Muddling Along in Washington

The budget proposals President Obama put forth on Wednesday in Washington are dead on arrival. New taxes and revenues drive Republicans up the wall, and cuts in health care and old age benefits do the same to Democrats. The plans Obama announced during his campaign and later repeated in his State of the Union speech for increasing investment in education and infrastructure, while popular, have no strong lobbies supporting them.

A government spokesperson emphasized that the president’s proposals should not be taken as a starting point for further negotiations because the administration has already more than met the Republicans halfway. He is correct even if he didn’t mean it quite that way: Obama’s budget shouldn’t be considered a basis for further negotiations, period.

It will be a miracle if anything happens in Washington other than the muddling-through mindset that has become business as usual in government. Both Republicans and Democrats have apparently resigned themselves to the automatic budget cuts brought about by the sequester. They may be painful, but neither side loses anything politically significant. That’s the point: U.S. politics are no longer capable of solving problems that run beyond a political cost-benefit analysis regarding the next election.

If the president — who has no reelection worries — had the power of the purse strings instead of Congress, that would be the key. But this isn’t a case of shoulda-coulda-woulda. Congress won’t get its act together and will continue coming up with quick fixes. When the next election cycle rolls around, a new batch of candidates will be claiming that they — and only they — have the real solution to breaking the blockade.