The Rev. Al Sharpton may have said back in the day that he won't criticize Obama (which ought to disqualify him from his newfound role at MSNBC as much as I love the man), but he was absolutely right about one thing the other night: the blind cowardice in the Democratic caucuses after passing the ACA made this debt ceiling defeat-- or one like it-- inevitable. However you feel about how the President dealt with the first threat of a government shutdown in this Congress, it came because Congressional Democrats were too scared for their seats to pass a budget. In so dodging, they not only forced a showdown over a continuing resolution, but they also lost the ability to use budget reconciliation for FY 2011, which would have made passing wprogressive deficit reduction measures a walk in the park. Raise top rates? Alright! Get rid of corporate tax loopholes? Sure! Stop subsidizing big oil and big corn? Why not? Carbon tax? OK! Plus, any method of economic stimulus that can pass the Byrd test can come along for the ride.
Instead, they went so far as to hand the decision as to whether to take the vote before the 2010 elections to extend only the middle class tax cuts to Senators facing re-election. And when they finally caved and voted to extend them all, nobody (including the President) thought to get a debt ceiling increase along with it. Even though the TPers were telegraphing their punches on pushing that envelope.
As a Spartan might have said, may they live forever.
What I find positively amazing is that while President Obama has taken quite a bit of flak for his capitulations, there is little mention that the untenable positions he's found himself in have been handed to him directly from blue dogs who didn't do their jobs as legislators and the People who voted in candidates eager to use the debt ceiling as a cudgel.
Unfortunately, Beltway media narratives cannot accommodate such truths. Indeed today, the same hacks who chided Austan Goolsbie for decrying the insanity of not raising the debt ceiling (saying that it was irresponsible to speak as if not raising it were something that could plausibly happen) are now saying that Obama didn't properly communicate the risk of default early on. One thing is for certain. The DC press will run ''dog bites man'' on page one before they admit that sometimes its the so-called moderates who fuck it up for everyone.
None of this is to say that Obama has been playing his hand especially well. He should have declared that if he didn't get guaranteed revenues, he'd take one of extraordinary measures afforded him by the powers of the executive branch to raise the debt ceiling himself. But it's not like the reasons his advisors gave him for eschewing those options were invalid. Any action the administration took unilaterally would have spooked the hands holding the levers of our economy. This is especially evident given the markets' response to the evidence of government dysfunction shown in the leadup to this shitty deal. Who knows? Maybe it would have been worse.
What's clear is that as the remnants of the Blue Dog caucus wither away, we're stuck with the consequences of their failures of conscience and intestinal fortitude. I wonder what Evan Bayh would say. Maybe it would be the same as another imposter in the guise of a public servant once said on an episode of the Simpsons:
"The politics of failure have failed. We need to make them work again."
Showing posts with label Tax Policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tax Policy. Show all posts
7.18.2011
Fuck You, the Economist
The fact that world news from other countries tends to be better than what we get over here may sometimes lead one to expect that when a foreign publication comments on America, that they'd understand us better than we do them.
The Economist has seen fit to remind me that I ought to jettison that expectation just as soon as I can manage.
You can tell right away that the author(s)' concepts of political science are stuck in the UK. Despite clearly stating that the crisis is entirely a political one, they continue on to state that the House GOP was acting reasonably within its electoral mandate from 2010 in being the first American majority caucus in history to refuse to raise the debt ceiling.
What, pray tell, is this mandate? According to The Economist, it's "to hold the government of Barack Obama to account."
Yeah, we get it. They have Parliament where you live and you don't know how a proper democracy works. Here's a hint-- politicians are supposed to be elected to do the will of the People, not to play Thunderdome with other politicians. We don't have a paradigm where there's a coalition whose job is, officially, to oppose the majority. It has to do with the fact that our system of representative government was designed on purpose, not retro-fitted to a constitutional monarchy. And while we've made plenty of our own mistakes, a lot of what we got right are things that we recognized were horribly wrong with the British system, one of which being the fractious nature of the British Parliament.
Nowadays, the phrase "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" gets floated as a justification for the GOP's chauvinistic obstructionism by American pundits who are too piss-scared of being seen as a part of the Liberal Media to speak honestly about the Republican Party. It's bullshit. That's not how the system was built to work; there are far too many mechanisms built in that grind everything to a halt. Operating our government like it's a Parliamentary system has been nothing short of disastrous for the American People, and the Economist's failure to grasp that basic fact ought to disqualify any commentary it offers on American politics.
When we send politicians to Washington, it's to do the job that the prior incumbents aren't doing well enough. And in 2010, that was create jobs. Which the polls confirm. The electorate is concerned overwhelmingly with jobs and the economy.
You'll notice that "just fuck with Obama a lot" isn't on that list.
The Economist is claiming, essentially, that a populace whose top 6 priories were (in descending order) The Economy, Jobs, Terrorism, Social Security, Education, Medicare, issued a mandate to Republicans to betray five of them in the service of their sixth priority, deficit reduction, while leaving tax cuts--which only 42% rated as a top priority-- alone
It's pretty easy math, The Economist. Isn't math supposed to be a feature of your discipline?
The math gets easier when you consider that those medicare cuts were originally part of a budget plan that also slashed taxes, and only would have significantly reduced the deficit if you assume quite a lot of nonsense. The Ryan plan was quite clearly not about the budget. In order to support the thesis that government is bad, evidence to the contrary must disposed of. It's only natural to target the nation's most popular government program.
The thing is, all of this has been available to anyone with a cheapass computer and the ability to find a WiFi hotspot somewhere. Does part of getting an Economics degree necessitate having the part of your brain capable of parsing this shit get cut out? Did Paul Krugman just not show up that day?
Was it a burning need to break out the "pox on both your houses" that persuaded the Economist to chide Obama for not finding a way out of the deficit crisis in the same breath that it had proclaimed said crisis to be a politically manufactured one?
I didn't even have to get into the utter lack of precedent for the debt ceiling vote being tied to ten-year budget outlooks to demonstrate just how clueless these wankers are.
And yeah, plenty of American outlets have been this fucking idiotic or worse in their coverage of the debt ceiling talks too, and none of them have resulted in me taking to the blogs.. But if the Economist is going to look down over the rims of its glasses at America without actually understanding what's going on, they've opened themselves up to ridicule.
The Economist has seen fit to remind me that I ought to jettison that expectation just as soon as I can manage.
You can tell right away that the author(s)' concepts of political science are stuck in the UK. Despite clearly stating that the crisis is entirely a political one, they continue on to state that the House GOP was acting reasonably within its electoral mandate from 2010 in being the first American majority caucus in history to refuse to raise the debt ceiling.
What, pray tell, is this mandate? According to The Economist, it's "to hold the government of Barack Obama to account."
Yeah, we get it. They have Parliament where you live and you don't know how a proper democracy works. Here's a hint-- politicians are supposed to be elected to do the will of the People, not to play Thunderdome with other politicians. We don't have a paradigm where there's a coalition whose job is, officially, to oppose the majority. It has to do with the fact that our system of representative government was designed on purpose, not retro-fitted to a constitutional monarchy. And while we've made plenty of our own mistakes, a lot of what we got right are things that we recognized were horribly wrong with the British system, one of which being the fractious nature of the British Parliament.
Nowadays, the phrase "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" gets floated as a justification for the GOP's chauvinistic obstructionism by American pundits who are too piss-scared of being seen as a part of the Liberal Media to speak honestly about the Republican Party. It's bullshit. That's not how the system was built to work; there are far too many mechanisms built in that grind everything to a halt. Operating our government like it's a Parliamentary system has been nothing short of disastrous for the American People, and the Economist's failure to grasp that basic fact ought to disqualify any commentary it offers on American politics.
When we send politicians to Washington, it's to do the job that the prior incumbents aren't doing well enough. And in 2010, that was create jobs. Which the polls confirm. The electorate is concerned overwhelmingly with jobs and the economy.
You'll notice that "just fuck with Obama a lot" isn't on that list.
The Economist is claiming, essentially, that a populace whose top 6 priories were (in descending order) The Economy, Jobs, Terrorism, Social Security, Education, Medicare, issued a mandate to Republicans to betray five of them in the service of their sixth priority, deficit reduction, while leaving tax cuts--which only 42% rated as a top priority-- alone
It's pretty easy math, The Economist. Isn't math supposed to be a feature of your discipline?
The math gets easier when you consider that those medicare cuts were originally part of a budget plan that also slashed taxes, and only would have significantly reduced the deficit if you assume quite a lot of nonsense. The Ryan plan was quite clearly not about the budget. In order to support the thesis that government is bad, evidence to the contrary must disposed of. It's only natural to target the nation's most popular government program.
The thing is, all of this has been available to anyone with a cheapass computer and the ability to find a WiFi hotspot somewhere. Does part of getting an Economics degree necessitate having the part of your brain capable of parsing this shit get cut out? Did Paul Krugman just not show up that day?
Was it a burning need to break out the "pox on both your houses" that persuaded the Economist to chide Obama for not finding a way out of the deficit crisis in the same breath that it had proclaimed said crisis to be a politically manufactured one?
I didn't even have to get into the utter lack of precedent for the debt ceiling vote being tied to ten-year budget outlooks to demonstrate just how clueless these wankers are.
And yeah, plenty of American outlets have been this fucking idiotic or worse in their coverage of the debt ceiling talks too, and none of them have resulted in me taking to the blogs.. But if the Economist is going to look down over the rims of its glasses at America without actually understanding what's going on, they've opened themselves up to ridicule.
12.10.2010
Not even Shakespeare could do my love for Bernie Sanders justice
Of course, many of his sonnets were written with a similar premise, but I digress.
As of this writing, Bernie Sanders, with an assist from Sherrod Brown and Mary Landrieu, has kept a filibuster-- a real one, not the I-Can't-Believe-They're-Not-Speaking silent filibusters we've been used to from the GOP-- for just over four hours. When Americans talk about the filibuster as a safeguard for minority rights, I think that they're still glossing over the fact that it killed every civil rights bill the Congress tried to take up until 1964, but if they all had to be done like this, I could live with it. I still think it needs to be changed so that it can't last forever, but with no further introduction, I give you Senator Bernie Sanders, the proud Socialist from Vermont.
UPDATE: It's just past 7 hours, and Bernie Sanders has yet to read from any text not relevant to the matter at hand. How he's able to do this is quite simple: You could take a year talking about better ways to spend 858 billion dollars. The question is, how many of those can we make happen.
There has been plenty of hypocrisy surrounding Democratic outrage at President Obama for this tax cut deal. Democrats traded away reconcilliation as a tool when they let Blue Dogs wuss out of voting on another Obama budget. They drained their political capital by letting Max Baucus spend an entire summer giving away the store on Healthcare Reform. They traded away favorable field position when they gave the decision about whether to stage a vote on the matter before the elections to those Senators who were up for re-election. Senator Mary Landrieu, the queen of off-shore drilling--to borrow a phrase from the brilliant, beautiful Melissa Harris-Perry-- has spoken of the moral outrage of the tax cuts. She's not wrong. Not right now, at least.
But she voted for them in the beginning, and as much as she pretends, there was never any real math that concluded that the tax cuts wouldn't lead to deficits.
Chuck Schumer's bill, which would have extended tax cuts to millionaires but not billionaires for five years-- at far greater cost to the deficit than the $858 billion tax cut framework-- didn't get to 60. And that bill contained NONE of the Obama tax cuts, and thus would have constituted a tax increase to working families. Having failed to come up with legislation that would actually pass the Senate, he is now fuming at President Obama for coming up with one that might pass.
But Bernie Sanders has earned his sense of moral outrage, speaking forcefully as an independent member of the Democratic Caucus against each capitulation by Congressional Democrats that led up to this deal on tax cuts. He is one of very few authorized to throw stones.
And he's not wasting it at all.
Thank you, Senator Sanders.
As of this writing, Bernie Sanders, with an assist from Sherrod Brown and Mary Landrieu, has kept a filibuster-- a real one, not the I-Can't-Believe-They're-Not-Speaking silent filibusters we've been used to from the GOP-- for just over four hours. When Americans talk about the filibuster as a safeguard for minority rights, I think that they're still glossing over the fact that it killed every civil rights bill the Congress tried to take up until 1964, but if they all had to be done like this, I could live with it. I still think it needs to be changed so that it can't last forever, but with no further introduction, I give you Senator Bernie Sanders, the proud Socialist from Vermont.
UPDATE: It's just past 7 hours, and Bernie Sanders has yet to read from any text not relevant to the matter at hand. How he's able to do this is quite simple: You could take a year talking about better ways to spend 858 billion dollars. The question is, how many of those can we make happen.
There has been plenty of hypocrisy surrounding Democratic outrage at President Obama for this tax cut deal. Democrats traded away reconcilliation as a tool when they let Blue Dogs wuss out of voting on another Obama budget. They drained their political capital by letting Max Baucus spend an entire summer giving away the store on Healthcare Reform. They traded away favorable field position when they gave the decision about whether to stage a vote on the matter before the elections to those Senators who were up for re-election. Senator Mary Landrieu, the queen of off-shore drilling--to borrow a phrase from the brilliant, beautiful Melissa Harris-Perry-- has spoken of the moral outrage of the tax cuts. She's not wrong. Not right now, at least.
But she voted for them in the beginning, and as much as she pretends, there was never any real math that concluded that the tax cuts wouldn't lead to deficits.
Chuck Schumer's bill, which would have extended tax cuts to millionaires but not billionaires for five years-- at far greater cost to the deficit than the $858 billion tax cut framework-- didn't get to 60. And that bill contained NONE of the Obama tax cuts, and thus would have constituted a tax increase to working families. Having failed to come up with legislation that would actually pass the Senate, he is now fuming at President Obama for coming up with one that might pass.
But Bernie Sanders has earned his sense of moral outrage, speaking forcefully as an independent member of the Democratic Caucus against each capitulation by Congressional Democrats that led up to this deal on tax cuts. He is one of very few authorized to throw stones.
And he's not wasting it at all.
Thank you, Senator Sanders.
9.23.2010
Share this with your friends.
ED-- I'm still working on the piece I alluded to in my last post. As it turns out, explaining what I love so goddamned much about The Venture Brothers to an audience that (I assume) isn't familiar at all with the show, which has been around for years, is an interesting challenge. While I figure it out, here is some must-see analysis of the two most important political fights going on right now.
Keith on the debate over repealing the Bush tax cuts for the rich and its alleged impact on "small businesses"
I'd known since 2004 that the claims about "small businesses" that Bush was using to defend his tax cuts were shameless manipulations of the facts, but this is fucking ludicrous. Share this with anybody who is even considering voting Republican this year. It casts a pale light upon not only their deception but the extent to which it fills their campaign coffers.
Who would have guessed that the United States Senate would manage to come down on the wrong side of an issue that 78% of Americans agree on. I have no words.
Ok, that's not true, but I don't have any that are better than Rachel's.
The silver lining here is that progressives have two issues that they can run on. But as the great philosopher Jerry Garcia wrote, "Every silver lining has a touch of grey." And here it's obvious. It's the Democratic Party. So, you know. Good luck everyone.
Keith on the debate over repealing the Bush tax cuts for the rich and its alleged impact on "small businesses"
Rachel on the Senate's failure to repeal Don't Ask, Don't tell
Ok, that's not true, but I don't have any that are better than Rachel's.
The silver lining here is that progressives have two issues that they can run on. But as the great philosopher Jerry Garcia wrote, "Every silver lining has a touch of grey." And here it's obvious. It's the Democratic Party. So, you know. Good luck everyone.
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