Daily Archives: June 6, 2017

In its zeal to trot out the most mendacious humans alive to defend the president and his policies, the Trump administration has recently turned to Mick Mulvaney. A haircut in search of a decent suit, Mulvaney serves as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Before that, he was known mostly to political junkies as a backbench Tea Party congressman from South Carolina.

Now that he works for Donald Trump, Mulvaney is quickly becoming the latest in a long line of exhibits for how completely the Republican Party has turned itself over to charlatans who spent their youth sleeping through math class.

About 10 days ago, Mulvaney stood in front of the White House press corps and the nation to defend the presidents draconian budget with a $2 trillion counting error at its heart. Last week having apparently not embarrassed himself enough, he resurfaced with an interview at the Washington Examiner to take potshots at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for reaching conclusions he does not like about his work.

It is important to note that Mulvaney did not challenge the budget officeon the merits of its work, such as its score of the American Health Care Act recently passed by the House of Representatives. What he did instead is cast doubt on the motives of the people who work for and run the office, hinting without providing a lick of evidence that they are a bunch of partisans out to sandbag a Republican administration.

Mulvaney explicitly took issue with the budget offices assertion that the AHCAs $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid will result in fewer people having health coverage throughMedicaid. Those of us familiar with the concept of cause and effect might think this obvious. But not Mulvaney. Since kicking off the rolls Medicaid users, who tend to be poorand old andhave disabilities, makes the GOP look like Ebenezer Scrooges meaner cousin, he deflected by suggesting it is no longer feasible to think of the Congressional Budget Office as a nonpartisan organization.

He went on to feed conservative paranoia by suggesting that the person in charge of scoring the AHCA had also scored Hillary Clintons health care plan in the early 1990s and the Affordable Care Act early in the Obama administration, with the clear implication that the AHCAs bad score was the result of liberal sabotage. (For what its worth, the budget offices score of the ACA was fairly accurate, while its unfavorable scoreof the so-called Hillarycare proposal helped sink that plan in Congress.)

The clear message is this: The anti-Trumpian swamp or the deep state, or whatever Trumps most fervent supporters are calling Washington these days, is lying to make the AHCA and the administration look bad.

In dismissing facts and figures as out of hand, Mulvaney is staying true to his roots as a member of the Tea Party and the House Freedom Caucus, having aligned himself with both when he entered Congress after the 2010 election. He was one of the congressmen who, in 2013, dismissed the warnings of virtually every economist and financial wonk about the dangers of not raising the debt ceiling as arrant nonsense and fearmongering. This led to a government shutdown and the nations near default on its debt, a potentially catastrophic blow to the worlds economy.

The intransigence of Mulvaney and his fellow Tea Partiers for a while led to theirbeingforced to the sidelines by the Republican leadership in the House. Instead, former Speaker John Boehner and later his replacement Paul Ryan started making deals with Democrats on the debt ceiling. That was fine in terms of at least keeping the government open and functioning andnot ending up incatastrophe for the millions of people who depend on it for their livelihoods and health care.

But now, with Tea Party true believers like Mulvaney holding high positions in the administration, the groups nonsense that could be intermittently checked during the Obama era has invaded the executive branch. And it has a president who is extremely malleable, who is inclined by his nature toward cruelty and who, like Mulvaney, is happy to blow up the public trust in political institutions in order to serve his own partisan ends, no matter how divorced from reality they may be.

Add to that the GOPs control of Congress that has allowed both the House and Senate caucuses to unleash their inner Ayn Rand, and you have a very dangerous moment in American history, as last weeks pullout from the Paris climate accordby the president shows. The Tea Party itself might have seemed beaten for a couple of years. But its intransigence and know-nothingism is now driving the car and could steer the entire country off a cliff.

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Mick Mulvaney's snake oil: A blend of bad science, bad math and really bad politics - Salon

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Despite Republicans trying to address unsustainable debt and deficits through the Trump budget, the Democratic Party and its echo-chamber allies are in high dudgeon over its proposed cuts. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called it literally a killer. Its message by bumper sticker.

The Democratic Party and its supporters will speak to their fears and Republican morality deficits. Visions of starvation, disease and death become their narrative. The Republican message substitutes math for morality. Logic and not emotion is considered the best path to travel. However, time has proven that message strategy wanting.

Boiled down to its basics, we are facing a math problem. But the solution must be found inside a political framework. Not enough politicians will support a take your bitter-tasting medicine unless the public fears the alternative. And that medicine is a combination of spending cuts to expensive entitlement programs or higher tax rates. Taxing the middle class is unpopular. (You cant get enough relief out of the top 1 percent even if you took all their income. And channeling Ayn Rand, what would you take in Year Two?)

If taxes are not the answer, you have got to cut spending. If that is the option for Republican offense, then the promotion of an austerity budget must be preceded with horror stories of the short-term personal consequences from servicing a growing $20 trillion debt. There are stories of horrible eventual outcomes that will come with insensitive and massive adjustments to lifestyles. Seen many? Any?

The Republican Party is not very good at drama. How often have you seen lame references to every man, woman and child owning and owing some enormous portion of the national debt? Does anyone fear that ledger entry? Alternatively, we could send everyone an invoice and then threaten to turn the deadbeats over to the Internal Revenue Service. That would be transformative.

In the real world, Republicans need to have a better option that pre-empts the morality issue. Defensive messages about our grandchildren having to pay the bill are not going to work. Immediate detailed cuts in services are more threatening, especially to the millions who dont have grandchildren.

The Sandernistas in the Democratic Party have developed a better game plan. Exhibit A is the 2012 political attack ad suggesting Paul Ryan was pushing an old woman off a cliff. That was offense. And offense requires telling a set-up story. Can the Republicans begin to show people what must happen to their tax rates or government benefits if we dont change course?

There was a time in my life that Medicare didnt exist. The modern food stamp (now called SNAP) program was started in the 1960s. Cutting back is not science fiction. It is Greece, Puerto Rico and now Illinois. In the short history of our country we have never been here before. Today we are funding the enormous and unprecedented medical and retirement needs of the baby boomer crowd who are turning 65 at the rate of 10,000 people a day. And that generation will keep expanding at that retirement rate for another 11 years. Can we tell that story? How many people do you think have heard it?

Can we talk about Social Security and food stamps being frozen for 5-10 years at their current payout? Can we speak in terms of cutting a penny of every dollar in nondiscretionary spending? Yes, but only if we spend serious time and money creating a voter base of common knowledge that these cuts are the lesser of potential evils. And that messaging must overwhelm the free-lunch crowd that continues to violate the moral in Aesops ant and grasshopper fable.

Can Republicans connect the dots for people? Better yet, can we reveal the dots that many people dont know exist before we connect them? It can be accomplished if we rely on stories more than statistics.

The left is successfully selling fears of a climate breakdown with visions of flooded coastal cities. Once they metastasize fear in the voting public, its a short step to trigger anger at those who created or abide the situation.

Can we show with stories what will happen if we dont stop our credit card mentality? There are plenty of ways to describe a future-compromised life that arrives long before Antarctica melts. Our problem is that disappearing ice sheets and stranded polar bears are too easily imagined. Debt is just a number. And the mental gymnastics required to comprehend $20 trillion is beyond most mortal beings. Result: You pay attention to what you understand.

Richard Berman is the president of Berman and Company, a public relations firm in Washington, D.C.

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Republicans must control debt message - Washington Times