The Fiscal Times has an interview with Rep. David Obey, the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who will retire at the end of this term after 40 years in office. The entire interview is a must read and left me with a deepened admiration for one of the last of a dying breed, an old school New Deal Democrat that gets working class sensibilities. 

While the article mostly centers on Rep. Obey's fight with the Obama Administration, and in particular with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, over funding for Obama's answer to No Child Left Behind, his Race to the Top educational proposal. Obey wants to cut $500 million, about 10 percent of the $5.35 billion budget proposal, in order to assist the states with teacher salaries and prevent mass layoffs. But the Obama Administration is threatening a veto if any funding is cut.

At its core, Race to the Top is a competitive grant program that rewards states that shift their education emphasis onto teacher quality and encourage innovations like charter schools. Personally, I'm not much for charter schools and see them as part of the assault by the monied classes on the state so the Obama proposals are a non-starter. Charter schools simply drain money and talent from an already stressed public school system. Graduation rates are at 69 percent as of 2009 that is no higher than the 68.8 percent at public schools despite the increased funding these schools receive.

But beyond the discussion over the funding fight over the Race to Top program, Rep. Obey has few other tidbits to gnaw on. Here's one that grabbed my goat:

We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.

Was that some sort of Obama Administration channels John Boehner and his I could give a rat's ass about the poor GOP session? Seriously, only a callous bastard like John Boehner or Paul Ryan could suggest that "people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal." Who are these people? Are they Democrats?

Unfortunately there is more. Here's the portion of the interview on the TARP.

I think everything [President] Bush and [President] Obama have done on the economy is getting a needless bad rap. At least that’s everything Bush did after September of the last year he was in office. . . I knew then it would be costly political vote because I was pissed off, because I detested being in the position we had to help the very people [on Wall Street] who had caused the economy to implode in the first place. We had no choice. If you’ve got an epidemic going on, you’ve got to treat the people who caused the epidemic as well as the people treating it or everyone is going to die.

The public hates it, but it happens to have been a pretty damn good deal for the taxpayers. When all is said and done, that will not have cost the American people nearly as much as we feared. The cost will be less than $100 billion. And if you can save your economy by spending $100 billion, I’d say that’s worth it. Even if to do that you had to give some help to the dumb bastards who got us in trouble in the first place, and you can quote me.

The problem for Obama, he wasn’t as lucky as Roosevelt, because when Obama took over we were still in the middle of a free fall. So his Treasury people came in and his other economic people came in and said "Hey, we need a package of $1.4 trillion." We started sending suggestions down to OMB waiting for a call back. After two and a half weeks, we started getting feedback. We put together a package that by then the target had been trimmed to $1.2 trillion. And then [White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel said to me, "Geez, do you really think we can afford to come in with a package that big, isn’t it going to scare people?" I said, "Rahm, you will need that shock value so that people understand just how serious this problem is." They wanted to hold it to less than $1 trillion. Then [Pennsylvania Senator Arlen] Specter and the two crown princesses from Maine [Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins] took it down to less than $800 billion. Spread over two and a half years, that’s a hell of a lot of money, but spread over two and a half years in an economy this large, it doesn’t have a lot of fiscal power.

We’re in danger of [throttling back on government spending too soon, as Franklin Roosevelt did during the Depression]. Any idiot understands that we've got to get our long term fiscal house in order. I take a back seat to nobody about my concern about fiscal responsibility. I was one of the leaders who helped pass Bill Clinton’s budget which helped to end deficit spending and brought us three straight years of budget surpluses. And I've opposed all of Bush’s giveaways.

In short, Obama's Treasury department wanted an ARRA around $1.4 trillion but Rahm Emanuel for political purposes and ignoring the advice of economic counsel wanted to keep it to under a trillion which was whittled down further to appease Specter, Collins and Snowe.

Good on you David Obey, good on you. Keep on telling it like it is.