A repository for Marcospinelli's comments and essays published at other websites.

Birth Control Debate: NH Lawmaker Proposes Repeal of 'Obsolete And Outdated' Contraception Law

Wednesday, February 22, 2012


It's not just the Republicans; Obama and Democrats have let them control the discussion.

As Dave Dayen has said:

I liked this Mark Thoma piece about the shifting of the Overton Window. I think I alluded to this with my story on a new round of tax cuts being humped by the GOP, and the new bipartisan consensus on the virtue of tax cuts as a stimulus measure. I know exactly what the Administration would say, they’re trying to get things done, and a payroll tax cut mimics a wage increase. And on the merits, that’s fine. But the point I made earlier is that it’s the ideological drift that you get when you fight on the other side’s turf that becomes the problem. This is what Thoma gets at in his piece:
For example, consider the current discussion over the president’s proposed budget, a budget that is touted as “broadly consistent with the bipartisan deficit reduction proposals put forward by the Bowles-Simpson Commission.”


I thought the recommendations for balancing the budget that came out of the Bowles-Simpson committee gave far too much to the GOP – the solutions that were proposed were much further to the right of the political spectrum than I would have preferred. My recollection is that people such as Paul Krugman and Dean Baker were critical as well (and recall that there was no official report because four Democrats and three Republicans on the seventeen member committee could not agree to the recommendations on the table — instead we got an unofficial report from the committee chairs, Bowles and Simpson).


However, Republicans have shifted the debate so far to the right that Bowles-Simpson is now being portrayed by the administration and others as a model of balance, reason, and compromise that both sides ought to embrace.



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Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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