Publisher's note: The author of this political post Dan Way, who is a contributor to the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.
4th District Democrat tells Chapel Hill audience GOP 'manufactured' crises
CHAPEL HILL A trillion-dollar sequestration that immediately would cut large portions of domestic and military spending likely will be deferred until budget architects can put together a long-term fiscal plan in the new Congress, U.S. Rep. David Price said Monday.
While strongly emphasizing the need for bipartisan cooperation to end the nation's economic ills, Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat representing the state's 4th Congressional District, repeatedly took swipes at Republicans for "manufactured crises" and Tea Party influence.
Still, he said during a briefing to the business community hosted by the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce at the Carolina Club on the UNC campus, there were "glimmers of hope" that the two parties might be willing to compromise on major fiscal issues.
From the outset, when he assailed the state's redistricting, Price blamed Republicans for a variety of issues. North Carolina's GOP majority in the General Assembly redrew district maps favorable to Republicans. As a result, a 7-6 Democratic majority in the congressional delegation will switch in 2013 to 9-4 Republican control, even though both parties split the vote roughly in half, Price said.
"That is exactly what the (redistricting) objective was. The results in the General Assembly are comparable," Price said.
Although Democrats picked up seats in both the U.S. House and Senate, "this was not a wave election," Price said.
U.S. House Rep. David Price makes a salient Liberal point to the North Carolina delegation of county commissionners at the Capitol Hill Club: Above. photo by Stan Deatherage
But the results bear scrutiny because there was "a heavy presumption against the president's re-election given the economic numbers," Price said.
"There are a couple of factors that I believe did tilt the outcome in President Obama's favor," he said.
"If Democrats had held the House in 2010 I don't think there's any way President Obama would have been re-elected," Price said. "The control of the House was turned over to Republicans, and they used their leadership in the House to provoke crisis after crisis and, I think, thoroughly put their fingerprints on the economic situation."
Almost immediately after the new Congress convened two years ago, "we had a threatened government shutdown, quite deliberately staged government shutdown," Price said. "And then, six months later, we came very, very close to defaulting on the national debt."
Negative public reaction to those events averted "a third crisis on the way because the leadership in the House was going to provoke another shutdown crisis at the end of October," Price said. "They elected not to do that because the result of the second crisis was to downgrade the country's credit rating" that provoked taxpayer anger.
That backdrop, and Obama's campaign, stirred just enough optimism and confidence "to make plausible the president's plea to stick with this slow, steady recovery we've had, almost 40 months of continual job growth," Price said.
"So in a strange sort of way, I think he can thank his re-election to the Tea Party just as the gains in the Senate are due to the Tea Party" and its right-wing ideology, Price said.
Price said President George W. Bush, with the help of congressional Republicans, lowered tax rates, resulting in $2 trillion in deficits, conducted costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq off the books, and approved a huge prescription drug plan "on a credit card," all of which squandered huge surpluses built up after the 1990s.
Absent from his remarks were any references to the $5 trillion in debt accumulated in Obama's first term or the 24.4 average percentage of federal outlays as part of Gross Domestic Product during each year he was in office, the highest since 1946.
Nor did Price note the $831 billion stimulus plan; national unemployment rates that have remained the highest since the Great Depression; the cost of the war in Afghanistan under Obama; or the fact that the president had Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress his first two years in office, offering virtually unfettered ability to make budget decisions.
Some in Monday's audience were not buying into Price's blame-the-Republicans mantra.
"I think we have a Congress problem. It's not a Republican or Democrat problem," said Lowell Hoffman, marketing director of a speaker's bureau at the tony Governor's Club community in the Chapel Hill section of Chatham County.
Mark Zimmerman, owner of a real estate firm in Chapel Hill, said rolling back the estate tax to a lower exemption threshold would not be welcome news to the many agricultural landowners in rural Orange County. The tax-exempt portion of the estate tax will decrease from $5.12 million this year to $1 million in 2013.
"There's room for agreement and compromise there, I think," Price said.
Regarding the $1 trillion in sequestration cuts set to take place at the end of the year, Price said "it was supposed to be something so unacceptable, so unattractive that it would force action by the supercommittee a year ago on this broad array of budget issues. But as you know, that didn't happen."
Now Congress faces an "indiscriminate meat ax, which would do great damage on both the domestic and military side," Price said. "I think in all likelihood it will be deferred."
In making the case for higher taxes, Price said, "The economy as a whole requires more than just austerity."
"The only thing not touched at all is the tax code," Price said. "The big question now is to what extent the Republicans who signed a Grover Norquist pledge and who stood fast through all these crises, stood fast against any kind of adjustment to the tax code, whether they will bend on that and agree to a more balanced approach." Price referenced Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, whose Taxpayer Protection Pledge binds its signers to oppose legislation increasing marginal tax rates or ending tax deductions unless they are accompanied by comparable cuts in tax rates.
Price said the spending deals of the 1990s that created balanced budgets while reducing the national debt should be the guide for a current economic solution.
"If they are good agreements they are going to be comprehensive, they're going to include tax increases, they're going to include spending cuts," he said, recognizing "the electoral outcomes are likely to be punishing."
Republican President George H.W. Bush famously reneged on his "Read my lips, no new taxes" 1988 campaign pledge after he couldn't get a deficit-reducing budget past Democrats controlling Congress without raising taxes in 1990. That is widely believed to have cost him re-election in 1992. The Democrats lost control of both chambers in Congress in 1994 after raising taxes unilaterally under President Clinton in 1993.
Still, Price said, "I would continue to think those budget votes were among the best I ever cast." But the lesson to be learned "was this is something you do not take on with just one party. It simply has to have bipartisan buy-in."
