Serious media warms to ‘The People’s Budget’

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I have posted several posts recently about "The People's Budget" offered by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and its co-chair, Tucson's own Congressman Raúl Grijalva.

I have suggested and prodded the Clueless political reporters at our sad small-town newspaper the Arizona Daily Star to pick up the phone and interview Congressman Grijalva about "The People's Budget." He has been in town for a week now and still no reporting in the Star.

The Congressman will be at the PDA meeting on Monday night to discuss "The People's Budget." Maybe the Star can assign one of its Clueless political reporters to interview him about it. What a novel idea, actually reporting on your local Congressman.

Chris Bowers at Daily Kos writes  'Serious' media starting to warm to The People's Budget:

Last week, we published a write-up about the budget proposal put forth by the Congressional Progressive Caucus: The People's Budget. It's a great proposal, as it produces a federal surplus by 2021 without cutting services for the poor, the elderly and the middle-class. Instead, it basically just ends the wars, ends the Bush tax cuts, and reduces unemployment. Which, as we saw in the 1990's, is actually about all you need to do to balance the federal budget.

The People's Budget didn't get much media play. In fact, with over 2,000 shares on Facebook, our article was probably the most prominent media write-up it received. However, today comes a nice a surprise—that most serious of serious magazines, The Economist, loves the People's Budget:

Have you ever heard of the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget plan? Neither had I. The caucus's co-chairs, Raul Grijalva of Arizona and Keith Ellison of Minnesota, released it on April 6th. The budget savings come from defence cuts, including immediately withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq, which saves $1.6 trillion over the CBO baseline from 2012-2021. The tax hikes include restoring the estate tax, ending the Bush tax cuts, and adding new tax brackets for the extremely rich, running from 45% on income over a million a year to 49% on income over a billion a year.

Mr Ryan's plan adds (by its own claims) $6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, but promises to balance the budget by sometime in the 2030s by cutting programmes for the poor and the elderly. The Progressive Caucus's plan would (by its own claims) balance the budget by 2021 by cutting defence spending and raising taxes, mainly on rich people. Mr Ryan has been fulsomely praised for his courage. The Progressive Caucus has not.

I'm not really sure what "courage" is supposed to mean here, but this seems precisely backwards. For 30 years, certainly since Walter Mondale got creamed by Ronald Reagan, the most dangerous thing a politician can do has been to call for tax hikes. Politicians who call for higher taxes are punished, which is why they don't do it. I'm curious to see what adjectives people would apply to the Progressive Congressional Caucus's budget proposal. But it's hard for me to imagine the media calling a proposal to raise taxes "courageous" and "honest". And my sense is that the disparate treatment here is a structural bias rooted in class.

Class bias is likely one of the reasons why proposing steep cuts to anti-poverty programs for seniors gets you labeled "courageous" while proposing something like The People's Budget gets you ignored. Being considered "serious" and "courageous" in our political discourse seems to have very little to do with the degree of academic analysis behind a proposal, with the degree of political risk involved in the proposal, or even your proposal with getting write-ups in ultra-serious media outlets like "The Economist." It is, instead, how closely your proposal for altering public policy aligns with policies that, while unpopular overall, are favored by the wealthiest Americans.

If The Economist can report on 'The People's Budget," then surely our sad small-town newspaper the Arizona Daily Star should be interested in reporting on it. (The Arizona Republic published a pre-release opinion by Reps. Grijalva and Ellison a couple of weeks ago).

UPDATE: "The basic mode of coverage I think, is the establishment press acts as stenographers to power." — Matt Miller, Center for America Progress Senior Fellow.

Mr. Miller was interviewed on the Rachel Maddow Show on Friday night in a segment about how the media villagers fawned all over the corporate-funded front groups of the conservative Tea Party in 2009 (FreedomWorks, Americans For Prosperity) – and still do, but now they are ignoring Republican members of Congress facing hostile town hall meetings as they return home to defend their vote to end Medicare as we know it in the Paul Ryan budget plan.

Rush Transcript:

This stuff is happening all across the country as Republicans who voted for the Paul Ryan thing now have to go home and defend that vote. You would not know this was happening all across the country if you just read the press or watched most TV right now. It's thanks to Daily Kos and reporters at Jason Likins at Huffington Post. They have been chronicling these events. They are the only reason this stuff is getting out there at all right now. There are not network news crews going out to cover the town hall events like in 2009. The Beltway could not get enough of it back then. It is happening now, the same thing. Because it's not angry conservatives, it's angry everyone else, they could not care less.

Of the comprehensive budget plans released this year, the one that does the most, the one that balances the budget 20 years earlier than Paul Ryan. It lets the Bush tax cuts expire, raises taxes on the richest in the country, cuts defense spending that's doubled in the past decade and was already the biggest thing in the discretionary budget. It would end the subsidies for the oil companies and on health care costs, still the budget eating dragon, we would get a public option. How does that sound compared to cutting taxes for the rich and dismantling Medicare? That is actually the most fiscally responsible budget in Washington. If you care about the deficit, this seems to be the one that does it. It's from the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

If you haven't heard of it, it's because of the Beltway press — it's why you haven't heard about it. It's sort of an embarrassing thing to admit. People get mad at me and write letters from Washington. The Beltway press does not cover liberals. When the Beltway press covers liberals, it's not only not political science, it's anthropology. The Beltway right now says the deficit negotiations have to be between President Obama and the Paul Ryan plan. Why not between President Obama and the progressives? If this really is about fixing the deficit, why is the most fiscally responsible budget plan that's been submitted and introduced, why is it not on the table?

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