax cuts for everyone. There is no party dedicated to the New Deal and the Great Society. We need one.