Let’s start with the good news about the “spending caps deal:”
Finally, a substantial boost to the Pentagon’s budget. Yesterday I mentioned the complaint by Defense secretary James Mattis that funding the government through continuing resolutions was eating away at the Pentagon’s ability to make long-term spending decisions. Mattis sounds genuinely pleased with this deal:
Steep increases in U.S. defense spending over the next two years — up more than 15 percent in 2018 alone, the largest boost in more than a decade and a half.
The full agreement remains to be hammered out between the House and Senate, but Defense Secretary James Mattis pronounced himself “very happy with $700 [billion] for this year, and $716 [billion] for next.”
This adds up to the biggest increase in defense spending since 2003.
The domestic spending is mostly aimed at genuine national priorities. Republicans dislike “increased domestic spending” in general, but once you see the specifics, you understand why Republican leaders signed off on it: $80 billion in disaster relief funding, $6 billion toward opioid and mental health treatment, $4 billion to the Veterans Administration to rebuild and improve veterans hospitals and clinics, $2 billion toward research at the National Institutes of Health. These are popular programs and broadly supported national priorities.
Remember the so-called “death panels”? They’re gone, repealing another key and unpopular component of Obamacare. It was always a stretch to claim that Republicans had “basically repealed Obamacare” just by repealing the individual mandate. But getting rid of the individual mandate and the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board? Now we’re getting somewhere. The IPAB was created under Obamacare and given the duty to slow the growth of Medicare spending, but no board members were ever nominated. But as written under the law, IPAB would have enjoyed a lot of power over what Medicare was willing to pay for and how much, with little opportunity for Congress to overrule their decisions. This deal gets rid of IPAB for good.
Democrats have once again failed to use the threat of a government shutdown to get a DACA fix on their terms, for the second time in two months. In the eyes of the pro-amnesty lawmakers, this is a surrender. Representative Luis Gutierrez, Illinois Democrat, is livid, declaring yesterday, “if Democrats join with Republicans on this deal and lift the caps, what you will have is a collusion with Donald Trump to deport Dreamers.”
It avoids a government shutdown. You know my perspective: No one ever “wins” a government shutdown. Democrats looked at polling numbers on DACA immigrants and thought Americans would support a government shutdown over them. Nope. President Trump thinks Americans will support a government shutdown over border security. Probably not. As soon as the government shuts down and Americans start seeing images of kids on a field trip finding the doors of the Smithsonian locked, they start to respond, “Those idiots, why can’t they keep the government open? A pox on both your houses.”
The bad news about the deal . . .
This is a big spending increase, when the debt is $20 trillion and we’re starting to approach the risk of trillion-dollar-per-year deficits again. The biggest spending increase since 2009, in fact. (It is fair to remember that Donald Trump did not run as a fiscal conservative.)
We just don’t care about deficits and the debt anymore, do we?
I should point out one dollop of budgetary good news: In January, tax revenues . . . are up, about five percent higher than they were a year ago. Now, not all companies had implemented the payroll withholding in January, so this month and coming months may see lower revenue. But as Investor’s Business Daily put it, “Those 3 million-plus workers who are getting bonuses and raises thanks to the Trump tax cuts will end up paying more in taxes on those extra earnings, offsetting at least some of the tax cuts they will enjoy this year.”
The editors focus on the opportunity cost of this deal:
This is a bad deal. It is a bad deal because it hikes domestic spending. It is a bad deal, as well, because it may end the chance for a conservative legislative achievement in 2018.
A two-year spending deal means Republicans probably won’t go to the trouble of passing a formal budget for 2019. That would mean no chance for a so-called reconciliation process that could allow them to enact meaningful legislation with only 50 votes in the Senate. If Republicans accept this deal and then forgo the reconciliation process, they will have given up their chance to pass a law without Democratic support, and measures such as easing the Obamacare regulations that will contribute to higher premiums in the coming years or reforming welfare will stand no chance of making it through Congress. With this deal, Republicans are hurting the chance to add to their ledger of accomplishments prior to November.
A Hard Lesson about the Two Faces of Abusive People
Someone asked me recently, “how does someone like [convicted sex abuser and former USA Gymnastics team doctor] Larry Nassar happen? How did no one know what was going on?” Similarly, we hear this morning from Axios’ Jonathan Swan, “Colleagues tell me they can’t reconcile the [former White House Staff Secretary] Rob Porter they know (consummate gentleman) with the Rob Porter they’re reading about, with a police report and photos of a black eye by a former wife.”
A quick, frightening, true, and important point about abusive people: they tend to be as multifaceted as non-abusive people, meaning that they will behave “normally” in a lot of circumstances, oftentimes being charming and pleasant to those they aren’t abusing.
Despite the popular perception and oftentimes their own self-description, abusive people are very rarely “out of control.” If they are genuinely unable to control their urges to hurt others, they generally run into insurmountable consequences quickly. An abusive person will often become a lot calmer when confronted with an authority figure they cannot abuse, such as a cop at the door. Abusive people can usually recognize the difference between the consequences of hitting a partner or spouse in public — where someone may see and confront them or call the cops — and doing so in private, and thus they keep those impulses in check in public. This is, in fact, one of the traits that can emotionally and psychologically trap the victim; the victim finds herself baffled and wondering, “he’s so nice and normal sometimes, so what am I doing that’s setting him off?”
A man who hits his wife is generally not going to run around the office hitting his co-workers or hit pedestrians walking down the street. Abusive people are generally pretty good at measuring what they can get away with in a given circumstance. They want to indulge their impulses right up to the point where it generates a permanent consequence. For example, if the abuser picks up a knife and begins chasing his partner around the house pledging to stab the partner, the partner is almost always going to flee and end the relationship, and/or file a restraining order. (As Jordan Peterson notes in his new book, restraining orders usually only work on the kind of people who don’t require restraining orders.) A man who is violently angry on the first date is not going to get a second date.
The creepy guy who hangs around a playground and stares at the children is going to get reported and caught pretty quickly. The creepy guy who works his way into a position of trusted authority, and who manages to seem kind, caring, and all of those other good traits around other adults, can pursue prey at will for a long time, because accusations of abuse will seem so unthinkable to other adults.
This doesn’t mean that every nice person we encounter is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or that all accusations are true. But it does mean that being professional and pleasant in a work environment does not disprove an accusation of awful behavior in a private environment. Many people have a hard time rectifying the two, and we should have a bit of sympathy for the friends and co-workers experiencing that cognitive dissonance upon learning of a person’s private sins.
ADDENDA: Matt Cooper gives us a depressing and unsavory glimpse behind the scenes of what Newsweek became in recent years — a click-bait-chasing unprofessional mess that made egregious errors week after week and simply didn’t care.