Embrace the Divide

Of Bitches and Dog Whistles

2012-01-24T17:37:00.002-06:00

Why this election is a choice, not a referendum

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, January 24, 10:27 AM

At the “heart of this campaign,” Newt Gingrich told hisadoring followers in his South Carolinavictory speech on Saturday night, is the fundamental choice between “Americanexceptionalism” and “the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.” America has achoice, he argued, between the vision of the founders and that of radicalorganizer Saul Alinsky, between a paycheck president and a food stamppresident.

For a man of serial corruptions,

As far as ethicsviolations go, he was found guilty of one violation, which compares veryfavorably against Charlie Rangel and Tim Geitner.

it is ironic

I’m revoking previouslaudation for accurately identifying irony. (http://www.embracethedivide.blogspot.com/2012/01/after-little-bit-of-the-primary-season.html)A professional writer and editor misusingirony? Also not ironic. Still tragic, though.

that character assassination is Gingrich’s true craft.

Whose character is heassassinating? Alinsky’s?

Dog-whistle racism — Obama as the “food stamp president”

Oh the irony—yes,actual irony—of dog-whistle racism. The thrust of the analogy is that a speakeruses language that is only able to be identified and interpreted by a racist,in much the same way as a dog whistle is only able to be heard by a dog (andother animals with broader audible ranges, but they don’t really have a placein this analogy). Of course, the tacit admission is that the outraged listeneraccusing the speaker of using “dog whistle racism” can hear the metaphoricaldog whistle. Hence, the outraged are, by definition, dogs and/or racists. Eitherthat or it’s all in their heads.

— provided him his initial lift in South Carolina.

Even on the internet,I defy you to find a more stunningly inept (and succinct) misinterpretation ofthe South Carolinaresults. It assumes both that South Carolina Republicans are all racists andthat Newt Gingrich tapped into that implicit racism with a single accusation—againstthe President, not against his rivals—in a single debate.

Few at Gingrich’s victory speech knew who Alinsky was,

[citation needed]

but they could tell from the name that he was surelyunsavory and probably un-American.

Ironically—yes, actualirony—just one sentence after flubbing the interpretation of the results sobadly, Katrina has perfectly exemplified why Gingrich struck a chord with South CarolinaRepublicans. We’re sick of being talked down to by monstrous buffoons who thinkfumbling their way through Kierkegard during their sophomore year at Princetonqualifies them to snivel about imagined racism or anti-Semitism while accusingus of ignorance to a question we were never given the opportunity to answer. We’resick of the seething disdain that the media has for us, and we love Gingrich forresisting questions with logical fallacies, for not succumbing to thetemptation for contrition, for giving us something to be excited about. Most ofall, we wanted to reward Newt Gingrich for treating us like intelligent andsober-minded adults, for forcefully articulating his beliefs, and for refusingto apologize to sniveling piss-ants like John King.

But the Gingrich dichotomy is neither original nor unique.It is simply the gutter version of the standard Republican frame for thiselection.

It must be exhaustingto hear dog whistles everywhere while explaining that you’re not actually adog.

In the more tempered words of Mitt Romney, Obama is accusedof trying to transform

America

from an “Opportunity Society” to a “European-style Entitlement Society.”

Barack Obama is theonly President since Lyndon Johnson to sign a brand new entitlement into law. Whenthe shoe fits…

No matter who wins the nomination, this will be a themepounded on over the next months.

Only if our nomineeis as aggressive as Newt Gingrich has been.

What’s odd about this frame is that it makes Republicans thedefenders of the past.

That’s generally theposition that opposes “fundamental [sic] transformation.”

To keep

America

the “shining city on the hill,” Romney and Gingrich and Rick Santorum agree,requires reaffirming the policies of . . . well . . . of George W. Bush.

Take a look at Bush’sdomestic policy and that of the current Republican crop. With the exception oftax cuts, there’s not a whole lot of similarity there. This is, of course,because George W. Bush felt the need to qualify conservatism, largely inresponse to logical fallacies from clueless talking heads like Katrina here.

They would sustain the Bush tax cuts and add further top-endand corporate tax reductions.

Damn right. It’s afar cry from the consumption-based tax that we should have, but it’s a goodstart.

They would repeal financial reform and health-care reform,return to “drill, baby, drill” energy policies, sustain the military budget andlay waste to the domestic budget

Seriously, thissentence is exactly what I’m looking for from the government.

that supports everything from schools

Which is inherently astate/local issue.

to clean air

Environmentalregulations should be able to pay for their own enforcement.

to the FBI.

If your opponent isburning too easily, there’s a good chance you’re fighting straw men. Not evenRon Paul is talking about cutting the FBI.

And they are busily inflating

Iran

as a mythical menace

Facepalm.

as threatening as

Iraq

was in the run-up to thatmisbegotten invasion.

Actually, the moreappropriate analogy if you believe that Iran isn’t a threat is Kosovo. Ifthere is any action on Iran,it will almost certainly be as a distraction from domestic problems for anirrationally dovish commander in chief.

Recycling the policies that blew up the economy is possibleonly because none of the Republican candidates — other than Ron Paul — bothersto offer a theory of what went wrong.

I don’t do researchto support these write-ups because Googling is boring, but the Republicanconsensus is that the housing crisis hit because of the Democratic policies ofBill Clinton and Barny Frank. State-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushedinitiatives to give home loans to unqualified borrowers, massively inflatinghousing prices and injecting risk into the system. It took about a decade and asystem-wide failure to adequately price derivative risks to inject enough badassets in the financial system to make major banks unstable. The economy willrecover when the system is purged of these bad assets and prices hit bottom.

Obama’s explanation?Something about evil bankers and greed. It’s all pretty incomprehensible.

The crash was apparently an immaculate conception. Thecandidates simply blame Obama for the deficits,

Deficits can becontrolled by controlling spending. When you’re spending 24% of GDP, there issimply no amount of taxation that can generate that revenue.

unemployment,

His policiescertainly haven’t helped. He’s economically illiterate; he doesn’t know how tohelp.

spreading poverty and, yes, rising reliance on food stampsthat followed in its wake.

Well that’s notsimply a function of rising unemployment (which is still largely his fault). Foodstamp reliance is a function of both cultural normalization for dependency anddogged governmental efforts to increase food stamp participation.

Tuesday night, in his State of the Union address, PresidentObama will also define the election as a choice — a choice between those whowould go back to the policies that drove us off the cliff

Bush, like Obama,inherited a terrible economy. The dot-com bust was widely thought to beeconomically disastrous. The 9/11 attacks came at a time when the economy wasstill very frail. And yet, until 2008, the Bush economy added kicked ass andtook names. Is it so unreasonable to have the same expectations for Obama?

and those who would build a new foundation for the economy.

It’s a cute shtick,but the idea that this man knows how to build a new foundation for the economyis laughable. He put all his eggs in the green energy basket and reality is currentlyin the process of kicking his ass.

The administration has made it clear that it plans to warnagainst the extreme and unsustainable inequality that is corrupting ourdemocracy

We don’t have ademocracy. We have a Republic.

and has crippled our economy.

[citation needed]

The president does this in tempered language, but the caseis inescapable.

Like a black hole ofinanity.

The wealthiest Americans captured essentially all of therewards of growth over the decade before the collapse.

Oh no! She’s passedthe event horizon! (Which, fortunately, means that she’ll never be able to emitinanity that will reach me. We can all rest easy.)

This wasn’t an act of nature. They used their resources torig

Oh you pitiablelittle dullard…

the rules — deregulating finance, demanding lower taxes,

The case that modestderegulation and marginally lower taxes lead to economic collapse flies in theface of every hard-and-fast rule of macroeconomic theory in existence. Shecouldn’t have pointed to a more inaccurate diagnosis if she were blind-foldedand lobotomized.

defending subsidies and privileges,

Katrina spends herlife fighting tooth and nail against conservatives to preserve a bloatedbureaucratic government. She believes in social spending based on specificcriteria to promote certain businesses. I wonder what, exactly, she thinkssubsidies are. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, WOMAN!?!

trampling on worker rights.

I must have missedthe trials against Citigroup for violations of child labor laws. What the fuckis she even talking about?

Middle class families worked longer hours, had more jobs,and took on debt to make up for incomes that weren’t keeping up with costs.

“Middle classfamilies” negotiate the terms of their employment with their employers. Thisincludes wages and hours worked. No one was exploited or trampled on, even ifthe results weren’t what they wanted. That’s why it’s a negotiation and that’swhy we have at-will employment.

Wall Street speculators went on a wilding that eventuallyblew out the economy.

This sentence is alsomildly retarded. Speculation is an incredibly crass and simplistic descriptionof the financial sector. This is the financial sector that makes markets thatvalue corporations that employ millions and set interest rates, which allow forretirement planning for millions more. They also buy and sell the bonds thatallow the federal government to continue to function.

Oddly, it appearsthat Katrina is more upset that the market eventually reverted to the intrinsicvalue of housing instead of perpetuating the bubble. In short, Katrina isn’targuing against speculators or Republicans. She’s arguing against the rudeimposition of reality that most of us dealt with sometime before adolescence.

The entitlement of the rich is undermining the opportunityof the many.

Funny how thisdisdain for entitlements doesn’t extend to things that are actually called “entitlements.”Instead, Katrina has concocted a narrative of colossal ignorance to appeal to thelowest common denominator of class envy.

Romney and Gingrich, the “vulture capitalist”

That term still doesn’tactually exist, which is again why you have to put it in quotes.

and the lavishly rewarded Washington insider,

Something aboutcorporate greed and such and…if she’s going to phone this in then so am I.

personify not success, but the corruptions that brought usto where we are,

I actually don’t thinkKatrina knows where she is, let alone where the economy is.

even as they champion the same policies that took us there.

The only thing she’sactually expressed outrage over are lower taxes, deregulation, and some as-yetundefined sort of corruption.

The president should be pleased that his Republicanchallengers are making the race into a choice rather than just a referendum onthe economy.

The referendumalready happened in 2010. It was pretty ugly for the president.

Most Americans will readily agree that returning to the Bushpolicies doesn’t offer a way out.

Bush was onlystaunchly conservative on foreign policy. Domestically, he kind of had to bedragged to the table, and didn’t have a major conservative domestic policy winof his second term

Yet it’s not enough to argue that everyone should play bythe same set of rules, that the wealthy should pay their fair share.

An argumentnecessarily voided by the tiered income tax structure she advocates furtherstratifying. Playing by the same set of rules and the wealthy paying their fairshare are necessarily contradictory ideas in the liberal parlance.

The president’s task is to show how greater fairness — andgovernment action —

Does she seriouslyequate the two of those?

is essential to getting the economy going in the short term

I suppose it wouldsound ridiculous to say that the engine of the economy should be hope andchange and fairy dust.

as well as putting it on sound footing for the long run.

It’s both ashort-term and long-term solution? And all we have to do is tax other people? Whata convenient diagnosis?

Katrina, please.Grown ups are talking.

He could take forceful steps to require the banks torenegotiate underwater mortgages.

Is this some weirdhybrid between nationalization of banks and post-Constitutional Chicago-stylethuggishness? By what precedent does the President of the United Stateshave authority to force the renegotiation of private contracts?

(Alternatively, if he pushes the state attorneys general tocut a sweetheart deal bailing the banks out of their mortgage frauds,

[citation needed.AGAIN]

it will sure undermine his credibility.)

Banks don’t need bailoutsand there was remarkably little actual fraud that led to the 2008 crash.

He’s begun to make that case for a fair-share economy withhis jobs bill that would tax the wealthy

Naturally. Is it justme, or are Democrats even more obsessed with tax rates than Republicans?

to pay for investments in infrastructure

This was theostensible purpose of the $750B stimulus, which failed spectacularly at doingany economic benefit.

and provide help for states to protect teachers and police.

States can get theirown houses in order. Look to Wisconsinfor a road map.

The Republicans in Congress have made themselves lesspopular than communism in fighting against the jobs bill.

Congressionalpopularity is an asinine metric; Republicans think about the congressionalDemocrats and Democrats think about congressional Republicans. And for therecord, congressional ratings were rock-bottom under Nancy Pelosi, too.

The Republican primaries are just a preview of what will bean ugly election.

Not based on anythingthe Republicans are doing. The President started telegraphing his attacks ayear ago (I suspect to dissuade prominent Republicans from entering the race.)

Americans are fearful about their economic future andseeking tangible solutions.

This might be thefirst sentence I’ve agreed with yet.

Instead, voters are being swamped with negative ads from thetwo campaigns.

Is she talking aboutthe primary? This has been the most substantive primary season in my lifetime. Thisis why we always seem to have two debates a week.

Republicans offer only more of what created the mess.

It would help if yourdiagnosis for the economy weren’t based on the ramblings of an economicilliterate.

The president offers positive initiatives, yet they don’tdeal with the scale of the problem. That’s why the movement that began in Wisconsin a year ago,occupied Wall Street and spread across the country will continue to grow.

Actually, the reasonfor Occupy was Big Labor money, retired hippies, and a culture tolerant ofshameless attention-whoring. There is no worse standard-bearer for America thanthe miscreant who leads these vagabonds.

Defang the Leviathan

2012-01-18T19:54:00.003-06:00

Mitt Romney’s flawed plan to‘fix’ campaign financing

By Editorial Board,Published: January 17

MITT ROMNEY HAS aprescription for the super PAC problem: Allow political candidates to collectunlimited donations, instead of having the funds funneled to supposedlyindependent groups.

It absolutely crushed in Monday’s debate--rightfullyso. Good on ya, Mitt.

“Let campaigns then takeresponsibility for their own words,” Mr. Romney said at Monday’s debate.

To thunderous applause.

He raises an intriguingquestion: Given the Supreme Court’s flawed interpretation of the FirstAmendment — that campaign spending equals speech;

I get that the miscreants that inhabit the bowels ofthe Post obsess over Citizens United with nasally wheezing and self-immolatingsexual aggression, but protecting campaign donations and other expressions ofpolitical support are precisely thefunction for which the First Amendment was designed.

that independent expenditureson behalf of candidates, even by corporations, therefore cannot be limited —

Gasp! Corporations! (Also partnerships, unions, estates…prettymuch any entity that can freely spend money can have protected speech.)

Just for the record, the Post is, itself, acorporation that decries the rights of corporations to give money to pseudocorporatePACs that will subsequently spend it on the type of services provided by the corporationthat writes this guy’s paycheck…is metamasochism a word?

would the campaign financesystem be better off with a regime of no limits plus full and timely disclosureof donations?

Abso-fucking-lutely.

In other words, a world wherethe $5 million check can go directly to the candidate? As Mr. Romney put it,“Wouldn’t it nice to have people give what they would like to to

Sad. Even Grammar Check catches a typo like that.

campaigns, and campaignscould run their own ads and take responsibility for them?”

Conversely, in a country where voters don’t likepoliticians that take $5 million checks, a candidate could also elect to refusedonations above a certain amount, or to refuse donations from particularlyshady sources. (Recall the media of the 2010 midterms breathlessly claiming—withoutevidence—that GOP PACs and SuperPACs were receiving money from overseas) Givingmore breadth of freedom to campaigners can only benefit the dialogue.

No. Mr. Romney’s cure notonly threatens to be worse than the disease, it wouldn’t necessarily cure thedisease.

No wonder the Post’s Op-Ed page sucks. This is thetype of uninspired drivel that the entire editorial board can get behind? Thisis the type of thesis you get in 10^th grade history. (Not from me; Ikick ass at this writing thing. My 10^th grade thesis was thatSpanish American War and the violent transition from McKinley to (Teddy) Rooseveltirreparably undermined the MonroeDoctrine as a viable strategy for American foreign policy. It did not contain asingle comma splice. I’m looking at you, Gail Collins.)

The $5 million check to thesuper PAC supporting the candidate is bad enough —

Why?

it creates the reality orappearance of a candidate beholden to a particular donor.

Yet it also shields the identity of the donor, makingthe appearance of impropriety meaninglessly vague.

Unlimited donations tocandidates would be worse.

[citation needed]

Candidates would beimplicated in soliciting these mega-checks, further undermining publicconfidence in the system.

Why? It’s not like the rule change proposed by Romneywould increase or decrease the amount of money in the political system (thoughI have a cure for that, too). The only difference would be more informationavailable to the public and more ammunition with which to hold candidatesresponsible.

Plus we might be able to avoid the specter of $35,000dinners in which tuxedo-clad candidates are dragged through receiving lineslike fucking show ponies so wealthy patrons have a customized picture to hangon the mantle for posterity. Political galas are like SpaceMountain for adults that are toofoolish to realize that if they just kept that money to themselves, they couldbuy their own Space Mountain.

The pressure would be on toallow unlimited contributions by corporations and labor unions directly tocandidates;

Yes. That’s more or less what Romney proposed verbatim.

currently, they arepermitted, in the aftermath of the Citizens United v. Federal ElectionCommission ruling, to give to super PACs.

I hope you’re happy, Washington Post Editorial Board. Yourfixation on jabbing at Citizens Unitedis decimating longstanding and much-needed guidelines for good taste in commausage.

The Republican NationalCommittee is already arguing in federal court that the ban on corporatecontributions to individual candidates should be declared unconstitutional.

Word.

Moreover, the attractivenessof the super PAC would be diminished but not eliminated, for the very reasonthat Mr. Romney notes: The PACs offer a useful, look-ma-no-hands

I’m fairly certain that whoever wrote this has never successfullyoperated a bicycle. Regardless, he certainly has no idea that this particularidiom is used exclusively in reference to attention-seeking braggadocio, not asa way to profess innocence. Keep inmind, whoever wrote this is a professionalwriter.

vehicle to do candidates’dirty work.

Yet candidates ability to fundraise directly would a)diminish the appeal of PACs and thereby decrease the funds and b) attach astigma to ads not associated with particular candidates.

Why assume these groups would disappear ifcontribution limits for candidates were eliminated?

They don’t have to disappear to be discredited andmarginalized.

Mr. Romney’s suggestion is superficiallyappealing because fixing the current mess seems so difficult.

He pretty much nailed it in one sentence.

A constitutional amendmentisn’t likely;

Something for which we can be thankful.

neither is a total change ofheart by the Supreme Court.

Scalia’d, bitches!

The FEC is dysfunctional,

It’s a government agency. Dysfunction is practicallyin the mission statement.

and Congress is gridlocked onthis issue.

This is a cute way of saying that these proposals don’thave electoral support.

Despite all that, trying tofix what’s broken makes more sense than breaking the system further.

It’s somewhat interesting that the Post, acorporation, unquestionably has the right to issue as many political judgmentsas they see fit. They pay to publish the paper. They spend valuable print areathat could otherwise feature revenue-generating advertisements. What makes themdifferent from General Electric or Halliburton?

Tighter rules

The answer to a liberal is always more regulation.

on coordination could bewritten to prevent wink-and-nod interactions between candidates and super PACs,

You’re fucking kidding me, right? This obliviousnesscan only stem from an utter detachment from reality. When you’re cracking downon winks and nods, rational people realize that they’re wandering intoterritory ordinarily reserved for the bat-shit insane.

such as, for example, Mr.Romney’s appearance at an event sponsored by the super PAC supporting him. Theflawed disclosure schedule could be improved.

This is the very definition of “nibbling around theedges.”

The emergence of thecandidate-specific super PAC, dedicated to the interests of a particularpolitician, puts a different gloss on the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded notion

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s acorporation bitching three times thatcorporations political spending has been deemed protected speech. Weren’t newspaperssupposed to be champions for free speech?

that independent expendituresdo not pose a corruption risk.

Of course there is a corruption risk. There is alwaysa corruption risk. What this boils down to is your belief that the Americanpeople are too stupid to see through a barrage of deceitful ads. The irony, ofcourse, is that it is the Post, not the American people, who has been socorrupted by politics that it has jettisoned its own core ethic ofimpartiality.

Even this court

Scalia’d!

might be persuaded to upholdlegislation treating these entities, staffed by the candidates’ longtimeadvisers, as arms of the campaign.

Wait wait wait…stop and break it down.

Mitt Romney’s plan is to destroy the wall between candidatesand their PACs by eliminating regulation on campaign finance. The Postdisagrees so vehemently that the editorial board posits a radical new counterproposal:destroying the wall between candidates and their PACs by adding new layers ofregulation. Both have the exact same desired outcome and radically differentways of achieving it. Few articles so clearly articulate the difference betweenconservatives and liberals.

I like Romney’s plan (it gives me politi-wood), but itdoesn’t address why election spending has ballooned so dramatically recently. Inpart, this trend is exacerbated because Obama is terrifyingly inept. The majorreason (and one which long predates the current administration) is that thegovernment continues to grow in size, influence, and power. Corporations andindividuals alike donate so that they don’t wind up crushed between the cogs ofthe machine. Money flows from virtually every sector of the economy tocandidates, PACs, SuperPACs, lobbyists, and consultants. Most donors are simplyhoping that currying favor with those in power buys the right to exist hassle-free(thought some are waiting for an under-the-table payday). The solution isprofoundly simple: tighten the scope of the federal government, hobble itsregulators, slash the tax code and eliminate all deductions, dismantle thebureaucracy. Defang the leviathan.

The amount of money in politics is dishearteningbecause all non-ideological spending is done with the same value proposition:that benefits derived from their cronyism will outstrip the cost of theirinitial investment. This year, x billion dollars will flood into the politicalsystem to get the corruptible into office. But politicians can’t simply repay those debtsout of the federal coffers (although in many ways it would be more economicalif they could). Politicians have to set up and pass pet projects or earmarks inwhich that debt is repaid after filtering through inept middle-men with aprofit margin. All the while, waste and fraud accumulate and the systemsnowballs upon itself. When we reduce the size of the federal government, we devaluethe investments that fuel the vicious cycle; campaign finance can then takecare of itself.

Capitalism on Trial; Prosecutors Guilty

2012-01-17T20:53:00.001-06:00

After a little bit of a hiatus for the primary season (which I now regard as functionally over), ETD is back, because the Op-Ed lunacy is back, and in force.

Vulture capitalism on trial

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, January 17, 9:12 AM

If you had asked me at the beginning of the Republicannomination fight what candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry would say towin, I would have said just about anything.

Considering that atthe beginning of the race, Rick Perry was regarded as the stalwartconservative’s choice, who had been reluctantly dragged into the contest in thefirst place, (and even Calista Gingrich wasn’t talking about Newt) experiencetells me that this is a bit of revisionist history.

What I couldn’t possibly imagine was that one of the thingsthey might start saying would actually be the unvarnished, unblinking,stand-up-and-clap-for-it truth.

Look no further towhy Romney is running away with the nomination: if Katrina vanden Heuvel agreeswith you, you done fucked up.

With their eyes set on Bain’s bane and Mitt Romney’s career,

Isn’t it adorable howshe thinks she’s a real writer? Have you ever had a small child lecture you on quantummechanics? It’s kind of like this. I can’t help but think it’s just adorable.

Perry and Gingrich have been astonishingly and appropriatelybrutal.

As a result, theirfreefall in the polls has sparked a general coalescence of support aroundRomney, mostly because Romney knows that agreeing with the Op-Ed pages in thePost during a Republican primary means you done fucked up.

“There’s a real difference between venture capitalism andvulture capitalism,”

There most certainlyis. One exists, and the other doesn’t.

Perry told Fox and Friends last week. “I don’t believe thatcapitalism is making a buck under any circumstances.”

Rick Perry is,apparently, unfamiliar with capitalism. (With the usual caveats for legality—of course capitalism doesn’t toleratetheft or fraud), capitalism is preciselymaking a buck under any circumstances. If the market wants iron, the capitalistgoes out and mines it. If the market wants a television show about idiots, thecapitalist goes out and films it. If the market want a fleet of nuclear-poweredhigh-speed zeppelins, the capitalist hires scientists to kick physics in thenuts and make it happen.

This is precisely thereason that capitalism works so efficiently—the individual actors within thesystem can respond to any market demand because there is no “honorable” or“dishonorable” way to make money. (Again, and I can’t emphasize this pointenough, this assumes actions strictly adherent to the laws.) Money is money,and it represents the virtue of the sweat, toil, ingenuity, and risk-takingthat were required to make it. This holds true regardless of whether the objectof that effort was sewage treatment or fashion design, or equity investment.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Be careful admittingthat out loud. Your editor might hear it and realize that you omitted a subjectin that sentence and realize that you really are less articulate than RickPerry.

Gingrich sharpened that point further on Bloomberg.

Bloomberg is a greatexample. He made his money by compiling and selling financial data to technicaltraders, who are mostly the snake-oil salesmen of the financial industry. Thesetechnical traders do precisely what Romney did at Bain—allocate equity, valuaterisk, and minimize market inefficiency, yet they (as a field) have a provablyworse track record. Yet liberals fail to impugn Bloomberg (or Tim Geitner orthe dozens of other financiers in the current administration).

“The question is whether or not these companies were beingmanipulated by the guys who invest

They weren’t.

to drain them of their money, leaving behind people who wereunemployed,”

It’s not that manipulationthrough aggressive divestiture is illegal—it’s functionally impossible. If youbuy shares in a company, those shares are worth more than the value of theassets of the firm (less liabilities). They would have to be, or the currentowners would have sold the assets themselves. This means that Romney and Baincould only dismantle a company at a loss. The presumption of rational shareholdersunderpins our entire system of equity valuation.

he said. “Show me somebody who has consistently made moneywhile losing money for workers and I’ll show you someone who has underminedcapitalism.”

Shareholders are notfiduciaries for workers. Precisely the opposite is true: workers arefiduciaries for shareholders. Line workers are entrusted to use and maintainassets that are not theirs; managers are entrusted with the operations anddecision-making of the firm using corporate money that is not their own. Bothhave basic legal obligations to the shareholders.

Workers are at-willemployees who earn money in return for doing a job. It is virtually impossibleto “lose [sic] money for workers” unless you commit fraud or enter fiscalinsolvency and fail to pay for services rendered, in which case, tort lawadequately defines the debenture procedures for contractors with liens againstassets. In other words, the legal system’s got this all worked out already.

Sadly, KVHand—apparently—Newt Gingrich believe that corporations exist to provide jobsfor employees. They don’t; all firms exist exclusively to maximize profits forshareholders.

Sing it, Brother Gingrich.

When an avowedsocialist agrees with your definition of capitalism, you done fucked up.

What’s especially ironic about all of this is how much theroles have reversed.

Credit where creditis due: what follows is, in fact, irony. I will allow her to bathe in the gloryof this brief flirtation with competency.

Romney, shameless flip-flopper that he is, has stood hisground, while the rest of the Republican field is opportunistically flippingand flopping around him. That, it turns out, is incredibly lucky for theAmerican people, allowing us as clear a picture as we’d ever had of the realRomney just at the moment he’s become the near-presumptive nominee.

You’re absolutelycorrect. This is the first time of the campaign that Romney has appearedgenuine, and his poll numbers reflect it. When I start agreeing with Katrina,I’m worrying that I’m about to done fucked up.

His full-throated response to his Republican opponents wasdeliciously revealing. “In the last few days, we have seen some desperateRepublicans join forces with [President Obama],”

They have.

he said during his victory speech in New Hampshire. “This is such a mistake forour party and for our nation.

It is.

This country already has a leader who divides us with thebitter politics of envy.”

We do.

He warned that we must not be “dragged down by a resentmentof success.”

We mustn’t.

So that’s what he thinks of the Occupy protests,

Now, I listened tothe speech, and I don’t recall any mention of Occupy, but I hope Romney regardsthem with nothing but seething disdain.

of the 99 percenters,

Keep in mind, callingyourself the “99%” is not an affirmation of who you are, but a small-mindedassertion of what you are not. This is purely divisive. Indeed, the entirerhetoric of the Occupy movement is designed to be divisive.

of the millions of Americans who believe income inequalityis a real-life problem and that they deserve a fair shot.

I guess the 1% arethe people who understand that private equity’s business function is todistributes money to anyone and everyone with a good, marketable (thoughunderdeveloped) business idea, offer management expertise, and make that ideaprofitable for those who chose to pursue it. It is precisely the mechanism bywhich inequality is undermined.

According to Romney, they’re just jealous, of him, and ofpeople like him, who concocted rapacious ways to make millions of dollars.

Romney wassuccessful. And his job isn’t easy. I know that because the government is sowoefully awful at it. (If it were easy, the government would merely be bad atit.) Selecting companies in which to invest private equity funds is kind oflike picking stocks, except that there are millions of options, information ishard to come by, accounting practices are not standardized and often unaudited,investors expect greater returns, negotiations are tense and demanding, andmeaningful investments must represent large amounts of capital (so mistakes ormissteps cost a fortune).

I am jealous of MittRomney. The dude’s clearly got chops. The difference is that I don’t resent himfor it. Everything about this article, from the tone to the substance,indicates that you, Katrina, do resent him, precisely because of his success. Ifmemory serves, that’s more or less a verbatim quote.

This is what he believes, we know, not just because of thesecomments, but because of his career at Bain. He’s a man who built a personalfortune practicing a form of predatory, you-are-on-your own brand of capitalism

Private equity, bydefinition, ties a firm to outside investors, thereby eliminating the“you-are-on-your own brand of capitalism” that she is hell-bent ondiscrediting. Does she even know what Bain does?

that casts workers into joblessness — by design.

Bain (like anyprivate equity firm) lays off workers so that the firm (and the rest of theworkers) can survive and the investment can grow. It’s not only necessary,logical, reasonable, and responsible (keep in mind that Bain also has fiduciaryduty to it’s investors); it’s theonly humane thing to do. Doctors amputate arms with an infection likely to killthe patient. That doesn’t mean that they are anti-arm.

And he’s a man who thinks those workers’ grievances

You’d think this wasthe Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Work conditions aren’t dangerous or illegal.The “grievances” of the Occupy “workers” are more like a rambling list ofarbitrary wants off the top of a pot-addled head.

are just about his “success” and not the system he intendsto propagate from the Oval Office.

Ah. Cool. So wefinally get to ideology.

And so the country is being offered a rare opportunity: thechance to have a conversation about two vastly different visions for our nationand its economy.

See, I’m doing itagain. Agreeing with KVH brings on a very unsettling paranoia.

On one side, the Romney Economy — a vision of deregulation,

Word.

of tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations,

Tax breaks for all.

of an assault on the middle class and the poor,

Mitt Romney punchespoor people for sport, after all.

and of an attack on the social safety net.

By social safety net,she’s referring to “that web of entitlements that are slowly bankrupting thetreasury and bilking unearned billions from future generations.”

But what will be the other side of that debate? We have, sofar, a patchwork of answers: President Obama’s Osawatomie speech,

Honestly, I alreadyforgot that. I’m sure he said…things…about…stuff.

Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy,

Elizabeth Warrengives progressives lady-wood. Anywhere other than Massachusetts and she’d be an unelectablehack.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s public fightfor the victims of the big banks,

Read: “shamelesspandering”

the Progressive Caucus and its People’s Budget,

Read: “socialistlunacy.”

and a nascent, but potent

This is a reference tothe odor. You’ll get no argument from me.

99 percent movement.

Read: “waning swellof relics of the 60’s and bored collegians pursuing a performing arts degree.”

Stitched together, they provide glimmers of a coherent,

There’s not a singlethread of coherence to be found in that list of miscreants and castaways.

inspired response to the excesses and depredations of theRomney Economy.

So…modern liberalismdefines itself as a reaction to a hypothetical future candidate as opposed to…say…a governing philosophy that has been mostly in power for the last six years?What, you want us to ignore Obama’s disastrous first term? Nancy Pelosi’s reignof terror and the hapless Harry Reid’s 1000 days without the senate passing abudget? The economy, brought on by bad liberal mortgage policies andexacerbated by unmitigated failures like Cash for Clunkers, the bailouts, andthe punchline-inducing stimulus? The executive power grab? A muddled foreignpolicy split equally between deference, confusion, and holdovers from the BushAdministration?

The difference between the two isn’t only that one is aboutnurturing fairness and the other, very clearly, is not.

Well at least thistime, I’m only agreeing with her because her intentional vagueness allows me toread it as I please.

The difference is that Romney capitalism — the kind of“vulture capitalism”

You see, “vulturecapitalism” is in quotes because it’s not a real term.

represented by Bain and so many chop-shop private equityoperations — undermines the strength of our economy itself, and the economy’sability to work for working people.

This is the problemwith socialists. They usually get sidetracked by reeducation and genocidebefore they actually understand the economy they’re trying to govern.

There is, as even Warren Buffett has pointed out, a realdifference between investing and building a company that makes something orprovides a service that adds value to the economy, and abarbarian-at-the-gate-style enterprise that loots and strips, making millionsfor its executives by ripping holes in the economic fabric.

Warren Buffet isanother great example of a liberal hero who does exactly what Bain does (excepteven better, and usually with public companies). The problem is that he’stilting at windmills here, because that second category doesn’t actually exist.If you believe markets are at all efficient, it follows that looting companiesis functionally impossible. If you don’t believe markets are efficient, all themore reason competing private equity firms like Bain are needed to eliminateinefficiencies by driving up the price of undervalued assets. Either way, itdecidedly does not rip a hole in the economic fabric.

The current rules, as set by lobbyists pushing for taxloopholes and deregulations, have been rigged to allow Romney and his friendsto make out like bandits.

Tax loopholes are nothingbut tax deductions for actions that the government deems beneficial. You’reright; they’re not purely capitalistic. But that’s not Bain’s fault. It’s noteven the lobbyist’s fault. It’s the damn senator or congressman who voted inun-capitalistic tax laws. Blaming Romney’s private sector career for a purelypublic sector problem is ridiculous on its face.

For the record, I’mtaking this as a tacit acknowledgement from KVH that lower tax rates spureconomic growth on a microeconomic level.

And so this election doesn’t just turn on whether we willchange the rules; it is a question of whether we want one of the actual banditsto be put in charge of our future.

Ugh. Those are allgross misunderstandings of Romney’s actual record, yet he is still preferableto a rabble-rousing agitator from Chicago’ssouth side with no private sector experience, a decidedly unspectacularlegislative history, and an atrocious record as President.

Though it might be odd that such attacks on Romney haveoriginated with Republicans themselves, that they have sparked a nationalconversation matters a great deal.

That is the worstconstructed sentence of this whole sprawling mess, which is quite the honor.

It allows those who’ve been making the case for years todrive home the critical point that the work of people like Romney is not thestuff of natural free markets;

Somewhere in theafterlife, Adam Smith just hit Karl Marx upside the head with a tire ironbecause of this broad.

Wait, hold on. There’smore than one person making thisasinine argument? I need bottles of wine.

it is the product of a well-funded construct of laws andrules and institutions and values

I.e. governmentregulation—you know, that thing that conservatives loathe and have devotedtheir entire movement to dismantling?

that undermine shared prosperity in a country that once tookpride in supporting upward mobility.

I’ll say it again:private equity (as all sources of capital) is the engine for upwardmobility. Without it, great inventionsand ideas languish until patents expire or underfunded inventors simply giveup. This is, unquestionably, a natural and necessary product of the freemarket.

There are many smart, concrete, not pie-in-the-sky

She has a way withwords, doesn’t she?

ideas about how we can recalibrate our economy,

Recalibrate?Re-fucking-calibrate? It’s not a goddamn guided missile. It has two directions:growing or dying.

return it to fairness, how we can reimagine it

Reimaging the economyis worse than recalibrating it. It’s already an abstract constract, youbuffoon. It doesn’t need any re-imaging, especially not from the executivebranch of the federal government (you know, the one that signs all those taxloopholes and rules and institutions into law).

as one built not on vulture capitalism but on democraticcapitalism.

Stop making shit up!“Democratic capitalism” is no more a concept than “vulture capitalism” is, butit’s even more asinine. Capitalism, necessarily, is democratic. The market isthe most absolute form of democratic participation ever known. That is becauseit is the manifestation of the freedom of choice.

The Nation recently gathered many of those ideas in aspecial issue,

All of them, I’msure, (I can’t be bothered to read that pinko rag. I have standards, after all)were dumb, abstract, and pie-in-the-sky. You see what happened there? Mirroringher prose actually made mine worse. God dammit, Katrina.

Reimagining Capitalism, laying out alternative ideas for amore humane capitalism that works for communities.

In the height ofirony, the new argument for socialism is simply calling it “New Capitalism.” Itdidn’t work for New Coke either.

This campaign promises to be an MRI of our economic system.

No, this campaign isan examination of the failures of modern liberalism and the miserable policiesof Barack Obama.

If that sounds unlikely, consider that six months ago, few,if any, political leaders were talking seriously about economic inequality —and today, the king of crony politics, the governor of Texas,

When did we demotethe Barack Obama?

is complaining about the immorality of vulture capitalists.A lot can change; a lot already has.

And a lot hasn’t. Sixmonths ago, Perry was seen as a stalwart conservative. Now, he’ll be lucky ifhe’s able to hold onto the governor’s mansion the next election cycle. BothPerry and Gingrich have embarrassed themselves and shown their campaignsunworthy of flying the flag of conservatism. The failure of Romney to win thesupport of Republican voters lies in their fundamental distrust of hisideological inclinations, not in his career. The more Romney talks about Bain,the more he looks like a good conservative.

The Point of [No Risk and] No Return

2011-11-08T11:51:00.000-06:00

End Bonuses for Bankers

By NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB

Published: November 7, 2011

I HAVE a solution for the problem of bankers who take risksthat threaten the general public: Eliminate bonuses.

I have a solution forthe problem of declining newspaper circulation: stop publishing this sort of tripe.

More than three years since the global financial crisisstarted, financial institutions are still blowing themselves up.

Bankruptcies are partof the rejuvenation intrinsic to the business cycle. This is particularly truein an environment of prolonged recession that has been characterized by centralplanners’ attempts to divorce cause from effect.

The latest, MF Global, filed for bankruptcy protection lastweek after its chief executive, Jon S. Corzine, made risky investments inEuropean bonds. So far, lenders and shareholders have been paying the price,not taxpayers.

Lo and behold, themarket is working as it should. It’s also worth noting that Corzine is aDemocrat, and also probably guilty of fraud.

But it is only a matter of time before private risk-takingleads to another giant bailout like the ones the

United States

was forced to providein 2008.

The United Stateswas forced to provide a bailout in2008? If memory serves, the government was the one forcing the banks to take abailout because an unpopular sitting duck president and a Congress in thethroes of a political dust-up decided that the risks of inaction were a greaterthreat to their legacy than the risk of failed policy.

The promise of “no more bailouts,” enshrined in last year’sWall Street reform law, is just that — a promise.

While I believe thata promise from a politician to a constituent ranks somewhere below “iron-clad,”the solution is to make bailouts and crony capitalism so politically poisonousthat no politician could do it and retain their job. By blaming banks for thebailout—indeed by claiming that the banks forced government’s hand—you haveabsolved all responsibility from our public officials. Congratulations, Taleb.In a mere paragraph you have a) shown historical illiteracy of events thathappened a mere three years ago, b) misdiagnosed the problem, c) blamed thewrong people for the problem, and d) given poorly thought-out cover to thosewho are actually responsible. Is “quadfecta” a word?

The financiers (and their lawyers)

We hate financiersenough without bringing lawyers into it. Let’s not incite another OWS riot, bigguy.

will always stay one step ahead of the regulators.

Despite acknowledgingthat there will always be a way around regulations, he proposes moreregulations. Fucking brilliant.

No one really knows what will happen the next time a giant bankgoes bust because of its misunderstanding of risk.

We do indeed live inan uncertain world. Trying to protect from the infinite possibilities ofexistence will have you shadowboxing in no time (this is Mr. Taleb’sfundamental misunderstanding of the difference between uncertainty and risk). Thepublic policy question is much simpler: what should happen? The answer is simpler, too. The firm should enterbankruptcy court and liquidate assets where necessary to emerge as a fiscallysolvent entity.

Instead, it’s time for a fundamental reform: Any person whoworks for a company that, regardless of its current financial health, wouldrequire a taxpayer-financed bailout if it failed,

I could make a verygood argument that this either applies to either no companies or to allcompanies. This standard is purely asinine.

should not get a bonus, ever.

In this instance,compensation will either occur in other, less transparent ways, or talent willflee these industries. Get ready for a world where your bank’s employees areall compensated like the IRS.

In fact, all pay at systemically important financialinstitutions — big banks, but also some insurance companies and even huge hedgefunds — should be strictly regulated.

Why is it thatdespite the demonstrable financial inefficiency of literally every governmentalagency ever created (military included) that Mr. Taleb’s particular class ofmorons still insist on turning our most profitable and functional industriesinto extensions of the government bloat?

Critics like the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators decry the bonus systemfor its lack of fairness

Which is, on it’sface, laughable. Wall Street bonuses are the purest form of fairness still inexistence in America.The better you perform—as judged by the stone-cold metric of profit—the moreyou make. Period.

and its contribution to widening inequality.

Stop pretending likethe OWS protesters are people with policy goals; they’re a mob of malcontentswith the corresponding propensity towards violence and incoherent rationalizations.

But the greater problem is that it provides an incentive totake risks.

Bonuses do notprovide an incentive to take risks. All risks have downside. That feature isencapsulated nicely in the definition of risk. Performance-based compensationprovides an incentive to succeed. While greater risk carries a greater chanceof huge returns, it also carries a greater chance of poor performance reviews,socially stigmatizing derision, and sleeping in a cardboard box.

The asymmetric nature of the bonus (an incentive for successwithout a corresponding disincentive for failure)

The disincentive is alack of pay, lack of status, and eventual termination, you colossal jackass. Thebonus is the carrot. The stick comes from the boss when he realizes that yourportfolio has performed 53 basis points under market averages over the lastthree years and boots your ass while trying to stifle a giggle as you plead throughyour job through gasping sobs.

Wow. That got dark.

causes hidden risks to accumulate in the financial systemand become a catalyst for disaster.

Counter-party risk inderivative contracts were indeed undervalued in the models that led up to the2008 crash. I fail to see how the modeling shortcomings of a few analystssomehow subordinates the entire financial sector to the federal government orinvites nationalization.

This violates the fundamental rules of capitalism;

The bailouts violatethe fundamental rules of capitalism.

Nationalizing thebanks violates the fundamental rules of capitalism.

Regulating employeecompensation violates the fundamental rules of capitalism.

Compensatingemployees based on performance-based metrics does not—in any conceivable form—violatethe fundamental rules of capitalsm.

Adam Smith himself was wary of the effect of limitingliability, a bedrock principle of the modern corporation.

If you want to eliminatebankruptcy proceedings and reinstate debtors prisons, and low usury interestrate ceilings, you’re welcome to present an argument, but for most of us, thoseissues were settled even before the issue of American slavery.

Bonuses are particularly dangerous because they invitebankers to game the system by hiding the risks of rare and hard-to-predict butconsequential blow-ups,

You speak, of course,about the agency problem as it pertains to risk. This is a relevant and sobertopic that corporations have worked to minimize for decades. Yet you believethat the solution is to compensate the men with their hands on the switches ofthe global economy like a DC paper-pusher. Not only does this asinine “solution”have the dubious honor of not solving the agency problem it was specificallydesigned to address, but by legally prohibiting compensation for financialprofessionals commensurate with their responsibilities and competence, itencourages the outsourcing of an entire industry worth trillions of dollars andhundreds of thousands of jobs. In short, fuck you, Mr. Taleb.

which I have called “black swan” events.

The irony ofpromoting your own book while undermining the capitalistic system makes me wantto punch a swan out of spite. See, jackass? It’s the swan that bears the consequenceof your shamelessness.

The meltdown in the

United States

subprime mortgage market,which set off the global financial crisis, is only the latest example of suchdisasters.

This is an academic’ssmarmy way of saying “shit happens.”

Consider that we trust military and homeland securitypersonnel with our lives, yet we don’t give them lavish bonuses.

The military is alifestyle, not a job. Soldiers are often contractually compelled to continueservice. Quitting will get them jail time. Likewise, not obeying orders willget them jail time. That combination is a pretty damn big stick thatmarket-based employers don’t (and can’t and shouldn’t) have.

They get promotions and the honor of a job well done if theysucceed, and the severe disincentive of shame if they fail.

This is why themilitary (and for that matter, the police force as well) is more of a vocationthan a profession. Priests aren’t compensated by market factors. Social workers,artists, and writers are all usually undercompensated by virtue of theirqualifications (most have postgraduate degrees), yet there is no shortage inany of these fields because they are intrinsically rewarding. Banking, however,is not.

For bankers, it is the opposite: a bonus if they makeshort-term profits

It is reasonable thatbonuses should reflect a longer period of time, but this isn’t exactly a matterof public policy. That’s between employer and employee.

and a bailout if they go bust.

I still don’tunderstand how the bailout is a faitaccompli when virtually everyone acknowledges that it is unfair cronycapitalism and very few believe that it worked to alleviate the impact ofrecession.

The question of talent is a red herring: Having worked withboth groups, I can tell you that military and security people are not only morecareful about safety, but also have far greater technical skill, than bankers.

That’s not whattalent actually means. The military does not recruit talent. It creates it throughmassive training organizations because it is divorced from the profit motive. Privateindustries have to hire talent—often from the military—because training is costprohibitive.

The ancients were fully aware of thisupside-without-downside asymmetry, and they built simple rules in response.

So why, instead ofre-instating a downside, are you instead eliminating the upside?

Nearly 4,000 years ago, Hammurabi’s code specified this: “Ifa builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, andthe house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of thehouse, that builder shall be put to death.”

Which, in Ancient Wherever-The-Fuck,caused the great housing bubble of 2000BC as building prices ballooned. Thisprinciple hasn’t been abandoned; we have mountains of tort case law for thesesituations. Here’s the rub: with few exceptions, the actions of banks--bothbefore, during, and after the housing bust--were neither criminal nor tortious.

This was simply the best risk-management rule ever.

We can’t get liberalsto support capital punishment for murder. Imagine trying to put someone fordeath for mere incompetence (which they generally support).

The Babylonians

I prefer to call Babylon “AncientWherever-The-Fuck.”

understood that the builder will always know more about therisks than the client, and can hide fragilities and improve his profitabilityby cutting corners — in, say, the foundation. The builder can also fool theinspector; the person hiding risk has a large informational advantage over theone who has to find it.

You’ll get noargument from me. The question is not why we should punish poor performance,but why you insist on not rewarding good performance.

Banning bonuses addresses the principal-agent problem ineconomics:

Yeah. I know. I wastalking about this paragraphs ago. Let’s wrap this shit up. I’ve got things todo.

the separation between an agent’s interests and those of theclient, or principal, he is supposed to represent. The potency of my

[bat-shit crazy]

solution lies in the idea that people do not consciouslywish to harm themselves;

Holy fuck! This dudejust cracked the code on the mystery of why self-mutilation isn’t sociallyacceptable behavior! Let’s give him a Nobel Prize!

I feel much safer on a plane because the pilot, and not adrone, is at the controls. Similarly, cooks should taste their own cooking;engineers should stand under the bridges they have designed when the bridgesare tested; the captain should be the last to leave the ship.

Yes, the argument forcommensurate consequences is well taken. But you’re not arguing forcommensurate consequences. You’re arguing for no consequences. The fact thatyou’re also arguing for no rewards is, I suppose, logically consistent, but it’sstill mildly retarded.

The Romans even figured out how to deter cowardice thatcauses the death of others with the technique called decimation: If a legionlost a battle and there was suspicion of cowardice, 10 percent of the soldiersand commanders — usually chosen at random — were put to death.

Nothing says “justice”like the cold rationality of arbitrary killings.

No such pain faces bailed-out, bonus-taking bankers.

A more sensitivereader might infer that he’s calling for the death of 10% of bankers.

The period from 2000 to 2008 saw a very large accumulationof hidden exposures in the financial system. And yet the year 2010 brought thelargest bank compensation in history.

It’s almost likethere was a prolonged, multi-year period in between those two events in whichall the other stuff got sorted out. Oh wait.

It has become clear that merely “clawing back” past bonusesafter the fact is not enough.

Nothing like passive verbs for issuingblanket statements of unassailable fact. No, Mr. Wizard, it has not becomeclear at all.

Supervision, regulation and other forms of monitoring arenecessary, but insufficient — consider that the Federal Reserve insisted, aslate as 2007, that the rapidly escalating subprime mortgage crisis was likelyto be “contained.”

Oh come on. The Feddoesn’t exactly use the same language as the rest of us and you know it. Theylie all the time so as to not undermine investor confidence.

What would banking look like if bonuses were eliminated?

Bleak andunprofitable.

It would not be too different from what it was like when Iwas a bank intern in the 1980s,

The time-frame isnothing short of pure hilarity. Go back to the Reagan years by reregulating!

before the wave of deregulation that culminated in the 1999repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law that had separatedinvestment and commercial banking.

The problem wasundervalued risk. That problem would have persisted whether or not commercial andinvestment banks remained separated.

Before then, bankers and lenders were boring “lifers.”Banking was bland and predictable; the chairman’s income was less than that oftoday’s junior trader.

Thanks for thenostalgia. I’m depressed already.

Investment banks, which paid bonuses and weren’t allowed tolend, were partnerships with skin in the game, not gamblers playing with otherpeople’s money.

Again, the argumentthat there should be skin in the game flies in the face of the assertion thatthere should be no skin in the game. That is, after all, this article’s centralthesis of regulating bankers pay. (For the record, there is nary a whiff ofConstitutional justification for this gross overreach of federal authorityanywhere. After all, we need new laws to stop all of these violations ofnon-laws.)

Hedge funds, which are loosely regulated, could take on someof the risks that banks would shed under my proposal.

I agree. But here’sthe kicker: there’s no good reason to divorce investment institutions fromlending institutions. The risk is still there.

While we tend to hear about the successful ones, the greatmajority fail and their failures rarely make the front page.

Taleb’s plan: boatloadsof underpublicized failure!

The principal-agent problem they have isn’t a problem fortaxpayers: Typically their investors manage the governance of hedge funds byensuring that the manager is hurt more than any of his investors in the eventof a blowup.

Now, explain how theprincipal-agent problem is an issue if you allow firms to go bankrupt. Managersand executives lose their jobs and get a giant black mark on their resumes, impairing futureemployment. Shareholders (including managers and executives with equity compensation) lose most of their investment. The taxpayers, quiteliterally, have no place in this event.

I believe that “less is more” — simple heuristics arenecessary for complex problems.

No you don’t, youarrogant fuck. You believe that more regulation is more. What’s more, this isn’t a complex problem.

So instead of thousands of pages of regulation, we shouldenforce a basic principle: Bonuses and bailouts should never mix.

That’s not what youargued. You argued that bailouts are inevitable and that bonuses are nonsensicalmeans of compensation. Bailouts are purely in the public sphere. Bonuses arepurely in the private sphere. In order for you to balance your silly littleequation, you have decided that the private needs to become public, not thatthe public needs to stay out of the private. It is in this point, the first onethat you made, that you ignored all questions about the proper role ofgovernment and discounted the plausibility of effective, minimalisticgovernment in favor nationalization.

You want to go backto the 80s in banking? The hours are 9-5, Monday through Friday, closed allholidays, including arbor day and secretary’s day. Employees are unfriendly and unyielding. ATMs are sporadic andinconvenient. Product lines are thin and uncustomizable. Customer service is ajoke. Margins are high because overhead is high. Barriers to entry for newcompetitors are higher. Congratulations, Nassim Taleb. You’ve turned the mostprofitable sector in the American economy into the DMV.

Equality, Inequality, and other Mathematical Concepts Eugene Robinson Doesn't Understand

2011-10-28T14:51:00.000-05:00

The study that shows why Occupy Wall Street struck a nerve

By Eugene Robinson, Published: October 27

The hard-right conservatives who dominate the RepublicanParty

It seems odd thatRobinson doesn’t get that “right-wing” isn’t a pejorative in the way that “left-wing”is to most Americans. After all, the differences between the right and lefthave never been so stark. Conservatives clean up after themselves, tell youwhat they believe, and go to work in the morning. Liberals engage in weird chantingrituals, espouse complete incoherence, and eventually riot against a systemthey don’t even understand.

claim to despise the redistribution of wealth,

Indeed we do.

but secretly they love it — as long as the process involvesdepriving the poor and middle class to benefit the rich, not the other wayaround.

If this is a class-warbetween the 99% and the 1%--as OWS protesters are so eager to assert--then howwould any constituency of 1% retain power by bilking the 99%? This isn’t a riddleor an invitation to anticapitalist kookery; they wouldn’t. Indeed, you can’tmake the assertion of 99% vs. 1% class warfare without veiled allusions tobrainwashing and outright demagoguery. After all, why would anyone vote to beoppressed? 9/11 truthers (also almost all liberal) have a more grounded set ofexplanations than this.

What’s more,billionaires are generally not Republicans at all. How many liberalbillionaires can you name off the top of your head? Bill Gates. Paul Allen. WarrenBuffett. Michael Bloomberg. George Soros. Mark Zuckerburg. George Lucas, StevenSpeilburg. The richest man in the world right now is Carlos Slim becauseAmerican billionaires have been shedding wealth to whatever do-gooder charity theysee.

How many conservativebillionaires are there? The Koch brothers. Rupert Murdoch. Maybe Steve Wynn. Sortof/Kind of/Maybe Donald Trump, but he’s more of a populist/protectionist thananything. The blanket assertion that Republicans are synonymous with wealth isdownright batty.

The truth of thematter is that the rich, even the super-rich, have mostly the same policy concernsthat the rest of the country. They tend to skew towards social justice policiesbecause the economics don’t have any threat of changing their economicstandings whereas social awareness most assuredly has the ability to elevatetheir social cachet. What’s more, entrenched, established billionaires fearlow-taxation and low-regulation policies (bedrocks of conservatism) thatobliterate barriers to entry for competing new start-ups. The billionaires’left-leaning tendencies aren’t mere coincidence, but the product of a web of incentives.

That is precisely what has been happening, as a jaw-droppingnew report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office

It can’t be saidenough: the CBO is nonpartisan, but being nonpartisan, it often makesdemonstrably stupid assumptions that are demanded by politicians. It isparticularly egregious when Democrats are setting the inputs.

demonstrates. Three decades of trickle-down economic theory,

Which hasn’t beenimplemented since the 80s.

see-no-evil deregulation

Which hasn’t beenimplemented ever.

and tax-cutting fervor

Which has absolutelynothing to do with income distribution.

have led to massive redistribution.

I don’t thinkRobinson really understands the concept of redistribution. Distribution ofwealth is part of any economic system, and it happens every minute of every day.In capitalist societies, wealth is distributed through profits, incomes,expenses, investment gains and losses, and gifting—all results of voluntarycontractual agreements.

Redistribution occurs when that regular distribution is altered to addresssocial desires that are not reflected in the marketplace. In other words,redistribution is the act of arranging the outcome of economic activitiesbefore those activities occur. By asserting that the outcomes are somehowundesirable, you, Eugene Robinson, have made the argument for redistribution. Thiswouldn’t be surprising or even worth pointing out if not for the fact that youhave dedicated this entire article to accusing Republican policies ofredistributionism.

Another word for what’s been happening might be theft.

If you want to gothere, you’re contractually obligated to stick to the “redistribution = theft”definition once your trite world-view is debunked.

The gist of the CBO study, titled “Trends in theDistribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,” is that while we’vebecome wealthier overall, these new riches have largely bypassed many Americansand instead flowed mostly to the affluent.

In the shock of the century,rich people have money!

Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t remember voting toturn the United Statesinto a nation starkly divided between haves and have-nots.

If your memory isfaulty, it’s most likely the result of a more global brain damage, because thatsentence has the intellectual acuity of a YouTube comments section. We have arepresentative Republic, which means that you don’t vote on how to distributewealth; you vote on representatives. Moreover, the nation is not starkly divided between haves andhave-nots, despite what the CBO report might say because “the rich” is not amonolithic and stagnant group of people. People flow in and out of incomedeciles rather freely. Consistently showing the top 1% as though the groupingwere somehow meaningful is flagrant and particularly brazen selection bias.

Yet that’s where we’ve been led.

This is the danger ofgiving numbers to the mathematically illiterate. I’d feel safer around a childwith a hand grenade.

Overall, in inflation-adjusted dollars, average after-taxhousehold income grew by 62 percent during the period under study, according tothe CBO. This sounds great — but only until you look a little closer.

For those at the bottom — the one-fifth of households withthe lowest incomes — the increase was just 18 percent. For the middle three-fifths,the average increase was 40 percent. Spread over nearly 30 years, these gainsare modest, not meteoric.

By contrast, look at the top 1 percent of earners. Theirafter-tax household income increased by an astonishing 275 percent. For thosekeeping track, this means it nearly quadrupled. Nice work, if you can get it.

I explained thisabove, but this entire analysis willfully misrepresents what the numberactually means. Since the study didn’t actually track individual actors, it can’trepresent that the 1% in 1979 is an entirely different dataset than the 1% in2007. (I’m graciously ignoring that this study didn’t detail the crash of 2008.)Which means that by the definition of what constitutes the top 1%, no one inthat group lost money, otherwise they would have fallen out of the toppercentile and been counted elsewhere. Similarly, no one in the lowest decilemade any money, or they wouldn’t have still been included in the lowest decile.Again, as a description of have-versus-have-nots, the data is about as uselessas a yacht in New Mexico.

This is not what Republicans want you to think of when youhear the word redistribution.

We’ve already proved thatDemocrats are much better at distributing tax dollars to their campaign donors.(See: Solyndra et al.) We’ve also proved that Democrats are great at filtering federalfunds through favored constituencies (unions) that then come back in the formof campaign contributions. If you’re asking why so many billionaires areDemocrats, look no further.

You’re supposed to imagine the evil masterminds asBolsheviks, not bankers.

“Mastermind” and “Bolshevik”haven’t been compatible terms since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed, Bolshevism precludes one from being a mastermind.

You’re supposed to envision the lazy free-riders who benefitfrom redistribution as the “poor,” and the industrious job-creators who getrobbed as the “wealthy” — not the other way around.

Again, if this is allbased off of a really shallow reading of a mathematically flawed analysis, thenthese assertions quickly become laughably inaccurate.

If Americans were to realize they’ve been the victims ofRepublican-style redistribution — stealing from the poor to give to the rich — thewhole political atmosphere might change.

I let him slide onthe “stealing” thing once, but theft requires the appropriation of goods fromthe rightful owner without consent. Robinson, for his part, wants to assertthat the money rightfully belongs to the middle class just by virtue of thembeing middle class Americans. Whatever that ideology may be, it’s notcapitalism.

I believe that’s one reason why the Occupy Wall Streetprotests have struck such a nerve.

That, and conservativesneeding someone new to laugh at. Obama’s policies are too depressing to be apunching bag anymore.

The far-right and its media mouthpieces

I think it’s kind ofstunning to liberal media figures that conservatives don’t have an equivalentapparatus. I think that’s why they get caught shadowboxing when they realizethat their understanding of the American political spectrum is skewed left.

have worked themselves into a frenzy trying to disregard,

Why would we want todo that? This rabid hysteria is the best contrast against which we can presentconservatism.

dismiss

Already done.

or discredit

This one they did tothemselves.

the demonstrations. Thus far, fortunately, all this efforthas been to no avail.

Seriously? There areNazis in New York, calls for violence inChicago, Communists everywhere, and riots in Oakland. (And that’s just off the top of myhead. Imagine if I weren’t too lazy to do research.) This is the organizationthat you want to trumpet as a pillar of the American left?

The right maintains that inequality is the wrong measure.

Of course it is.Fairness is a function of both input and output. Looking at output alonenecessarily misses the point.

To argue about how the income pie should be sliced is “classwarfare,”

It sure is, you dirtysocialist.

and what we should do instead is give the private sector theright incentives to make the pie bigger.

If by “give the rightincentives” you mean “get the hell out of the way” then yeah, you’ve got it.

This way, according to conservative doctrine, everyone’sslice gets bigger — even if some slices grow faster than others.

In that sentence, reasonablepeople have found a reprieve from lunacy that is desperately needed.

Indeed, the CBO report says that even the poorest householdssaw at least a little income growth. Why is it any of their business that thehigh-earners in the top 1 percent saw astronomical income growth? Isn’t thisjust sour grapes?

No, for two reasons. First, the system is rigged. Wealthyindividuals and corporations have disproportionate influence over public policybecause of the often decisive role that money plays in elections.

And yet, liberals arethe ones who want public policy to be more influential. Conservatives want lessinfluential public policy. All of this is a function of the country gettingmore liberal—not more conservative, as Robinson suggests—over the time periodof the CBO study he cites.

This is why Icontinue to insist that OWS is the larval stage of conservative thought.

If the rich and powerful act in their self-interest, asconservative ideologues believe we all should do, then the rich and powerful’sshare of income will continue to soar.

That seems toindicate that those of us without bottomless pockets all have a vested interestin reducing the size and scope of government interest. Funny, that sounds a lotlike the Republican platform.

Second, and more broadly, the real issue is what kind ofnation we want to be. Thomas Jefferson’s “All men are created equal” isproperly understood as calling for equality of opportunity, not equality ofoutcomes.

File this one under “noshit, you dirty socialist.”

But the more we become a nation of rich and poor,

Which is a sillyassertion based on mathematical incompetence.

the less we can pretend to be offering the sameopportunities to every American.

Dammit, you alreadyscrewed up Jefferson. The government doesn’toffer opportunities. Existence, unfettered by government meddling andlawlessness, guarantees opportunities. Everyone in the country has the rightand the opportunity to drive a bus, or be an accountant, or enjoy a heroinaddiction, or be a school teacher, or be a rodeo clown, or—heaven forbid—be ahedge fund manager. The difference is that there is a very specific set ofskills that qualify one for any of these opportunities. (There are fewer skillsrequired for heroin addiction, but needles are kind of tricky, I guess.) The greatequalizer is that if you believe that the system has unfairly put up barriersbetween you and your vocation, you can always start a business.

By giving peoplecontrol over their opportunities, it encourages people to develop skills andcultivate competence. In contrast, giving people an undeserved opportunityentrenches incompetence.

As polarization increases, mobility declines.

Except polarizationhasn’t increased. The gulf between rich and poor is a function of mobility, nota symptom of a lack of mobility. The massively wealthy in this country didn’tall start out massively wealthy. That is the American Dream in action.

The whole point of the American Dream is that it isavailable to everyone, not just those who awaken from their slumbers ondown-filled pillows and 800-thread-count sheets.

Fuck off, I like mysheets.

So it does matter that as the pie grows, the various slicesdo not grow in proportion.

You haven’t shownthat at all. It’s a naked assertion, and a bad one, at that.

We’re not characters in one of those lumbering,interminable, nonsensical Ayn Rand novels.

Rand’s novels present flat characters becausethey are archetypes. The problem is that you are, very much, a character from aRand novel: Ellisworth Toohey. I wouldn’t likethe comparison either.

We believe in individual initiative and the free market,

[footage not found]

but we also believe that nationhood necessarily involves acommitment to our fellow citizens, an acknowledgment that we’re engaged in acommon enterprise.

There is nothing inmy enterprise that is common to a vagrant in San Diegoor a billionaire in Boston.My enterprise is my own.

We believe that opportunity should be more than just anempty word.

No, you believe thatopportunity should be replaced with certainty. In reality, the two arediametrically opposed. If you believe in opportunity, then you must alsobelieve in the purposeful threat of failure. You must believe that those thatfail should not be rewarded for failing because doing so inverts therisk/reward incentives and skews the economic calculus.

In short, this entirecolumn is based on provable falsehoods and basic statistical illiteracy. Isuppose it shouldn’t be surprising that a failing business model (print news) seemsto be leading the charge against creative destruction and the cleansingefficiency of capitalism. In an unfettered market, the incompetent get left inthe dust.

Roger Cohen: The Conscience of a Bureaucrat

2011-10-25T16:29:00.003-05:00

The Beauty of Institutions

By ROGER COHEN

Published: October 24, 2011

LONDON— Jean Monnet, the postwar architect of European unity, once wrote: “Nothing ispossible without men,

Except growth, decay,life, death, nature, change, termite colonies, hurricanes, asteroid collisions,sunrise, sunset, the tides, migratory birds, and literally any of a hundredthousand things that you can think of that doesn’t involve man.

but nothing is lasting without institutions.”

Again, with the exceptionof gravity, time, magnetism, and the thousands of other natural truths we haveuncovered over the millennia.

So upon even acursory examination of its two assertions, neither holds to be anywhere closeto true. And yet, this is the type of thing that you want to build a column offof? Have at it, hoss.

When humankind fails, the best institutions save it from thebrink.

Ah, so this is adefense of the Catholic Church vis-à-vis the litany of child molestationscandals that have peppered the institution for decades?

No?

Then certainly it’s afawning declaration of industrial prowess under Fascism?

No?

An ode toorganizational efficiency at the DMV? A rousing defense of the corporateresponsibility of the oil industry? An essay praising the traditional nuclearfamily?

Of course not.

The forging of the European Union is up there with the U.S.Constitution as an act of creative genius.

No. Now you’redeliberately trying to piss me off. This is precisely what conservatives meanwhen they argue that liberals are disdainful of American exceptionalism. Comparingthe United Statesto the EU would be hurtful if it weren’t so ludicrous.

Loving an entity is hard, given the intangibility of thething,

No. It isn’t. Patriotismis easy—or it should be. It’s quite easy to love a sports team or a church or aschool or a brand—all institutions. In fact, the intangibility is what makesthe love easier. Loving tangible government—with its corruption, inefficiency,factionalism and petty egos--is both weird and foolish. Loving country and thepromise it holds is an instinct that only grows stronger with understanding.

but I love the bland Brusselsinstitutions that gave my generation a peace denied its forbears —

…seriously? That is what you love? You need to startwatching football.

all those young men engraved in stone and granite onmelancholy town squares across Europe. It’s ameasure of the success of the European Union that peace is now taken for grantedby its half billion inhabitants.

That’s wasn’t the EU.It was postwar demographic and economic shifts away from European power, ColdWar-era mutually assured destruction, and stringent military prohibitions from Europe’s transatlantic victors.

Nobody pauses at the memorials. These days I find myselfwanting to shout: “Remember!”

You self-importantdolt. You write for one of the most widely circulated papers in the country andyou find yourself compelled to get the message out by shouting? Even if youwere that dumb, I would shout back “Remember what? Be more specific.” You’re a professional writer for God’s sake. The veryidea of making a vague proclamation or an unsubstantiated assertion ought to behateful to you.

I suppose I shouldn’tbe so surprised; you’re not very good at your job.

That’s a tall order when people glide from France to Germanyand onto Poland, across thekilling fields of old, without pause for a border, and the Basque separatistsof ETA have just laid down their weapons in Europe’slast armed confrontation.

If you’re going togive the EU credit for disarming the Basque separatists, will you also faultthem for Bosniaand Kosovo (and pretty much all of the ethnic cleansing shenanigans that go onin the Balkans?)

Yet I detect a dawning sense of the gravity of Europe’scrisis — its political rather than financial peril — in the parallels beingdrawn between dying for Danzig in 1939 and paying for Athens in 2011.

If this financialcrisis can so easily turn into a political one, a rational observer wouldunderscore the necessity of conservative fiscal policy that frowns upon deficitspending. Cohen, being both dangerous and a buffoon, is going to proposehyperinflation.

These are dangerous times. Helmut Schmidt, who as a Germanis hardwired to the nature of cataclysm

The German peopleappreciate you distilling their national identity from six thousand miles away.(Not only distilling their national identity, but giving them “cataclysm” as anational identity. Then again, I’m itching to machete some video game zombie-Nazistonight, so I suppose it’s justfied.)

and at 92 knows what sacrifice brought a borderless Europe,

Exchanging the Lirafor the Euro was hard for us all. VIVE LA FRANC!

declared as much the other day, lambasting “anyone whoconsiders his own nation more important than common Europe.”

What a buffoon.

There are plenty of such people these days, driven byfrustration or boredom or pettiness to the refuge of the tribe.

The people of Germany are not the people of Greece. Theyhave different languages, cultures, politics, traditions, religions, histories andvirtually everything else that ties a people together in common identity. Andyet, the sins and excesses of the Greek people are expected to be funded by theGermans? Or French? This is a clear highway to resentment, and will do more tofoment aggression than to promote harmony.

The euro’s creation was an irrevocable political decision.

Um…it’s prettyrevocable. A sovereign country simply just needs to pull its funding and cashout. It would require recreating a central bank and currency, but these arepretty manageable feats when confronted with the alternatives of hyperinflationand social collapse.

The currency, however, had the misfortune to be birthed justas the idealism that fired Europe’sintegration sagged.

In other words, thegroundswell of pan-Europeanism that birthed this “irrevocable politicaldecision” was pretty temporary.

The federalist implications of a common currency met thefissuring rancor of complacent Europeans.

Leaning pretty heavyon the thesaurus, huh?

They had been lulled by the end of the Cold War, irked byEuropean bureaucracy and wearied by the E.U. expansion to post-Communiststates. The bad history uppermost in the minds of François Mitterrand andHelmut Kohl had faded. If ever a crisis was foretold, it’s the euro crisis.

The only thing predictableis that internationalism will always fail. Always.

But the danger is broader. European frustration with remote,seemingly unaccountable institutions

Remote andunaccountable is a veritable definition of the European Union.

has spread into a wider anger against the impunity of thepowerful and the richness of the ever richer.

As I have said before,the Occupy protests stem from the larval form of conservative thought.

Growing numbers of people feel that the levers ofglobalization’s compounding advantages are manipulated by the privileged few.From Manhattan to Milan, the Occupy movement is saying “EnoughAlready!”

And much like RichardCohen shouting “remember,” the rest of the world is screaming back: “be morespecific! (And take a shower!)”

No, European leaders retort, we need more — morebudget-cutting, more sacrifice to set our houses in order after the debt-drivenbinge of this century’s first decade.

We have a fundamentaldefinition of what “more” means. “More” does not mean “less” government. Thisisn’t some sort of Orwellian thought exercise or an appropriated architecturalslogan from the 60s. This is just stupidity.

Just as the euro had to row against an unraveling tide,

This should beobvious, but tides most certainly do not “unravel.”

so the austerity prescribed to save the currency now has torow against a tide of skepticism.

Europe isn’t embracing austerity to save thecurrency. They’re doing it because they simply can’t continue to self-financeat their prior spending levels. The market for their debt securities wouldballoon more than Violet Beauregard. That’s right, it’s a Willy Wonkareference. Want to fight about it?

Jean Arthuis, a French senator, gave this recent assessmentof the state of the West: “Globalization led us, through outsourcing, to giveup our productive substance and opt for the comfort of consumption, while otherstates became the producers of what we consumed on credit: on our sidesovereign debts, on the other sovereign wealth funds.”

Tying debt tomanufacturing outsourcing is pretty much retarded, but hey, they’re French. Thenation of Camus has different standards for logical cohesion. Have I mentionedthat I disdain Camus?

Many Europeans and Americans experience that shift day today as lost jobs, the disappearance of the credit that cushioned relativedecline, growing disparities between rich and poor, a feeling of powerlessness,too many bills to pay, a gathering sense of injustice, and growing anger towardhapless politicians outstripped by markets they cannot control.

Recessions blow. Weget it. But it has very little to do with globalization. If you want proof, askyourself why China continuesto attract manufacturers despite having almost completely lost its labor wageadvantage over some of our less crazy/communist neighbors like Brazil, Mexico,or Colombia.

“Capitalism is crisis,” says a big banner of the Occupymovement at St. Paul’s in London. Indeed it is.

I told you before whyconservatives think liberals have no regard for American exceptionalism. This is why we feel confident in callingthe rest of you socialists. If you don’t believe that capitalism is the mostefficient economic system, the alternatives are socialism (or it’s synonyms—andyes, they are synonyms--Marxism andcommunism), fascism, feudalism or...uh…mercantilism? Syndicalism? Honestly, Ithink we’re being kind.

As Joseph Schumpeter noted, “Economic progress, incapitalist society, means turmoil.”

Turmoil is not thesame as crisis.

The trick

Trick? A trick issomething a whore does for money. This is an illusion.

is to convince people that crisis is creative more than itis destructive —

As opposed toliterally every other economic system ever devised, each of which has beenempirically proven to be destructive.

and that’s not happening right now. The European Union wascreated for such a moment.

And yet it continuesto fail spectacularly. Can we finally put to rest the unjustifiable reverencefor international organizations like NATO, the EU, or the UN?

It was meant to guarantee the impossibility of the worst —not to deliver Europeans to postmodern bliss but to save them from the hellthat began almost a century ago in 1914 and did not really stop until theContinent lay in ruins in 1945.

This is like askingan electrician to fix your toilet. Unless you live in Japan, where basichousehold appliances have the computing power of the WOPR from War Games, he simply doesn’t have theright tools in his belt. Similarly, you can’t promote responsiblerepresentative democracy by centralizing power abroad. You can’t purifycapitalism with government involvement.

That metaphor mayhave gotten away from me.

Now, thankfully, the big bazookas are financial. Roll themout, whatever the subsequent cost in inflation. Irrevocable means just that:The euro cannot be turned back.

If you’re trying toprevent the re-implementation of Nazism in Europe, which is firmly entrenchedas a “worst-case scenario” behind only pterodactyl invasion in calamitousrepercussions, you might want to do a little research into the Weimar Republic’spolicies on inflation. Inflation isn’t a bazooka; it’s a kamikaze.

There is no soft euro exit imaginable, only mayhem anddanger.

Why? Why is theredanger? Obviously there would be some pain in reestablishing national centralbanks and currencies. The alternative, however, is tying a rope around a groupof shipwreck survivors floating in the ocean. When one of the frail, exhaustedbodies stops kicking, his weight invariably pulls the others under.

Recapitalize the banks.

With what? Worthlesspaper?

Bulk up on the rescue fund.

Again, how do you dothat without inflating or begging?

Turn bankers’ Greek haircuts into buzz cuts.

At first I confusedthis call for higher taxes with support for austerity. I nearly had a heartattack.

Do whatever it takes.

This is just sad. Very few financial crises have been known tobe avoided by begging, desperation, or shamelessness.

Germany

,ushered from ruin by the European Union, must lead the safeguarding of the euroor risk the loss of the stability that it prizes above anything.

Stability isoverrated; existence is not.

The best institutions are also self-correcting mechanisms.

The self-correctingmechanism here would be for Greeceto become a subjugated client-state of Germanyand/or France.As much as the idea of German territorial expansion horrifies me, Greece hasforfeit the right to exist as a sovereign nation. It is their citizens that must pay the price for their bankruptcy.

They work like the checks and balances of the U.S.Constitution. They turn crisis into opportunity. In time the euro’s defensewill demand a federative leap forward. That will be good for Europeans even thoughthey cannot see it now.

So all of this—the crisis,the defense of Greece—isall just a guise for an pan-European central government. National sovereignty stillmeans something. This article is titled “The Beauty of Institutions.” There hasbeen no espousal of beauty. Only a grim, dystopian future of European inflationin which, at the end of the trials of financial collapse, the entirety of Europe congeals into one federal government. This is someweird mix of a Bond movie villain’s plot, a UN ambassador’s wet dream, andNapoleonic conquest. To Cohen, that is what beauty looks like.

Opinion Nuggets: Slapping down the Invisible Hand

2011-10-17T10:42:00.000-05:00

Krugman... The guy has a name like an 80's high school villain. The guy who pushes the bike-riding protagonist off the road and into a ravine while speeding by in the convertible. (I'm envisioning the Goonies, but most 80's movies featured their very own resident jackass, so take your pick.) It’shard to believe sometimes that the bearded, tweed-clad weirdo is a Nobel Laureate.Take this little gem from today’s column, for example:

…[T]he financialization of America wasn’tdictated by the invisible hand of the market. What caused the financialindustry to grow much faster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980was a series of deliberate policy choices, in particular a process ofderegulation that continued right up to the eve of the 2008 crisis.

If you’re not banging your head against the wall, you’renot paying attention. The “invisible hand,” Adam Smith’s eloquent elucidationof the omnipresence of market forces, describes the natural forces at work inthe economy. These forces can be diverted or dammed by non-market forces likeregulation. Yet the removal ofregulation has the precise effect of showing the direction and magnitude withwhich the invisible hand pushes the markets. In other words, the “financializationof America”was absolutely and necessarily dictated by the invisible hand, not—as Krugmanobtusely suggests—by deregulation.

More astonishing, however, is that Krugmanacknowledges that “a series of deliberate policy choices, in particular aprocess of deregulation” was what “caused the financial industry to grow muchfaster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980.” And yet Krugman’sconclusion, remarkably, is that regulation is the answer to our economic woes.Indeed, in addition to showing greater growth up until 2008, the financialsector has rebounded more briskly than the rest of the economy as well (and notas a result of bailouts—there were plenty of fiscally solvent institutions totake up market share had some of the big banks collapsed). Wages are higher.Productivity is higher. The industry employs a veritable legion of well-paid andwell-trained high-performers in bespoke suits. While we can quibble about howthey’re all kind of assholes in their personal lives (though my experience hasbeen that they are not), from a macroeconomic sense, there is absolutelynothing to not like about a lightly regulated financial sector.

The drumbeat of anti-capitalism drowns out the low hum of cognitive dissonance for the readers of the Times. Krugman knows that these arguments are downright silly, but he has long since sold out his credibility to rank populism.

An Open Letter to Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-11T16:00:00.003-05:00

To Our Smelly Occupiers:

Let’s get this clear right off the bat: I don’t like or respectyou. Your message is garbled. Yourreasoning is labyrinthine. Your methods are repugnant. Your style is insipid. Yourmorality is reprehensible. Your rebellion is trite. Your raison d’etre is nonexistent. Most importantly, you are simply wrong.

Trudging through the mire of drug-addled mumblings andpseudointellectual jargon, the unifying theme of your squandered mass of humanityappears to be that you want the end of corporate money in politics. Yet withthe awareness of a lemming, you fail to recognize that Republicans andspecifically the Tea Party have been on the front lines of this fight for almost three years now.

Imagine political influence as a market. Unions,corporations, individuals, and groups are all consumers of political influence; politicians are the suppliers. That influence has value, which isset by the marginal profit realized from that influence. The market is impededby campaign finance laws and ethics guidelines, of course, but the immutablelaws of economics simply point towards the sly execution of dubiously ethical political quid pro quo in lieu of notarizedcontracts. It may not be technically illegal, but--not unlike you hippies--it doesn't pass the smell test. A lack of transparency makes it smell worse. The greater the value that political influence has, the more you're going to see corporate, union, and private money flood into the political sphere. Don't blame Citizens United for economics of the situation. Embrace the economics and get to work on a functional solution to the root causes of this corruption.

The single most effective way to impair the value ofpolitical influence is to constrain government’s authority. If government hasless authority to set utility prices, then there will be fewer utilitylobbyists. If EPA regulators have the authority over impeding privateconstruction, then there will be fewer lobbyists for builders and developers. Theprotestors envision a beefy government as a bulwark against corruption. Preciselythe opposite is accurate. A larger government with more functions gives the corrupt more places tohide transactions and forces watchdogs to cover more area. There is no salve to cure the problem of the influence of money in politics; there is only the scalpel (or in times like these, the hacksaw).

Yet, in contradiction to the single discernable goalof the occupiers, you ragged malcontents have politically aligned with theforces most eager to give government unlimited authority: communists, socialists,unions, and Jan Schakowsky.

When age sets in and your underdeveloped minds have grown asense of shame, you will look at this country, glorious and free, and realizethat despite the carefully manicured self-image of a bold leftist revolutionary,you were a conservative all along. We'll welcome you with open arms when you're ready (and have taken a shower.)

Best Regards,
Boojtastic

Hippies and Scraggly Facial Hair: A Love Story

2011-10-10T17:26:00.002-05:00

Panic of the Plutocrats

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: October 9, 2011

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Streetprotests will change

America

’sdirection.

It will. The Americanpeople are seeing hippies crapping on cop cars. They’re seeing throngs of privilegednitwits blocking the Brooklyn Bridge and being arresteden masse. They’re seeing whatever thehell this creepiness is (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QZlp3eGMNI). After hearing about theanti-intellectualism of conservatism, they’re seeing aspiring intellectualsparalyzed into perpetual indecision by their own lack of mental dexterity and anatural timidity. After hearing about [heretoforeunseen] bigotry and racism at Tea Party rallies, they’re seeing the influenceof anti-Semitism in Occupy Wall Street. After hearing about the [heretoforeunseen] rage of the right, they’re seeing left-wing mobs on the brink of riot.After chiding conservatives for using socialist as an ad hominem epithet, they’re seeing the rise of a movement that is proudlyanticapitalist. If that doesn’t give the country a violent shove to the right,then it might be too late for America.

Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkablyhysterical reaction from Wall Street,

Namely, laughinghysterically at the poor little dullards. In fact, I haven’t seen anythingresembling a reaction from Wall Street.

the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits whoreliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

Paul Krugman’salready got the verbiage down! Accuse the rich and the superlatively rich ofill-defined nefariousness. Imply a moral superiority to the tyranny of themajority, and stay short on specifics.

And this reaction tells you something important —

The laughing? Yeah,it tells us that we, thankfully, still have a sense of humor.

namely, that the extremists threatening American values arewhat F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

First, Wall Street is not extreme in any sense of the word(in fact, it is usually a moderating force.) Second, I don’t think Paul Krugmancould name an “American” value if he tried. Third, the assertion here is thatthe wealthy (and those that protect their interests) are anti-American simplyby virtue of having wealth.

If Krugman believeswealth to be anti-American, is it any surprise that his vision for our nation’sfuture is steeped in poverty?

Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed themodest-sized if growing demonstrations,

Non-sequitur NumberOne: That Republicans are the party of Wall Street. Of course, the exactopposite is actually true. Wall Street lies in the heart of a big blue city ina big blue state in a big blue region and Democrats take more money—by a widemargin—from the financial institutions than Republicans.

which have involved some

[many]

confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem tohave involved a lot of police overreaction —

I guess the statuteof limitations on criticizing the NYPD from the 9/11 attacks has finally lapsedfor liberals. Krugman’s got ten years of pent-up rage against the police builtup.

but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in factbeen nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of2009.

The Tea Party was andis clean, civil, and purposeful. Occupy Wall Street is none of the above. Virtuallyevery rancorous allegation against the Tea Party has been disproved; virtuallyevery hyperbolic allegation against Occupy Wall Street has been corroborated on video.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, hasdenounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.”

He happens to becompletely right.

The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, withMitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,”

You just said thatwealth was anti-American. One would think that “class warfare” is somethingthat you would want to own up to.

while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.”

Which is obviouslybeyond the pale to someone who believes that the wealthy are “extremists [thatare] threatening American values.”

My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for somereason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because theybelieve rich people don’t deserve to have them.

There are fourcomponents to Paul’s comments: 1) The protesters don’t believe the rich deservetheir wealth. 2) The lack of deserving empowers the protesters, in their ownminds, to seize and redistribute those assets. 3) They may do so by force. 4)That wealth is roughly represented in the primiative mind of the mob by iPads.

None of these itemsis contested by those at the protests or anyone who ascribes to the progressiveagenda. Plus, they’re all big Apple users, because, frankly, Apple usersgenerally suck. The sole point if differentiation is that they usually want thegovernment to function as a redistributionist mob by proxy.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industrytitan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused theprotesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,”a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

Have you seen the movement’s actual goals? http://occupywallst.org/forum/proposed-list-of-demands-for-occupy-wall-st-moveme/All but two of those items will immediately reduce employment. If New York hada mayor that didn’t sprain his vagina in a freak knitting accident, thisdisruptive bacchanalia of collegiate ennui would be broken up by dusk.

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, youlearned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned withLenin.”

That’s beinggenerous. Reports are that Occupy Wall Street is becoming a mass drug den.

The way to understand all of this

[Undefined pronoun]

is to realize

This is already thesecond infinitive verb of the sentence.

that it’s

[Undefined pronoun]

part of a broader syndrome,

[Unsupportedextrapolation that is still undefined]

in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely

[Unquantifiableassertion]

from a system rigged in their favor

[Citation needed]

react with hysteria

Maybe Krugman’s got adifferent idea of hysteria than the rest of us. The evidence that he presentedin support of the claim of hysteria are:

a) Cantor’sstatements that Occupy Wall Streetis a “mob” that “pit[s] Americans against one another.” This, of course, isboth true, and decidedly un-hysterical.

b) Mitt Romneycalling Occupy Wall Street“class warfare.” Personally, I wasn’t aware that this charge was either insultingor contested.

c) Herman Caincalling Occupy Wall Street “un-American,” which is referenced mere momentsafter Krugman asserts that the wealthy are “extremists [that are] threateningAmerican values.”

d) Rand Paulasserting that these riots have the potential to turn into riots (which stillpales in comparison to Nancy Pelosi claiming that the Tea Party was going tore-kill Harvey Milk) is also completely true.

e) Michael Bloombergthinks that these protests could cost the city jobs, which is also folly toargue against.

These all seem likewell-founded assertions of fact or predictions based on observed behavior.

to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

The only things that Occupy Wall Streethas pointed out are the merits of internal plumbing.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industrybarons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama.

I don’t recall, butgo on.

They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist forendorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backedby federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation.

Considering thatbanks entire means of making a profit is their ability to assess, manage, andvaluate risk, that proposal is roughly akin to telling General Motors that itscars couldn’t have wheels.

And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loopholethat lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes —

The capital gains taxrate is not a loophole. Those funds have already been subjected to corporatetax.

well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group,compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

None of us wereaghast because no one except his mother and a handful of industry insiders knowswho Stephen Schwarzman is.

And then there’s the campaign of character assassinationagainst Elizabeth Warren,

She’s a senatorialcandidate. If you want to start talking “character assassination,” theconversation begins with me saying “Christine O’Donnell,” continues with youimmediately conceding, and ends with some light trash talk and a few minutes ofvictory dancing with my mad pop-and-lock skillz.

the financial reformer

Uh…she was apresidential advisor and the candidate to run an organization established by abill that will be repealed in 15 months. She didn’t actually reform much ofanything.

now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube videoof Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich

Paul, if I weren’tcompletely convinced that the male erection was unachievable within eyeshot ofElizabeth Warren, I’d say you flirting.

(Author’s note: thiscomment originally implied various sexual fetishes and alluded to Pulp Fiction. Be glad I toned it down.)

went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it wasno more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxesare what we pay for civilized society.”

Not a singleconservative or Tea Party member—not even the furthest right member of Ron Paul’scadre of cultists—believes that taxes should not exist. Not one. Warren’s implicationswere as inane as their premise was flawed. The comments were seized upon bothbecause it underscored just how silly the left is about economics, and becauseit gives cover to the notion that the wealthy, who already pay exorbitanttaxes, are somehow mooching from the rest of us. That is preciselyass-backwards.

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy,you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky.

Why not? One WhiteHouse insider already openly lavishes praise on Mao.

George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,”

She doesn’t?

that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.”

Definition ofchimera: “A vain or idle fancy”

Warren’s comments: “There is nobody in thiscountry who got rich on his own. Nobody.” She was, of course, implying that theidea of individual wealth was a vain or idle fancy.

Is the connectionreally that hard to make?

And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host.Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

Neither is thisparticularly specific to Warrennor is it particularly barbed. Outside of getting your rocks off on being herwhite knight, what the hell is the point of this aside, Paul?

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that WallStreet’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensibletheir position is.

Wait…what? The world-beaters that chant “What do we want?We’re not really sure!” have slyly unmasked the impenetrable veneer ofcapitalism and forced its adherents to admit it was all just a crazy sham?

They’re not John Galt;

If you want to gowith the Atlas Shrugged reference,Midas Mulligan was the banker amongst the heroes. Not coincidentally, he was alsothe first character to join Galt’s strike. Just saying.

they’re not even Steve Jobs.

But I’m guessing thatSteve Jobs needed a banker or venture capitalist for Apple’s early financing.

They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financialschemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helpedpush us into a crisis

How is it possiblethat risk bundling and derivative securities are responsible for the inherentlack of value to their underlying assets? This might have been too complex anargument for one sentence, but suffice it to say that this argument is about aswell thought-out as Mel Gibson’s position vis-à-vis the Jews.

whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens ofmillions of their fellow citizens.

I bet life is muchsimpler when you can just blame bankers.

Yet they have paid no price.

Financial companieshit the recession just as hard as everyone else. Often worse. Tell stockownersin Lehman Brothers that they didn’t pay a price.

Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with fewstrings attached.

Considering that a) thebanks were forced by the Treasury Department to take TARP fundshttp://articles.businessinsider.com/2009-05-13/wall_street/29994241_1_scribd-bank-documents and b) they have repaid these sums withinterest, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/27/treasury-has-profited-from-big-bank-bailouts/?page=all one could effectively argue that thetaxpayers have been the ones to pay no price.

They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federalguarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tailstaxpayers lose.

So…the beef is withthe government, not the banks, yes?

And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases havepeople with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-classfamilies.

You already mentionedthis, and I already told you that the capital gains tax is not a loophole youdoddering old fool!

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — andtherefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny.

Most banks didn’teven want TARP. They were forced to take it. As for capital gains taxes, Iwelcome that argument.

Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly andmoderately,

[Footage not found]

must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, themore reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she mustbe demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

Elizabeth Warrensounded neither moderate nor reasonable. The problem was that she used thelanguage of radicalism to support a truism. We don’t actually object to herovert argument. We object to the next logical step off the cliff into socialism:because people didn’t earn their wealth individually that they should not beempowered to spend it individually.

So who’s really being un-American here?

The Occupy Wall Streetprotesters. Elizabeth Warren. To a lesser extent, Michael Bloomberg, but thatmostly has to do with him being a huge bitch. But in reality, you can’t set upa conclusion like this—as though he’s actually resolved what Americanism meansat its core—without having tried to articulate the defining characteristics ofAmericanism or un-Americanism. It just feels like sloppy writing, and thatoffends me more than any of this sloppy reasoning.

Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get theirvoices heard.

By shitting on copcars, doing drugs, and generally indulging in society’s leniency formisbehavior from leftist protest. Is this a protest or a temper tantraum?

No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want tosuppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

If you want to argueagainst government involvement in banking, great. You’ll find a lot of allieson the right. But if you want to argue that government should stay involved inbanking, but that bankers should be vilified, lamented and ultimately pilfered,well then fuck you, Krugman. The simple truth of the matter is that theseprotests are about replacing capitalism with a player to be named later becausethese buffoons haven’t really thought it through. They want to reshape America withoutany real understanding of what’s wrong, why, or what they want. The result isalways going to be statist, whether it’s fascist or socialist or despotism. And,like these protests, it’s always going to be un-American.

Nurse Ratched Goes to the Bank

2011-10-04T18:31:00.000-05:00

Nurses’ prescription for healing our economy

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, October 4, 11:55 AM

If you want to know just how bad things are for those hithardest by the Great Recession, ask a nurse: They see more young men sufferingheart attacks,

more anxiety in children,

Often mistaken for pushierRitalin sales reps.

and more ulcers and stomach illnesses in people of all ages.

I’m too lazy to doany more research. This woman is trying way too hard to tie finance to health.

Financial struggles are forcing more patients to forgonecessary medicines and treatments.

[citation needed]

A Princeton/Georgia State study reports a 39 percentincrease in ER admissions for suicide attempts precipitated by homeforeclosures, and a direct correlation between foreclosure rates and increasesin emergency-room visits and hospitalization for hypertension, diabetes and anxiety.

It’s cute to seesomeone pointing to statistics and confusing causation with correlation. Plus,there’s no indication of how strong the correlation is. How about an R-squaredvalue, lady? The reason that there are more suicides “precipitated” by homeforeclosures is that there are more home foreclosures.

Given this widespread hardship and pain, it makes sense thatnurses who are on the frontlines in our communities

Technically, militaryhospitals are precisely the opposite of front lines.

every day are leading an effort to hold Wall Streetaccountable for causing these economic troubles while raising hundreds ofbillions of dollars for vital human needs.

And there’s the jumpfrom incompetent to crazy. No, Katrina. It doesn’t make sense at all thatnurses would try to rage against Wall Street.

National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest union andprofessional association of nurses, representing 170,000 RNs, is out in thestreets, in congressional offices and just last week in Liberty Park

Is this sentencestill going?

with the Occupy Wall Street protesters

What a bunch ofworld-beaters those guys are.

pushing a good idea that has been around for decades andwhose time has come:

Is this sentence still going?

a financial-transactions tax.

Oh Jesus. ObviouslyKVH believes that “it makes sense” that nurses have an expertise in tax policyand financial markets. I forgot that they took courses in derivative valuationand Macroeconomic Theory in between Pharmacology and Physiology.

This is a small levy

Tax.

on trades of stocks, derivatives and currencies meant tocurb short-term speculation while raising massive revenue

Wait, I thought itwas teensy weensy “levy.” How can something so small raise “massive revenue?”

Here’s what willactually happen with this idiotic (and massive) tax: First, volume will shrinkon the major exchanges, and plummet on the minor exchanges as investors whowould otherwise like to buy American stocks will begin looking to more a morefavorable regulatory environment overseas. Whatever countries avoid this new plagueof financial lunacy will see a new influx of investment that will propel newgrowth.

As the cost toreallocating away from perilous ventures increases, what remains of domesticinvestors will trend away from speculation and flee to safety. Indexing willbecome the norm. This permanent shift towards safety and stability will suck upthe capital ordinarily allocated to the start-ups and growth industries thatpropel job creation.

The decrease in tradingvolume coupled with widespread indexing strategies will have the dual effect ofshowing government revenue estimates to be wildly inflated and underminingmarket efficiency. Frequent trading curtails the forces suppressing arbitrageopportunities. As a result, there will be more likelihood of arbitrage forlarge institutional investors that will be inaccessible to smaller investorsbecause of scale.

The increase intransaction costs will drive up the required rate of return for debt and equitysecurities. Companies will then see their cost of capital increase, and as aresult, will pursue fewer new projects. It may cause some to favor debtfinancing, which is more stable than equity, thereby shifting the capitalbudget towards higher leverage ratios and increasing default risk.

Finally, “financialtransactions” is an inherently murky designation. This will eventually creepinto a national sales tax or a VAT tax, as all “transactions” are, by the verynature of being transactions, financial. In addition to this being economicpoison, it’s also inherently unconstitutional.

for urgent needs.

Because without theever-present gluttony of the leviathan, firefighters’ children will go hungryand blah blah blah.

Since June, thousands of nurses have protested on WallStreet, at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington,and the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco, as well as participated in actions rangingfrom working in soup kitchens to staging sit-ins at 60 district congressionaloffices in 21 states to lead the fight for this common-sense measure.

Clearly they don’thave much going on in their personal lives.

“In my practice as a staff nurse in a downtown Boston teaching hospital,I am seeing the effects of this crisis every day,” said Massachusetts RN AnnMarie McDonagh.

Because what’s a morereliable way to measure a major nationwide trend than the anecdotal evidence ofa single nurse in Boston?

“A nurses’ union must do so much more than just negotiatefair pay and decent working conditions.

It must alsocultivate delusions of grandeur within its management.

It must use its power to promote the overall well being ofits members and the public they care for.”

No. Promoting thewell-being of its members and the public at large are two different andcontradictory items. Nurses unions don’t promote the well-being of the public;that’s what hospitals are for. Nurses unions bargain against hospitals. Nurses unionsuse their power to oppose the overall well being of the public.

Last month, at NNU’s convention in San Francisco, filmmaker Michael Moorepraised the union for its creativity and initiative.

Wait, Michael Moorewas there? And not one of these nurses had the decency to recommend Lap-Bandsurgery?

“It’s so necessary,” said Moore. “Your movement on [this tax] isgenius; it has to happen.”

Mooreis onto something.

Technically, it wouldhave been the nurses union that was onto something, but if Moore wants to co-opt this terrible idea, he’swelcome to it.

There is indeed a sense that this idea needs to become areality.

This may be the worsesentence I’ve read in the last month. I’ve missed it. I might have to check outsome My Immortal.

This is no marginal idea: The “Tobin Tax” to discourageshort-term currency speculation was originally suggested by Nobel laureateeconomist James Tobin in 1972. Just last week, Bill Gates endorsed a small taxon financial transactions as a way to raise substantial resources fordevelopment spending.

And yet, no one canexplain how a small tax raises “substantial resources.”

In Europe, centrists andeven some conservatives now embrace such an idea.

Does anyone reallythink that we should be following the European financial model in the midst ofGreek default and the pending dissolution of the European currency? Anyone?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President NicolasSarkozy have both signaled their support, and the new head of the InternationalMonetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, was a strong proponent of afinancial-transaction tax as finance minister of

France

And they all have onething in common: no one over here gives a damn what they think.

Last week, the European Commission released proposedlegislation for an EU-wide financial-transactions tax.

So if this is allabout Europe’s new and exciting way to slidetowards socialism, why the hell did we have to do all that crap with thenurses?

Also last week, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble,a conservative, made his strongest statement yet on the matter. “Before the endof the autumn we are going to create a tax on financial transactions. Ifnecessary, I’m sure, just in the eurozone,” said Schaeuble.

Cool. It’ll beinteresting to see what happens when the equity markets suddenly shrivel acrossEurope as savings pour into the East Asianmarkets.

But in the

United States

, top members of President Obamaħ

Holy crap, shemisspelled Obama. Hilarity ensued.

economic team have torpedoed this idea. According to RonSuskind’s new book, “Confidence Men,” President Obama supported the tax beforethen-chief economic adviser Larry Summers nixed it.

Of course he did.Obama supports just about any tax you can levy.

It comes as no surprise that Treasury Secretary TimGeithner, who Suskind reports was referred to as “our man in Washington” by one top banker ” has been nosmarter on this front.

No one likes poorTimmy.

He recently attended a meeting of eurozone financeministers, urging them to get a grip on their debt crisis,then

Another typo. Thisjust feels shoddy. (The article, I mean, but I suppose one could say the sameabout Geithner’s economic joust with Angela Merkel.)

immediately said that the United States would not impose atax on financial transactions as a way of dealing with the crisis.

Somehow, I don’ttrust Geithner enough to think he actually said that. I allocated all of myresearch time on the graph, though, so I’m not going to look it up.

Geithner drew a strong rebuke from Austrian Finance MinisterMaria Fekter, a conservative.

Transatlanticconservatism is kind of like football. Sure, there are 11 guys on the field,but when you show up in Germanytrying to play fullback, they make you wear shin guards and no one’s heard ofthe iso play.

“I would have expected that, if he explains the world to us,that he would also listen to what we want to explain to the Americans,” shesaid.

That’s not reallymuch of a rebuke.

“The Europeans are way ahead of us on this, with the realpossibility of implementing financial transactions taxes in the next year,”

Somehow, I’m okaywith falling behind to Europe in this shitsandwich of an idea.

said Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Projectof the Institute for Policy Studies, who zealously follows this issue. “Thenurses union is doing a tremendous job of pushing the

United States

in the rightdirection.”

And yet, no one canexplain what the fuck any of this has to do with nursing.

It’s no surprise that the corporate-owned mainstream media isn’tpaying much attention

She writes, without atrace of irony, published in the WashingtonPost.

to the activism around this issue by NNU and organizationssuch as the National Peoples Action, Jobs with Justice, the American DreamMovement and Americans for Financial Reform.

To be fair to the “corporate-ownedmainstream media,” those guys tend to do a pretty good job marginalizingthemselves.

Thousands of nurses insisting that they be heard on an issuethat would help their patients

HOW?!? HOW WOULD A TAXINCREASE ON FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS HELP PATIENTS IN ANY CONCEIVABLE WAY? INORMALLY DON’T LIKE TYPING IN ALL CAPS BUT MY INCREDULOUS BEFUDDLEMENT DEMANDSMORE THAN A SIMPLE SNARKY COMMENT. WHAT THE HELL IS SHE TALKING ABOUT. I FEEL…IFEEL LIKE…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DVAsmrwdtQ

seems to be of little interest to most in the nationalpress, while three tea partyers

Is this the properpluralization? The tea party has been part of the popular vernacular for twoand a half years, and people still haven’t figured out a generally acceptedpluralization for individuals sympathizing with the tea party movement. Odd.

on a corner are treated as a major media event.

Wah wah wah.

But a financial-transactions tax now has support at thehighest levels of economic power

I think you’reoverestimating Bill Gates.

and out on the streets,

I think you’reoverestimating the Nurse’s Union.

where tens of thousands of nurses and their allies arehelping to lead the fight to heal Main Street. What we are now seeing is an unprecedentedopportunity for a transnational alliance to generate revenue

Why on earth is sheso excited about this new revenue source? It’s not like government spending is constrainedby revenues. Indeed, federal expenditures are mostly fixed, whereas taxreceipts and revenues can fluctuate 2-3 percentage points from the mean basedon the business cycle.

There is simply noreason for anyone to get this excitedabout a new avenue of taxation unless she is championing the use of thegovernment to assault those with whom she disagrees. It’s no surprise; it’swhat socialists do.

from those who created the economic debacle,

This meme can’t berepeated enough times to make it true. Government caused the financialmeltdown.

and to restore Wall Street and global finance to its properrole of serving the real economy.

Double Taxation and Buffett's Lamentation

2011-09-29T18:09:00.001-05:00

UPDATE: Pure deliciousness.

Why conservatives hate Warren Buffett

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: September 28

Maybe only a really, really rich guy can credibly make thecase for why the wealthy should be asked to pay more in taxes.

You’ve got to lovehow he says that the wealthy should be “asked” to pay more in taxes. Much in thesame way as the police “ask” you to put your hands behind your head when theyarrest you for tax evasion.

You can’t accuse a big capitalist of “class warfare.”

I can and I do. Buffettis obsessed with the idea of not being rich in spite of being fabulously wealthy. It’s why helives in Omaha.It’s why he keeps a modest home in a modest neighborhood. It’s why he givesmonumental sums to charities (usually run by fellow self-loather Bill Gates)instead of reinvesting it all in economically productive projects. That he’sembroiled national tax policy in his own self-loathing glorification of theeveryman merely shows that class warfare canard of the nefarious rich has already worked on him, in spite of his many marketable talents.

That’s why the right wing despises Warren Buffett and istrying so hard to shut him up.

We despise him thesame way we despise anyone trying to raise our taxes. Buffett’s personal guiltis not a valid impetus to impose a sacrifice on me--especially to fund afederal government rotting through to the core due to the bloat of incompetency, mismanagement,corruption, aimlessness and philosophical wrongheadedness.

Militant conservatives are effective because they areabsolutely shameless.

What, exactly haveconservatives to Warren Buffett that has been shameless? Ask him to back up hisassertions with the physical evidence provided by his tax returns?

Many of the same people who think the rich should be free tospend unlimited sums influencing our politics without having to discloseanything

Pay attention to thesentence structure here: “the people who think [ambiguous group] should be freeto [do something]…[derisive dismissal].” It should be clear that the issue hereisn’t campaign finance laws; it’s freedom.

are now asking Buffett to make his tax returns public.

And unlike “asking”the rich to pay more taxes, some conservativesare actually asking—in the sense that he actually has the option not to comply—Buffettto make his tax returns public as evidence to support his assertions.

I guess if you’re indifferent to consistency, you have a lotof freedom of action.

This is America; everyone has a lot of freedom of action. Regardless, there is nocontradiction. Buffett has provided factually dubious claims. Wealthy politicaldonors do not make any factual assertion that needs substantiation. Treating them the same would be unreasonable and kind of silly.

Buffett has outraged conservatives by saying that he paystaxes at a lower rate than his secretary.

Assume Warren Buffett makes $650M this year in his equity position in Berkshire Hathaway from dividends (it keeps the mathround). Corporations pay a top income tax rate of 35%. This means that toprovide the $650M that Buffett received, BerkshireHathaway would have had to produce $1,000M in EBT. Buffett then pays $97.5M in taxes on the $650M of dividends. As aresult, Buffett effectively pays $447.5 million in taxes on $1,000 million of income.That’s an effective tax rate of 44.75%--for federal taxes only. He’s still gotto pay state income tax, state sales tax, school district taxes, gasolinetaxes, payroll taxes, and ten thousand other things that the government has designedto piss us off. His secretary pays no more than 28%. QED, bitches.

He’s said this for years,

And has been wrong for years.

but he’s a target now becausePresident Obama is using his comment to make the case for higher taxes onmillionaires.

Exactly. If hefollowed the laws, I wouldn’t care a lick if he did pay less than his secretary,or if he thought it was unfair. But Buffett wrote an Op-Ed, revised it, got input from an editor, and published it in one of the largest papers in the country. It's not like some intrepid reporter caught a few off-the-cuff remarks and injecting them into the national debate. What makes me care about Buffett's views on tax policy is that now hewants to leverage this colossally stupid and factually misguided nugget to make me pay more taxes than his secretary. More to the point, Obama isusing Buffett’s sterling reputation to imply that this blatant stupiditysomehow has the credibility of Buffett’s investment acumen. It doesn’t, and it's sad that Buffett is allowing a failing president to use him.

Thus did the Wall Street Journal editorial page call onBuffett to “let everyone else in on his secrets of tax avoidance by releasinghis tax returns.”

I didn’t even readthat editorial, and even I know that it’s a tongue-in-cheek way to imply thatBuffett is lying about the facts of his tax return to make a case—which isprovably false even if everything Buffett is saying is true.

Somehow, the Journal did not think to ask its friends whobattle vigorously for low taxes on capital gains to release their tax returns,too.

Why would it?

But aren’t they just as engaged in this argument as Buffett?

Of course, but theyaren’t using their personal narrative as a bludgeon in political theater. They’reusing fact, data, and logic to win the narrative in the sphere of ideas.

Shouldn’t accountability go both ways?

This isn’t aboutaccountability; these aren’t public fiduciaries. It’s about verifying factuallydubious claims that have a material impact on public discourse. If notverified, jackasses like you, EJ Dionne, fill an entire column with wildnon-sequiturs and factual errors that avoid entirely the reality we live in. If the Wall Street Journal wants to tell Buffett to disclose his tax records in an Opinion piece, why are they then also obligated to demand tax records from hundreds of other people?

Nor did the Journal suggest that the Koch brothers couldserve the public interest by releasing a full accounting of all their politicalspending.

How many timesis he going to keep going to that well before he realizes that it’s dry?

Buffett’s sin is that he spoke a truth

If it’s truthful,what’s the harm in conservatives asking him to verify?

that conservatives want to keep covered up:

If we wanted thisargument covered up, we’d allow the narrative to wilt by ignoring it and relyon Boehner to kill Obama’s absurd policy. We would then collectively move onwith our day and collectively have a ham sandwich. Instead, we have fixated onthis because--in spite of our collective desire for ham--we believe that this is anargument that simply must be refuted because anything more than a cursoryglance at Buffett’s claims show them to be downright laughable.

Taxing capital gains at 15 percent means that people whomake their money from investments pay taxes at a much lower marginal rate thanthose who earn more than $34,500 a year from their labor.

Unless, of course,that money has already been taxed. Oh wait.

That’s when the income tax rate goes up to 25 percent. (Forjoint filers, the 25 percent rate kicks in at $69,000.) For singles, the 28percent bracket starts at $83,600, the 33 percent bracket at $174,400.

Thanks for looking upthe tax table for me. It’s very kind of you. Of course, it’s completelyirrelevant to the argument, but very kind nevertheless.

So if an investor such as Buffett pockets, say, $100 millionof his income in capital gains, he pays only a 15 percent tax on all thatmoney.

See above for morereasons to laugh at EJ Dionne. Also, he put $100M out therefor no discernable reason since he didn’t actually do any math.

For everyday working people, the 15 percent rate appliesonly to earnings between $8,500 and $34,500. After that, they’re paying ahigher marginal rate than the multimillionaire pays on gains from investments.Oh, yes, and before Obama temporarily cut it by two points, the payroll taxadded another 6.2 percent to the burden on middle-class workers. That levydoesn’t apply to capital gains or to income above $106,800, so it hits low- andmiddle-income workers much harder than it does the wealthy.

Do we get to talk noabout how the employing company payspayroll taxes as well, and that those payments are further deducted from themoney available to pay capital gains? No? Shucks.

No wonder partisans of low taxes on wealthy investors hateWarren Buffett. He has forced a national conversation on (1) the bias of thetax system against labor;

Refuted.

(2) the fact that, in comparison with middle- orupper-middle-class people, the really wealthy pay a remarkably low percentageof their income in taxes; and

Refuted.

(3) the deeply regressive nature of the payroll tax.

Payroll taxes arethings like Social Security and unemployment insurance whose expenditures massively favor the poor. You want to know whatinsurance wealthy investors have against unemployment? Bankruptcy.

(Because this column appears in The Post, I should note thatBuffett heads a company that owns a substantial minority share in TheWashington Post Co. and for many years held aseat on the company’s board of directors.)

Warren, I don’t wantto tell you your business, but it’s probably time to cut bait here.

It’s worth noticing that while conservatives who talk aboutreligion get a lot of coverage

[FOOTAGE NOT FOUND]

— and I will always defend their freedom to speak of faithin the public square —

This is really takinga leap. Okay, I’ll stick with you, I guess.

what really get the juices flowing on the right these daysare tax rates.

Considering that the Bush tax cuts are about to expire (again) and that the President has shown himself to be a flip-flopping lunatic on an issue that materially impacts economic prospects...yeah, it kind of makes us nervous.

I’m not sure that a politician who renounced the Almightywould get nearly the attention Buffett has received for his renunciation of lowcapital gains taxes.

He wouldn’t, becauseyour assumption that faith is of primary concern to conservative voters simplyisn’t a grounded assessment of the right. It’s a caricature from pretentious north-easterners who use their atheism as an excuse for moral laziness andinconsistent philosophical meanderings. (And I am an atheist.)

Advocates of higher taxes on the wealthy do not want to“punish” the successful.

Taxation is synonymouswith disincentivization, which is a fancy way of saying punishment. Unless you’rearguing that success and wealth are not congruent in this context—a nuancedpoint that is as irrelevant to the conversation as it is unlikely to be graspedby Dionne--you’re arguing against a definitional assertion.

Buffett and Doug Edwards, a millionaire who asked Obama at arecent town hall event in Californiato raise his taxes,

Subsequently, DougEdwards got his first erection in twenty years seeing his own name in thepaper.

are saying that none of us succeeds solely because ofpersonal effort.

Horseshit.

We are all lucky to have been born in — or, for immigrants,admitted to — a country where the rule of law is strong, where property issafe, where a vast infrastructure has been built over generations, where ourcolleges and universities are the envy of the world, and where governmentprotects our liberties.

If I’m reading thisargument correctly, the very existence of a prosperous and structurally stablecountry negates the ability for individual success? Obviously Dionne wants thisto be true because it means that none of us fails solely because of personalincompetence.

Wealthy people, by definition, have done better within thissystem than other people have.

The reason thatcapitalism is the best system that the world has ever known is that it placesevery producer and every consumer on the level playing field of free commerce. Itchooses winners and losers based exclusively on the merits of activecompetition. By dampening the rewards of success for the meritorious, you havefundamentally changed the risk/return equation that defines the system that youhave claimed is responsible for the success in the first place.

They ought to be willing to join Buffett and Edwards inarguing that for this reason alone,

And yet, the systemis not what defines who is successful; their inputs into the system do. This is why capitalism works with suchruthless efficiency.

it is common sense, not class jealousy, to ask the mostfortunate to pay taxes at higher tax rates than other people do.

This is, of course,both inaccurate and wrong. It’s inaccurate because the argument is actually aboutwhether the wealthy should pay more than others, or whether they should paymuch, much more. It’s wrong because a flat tax or a consumption tax would be asimpler and more efficient means for raising the revenues the government needsto produce the healthy economic ecosystem Dionne so lazily describes.

It is for this heresy that Buffett is being harassed.

Buffett isn’t beingharassed. He injected himself into the public discourse. When he wasquestioned, he continued to stay in the public discourse. He’s a big boy. Hecan handle himself. Crying harassment is like bemoaning an NHL hip-check asassault.

The scorn is not forhis heresy. It is for the mendacity of his unfounded assertions. It is thearrogance that his petty and ill-defined notions of self-loathing should definemy taxes. It is the indignity of being talked down to by a man clearly sufferingfrom the Nobel Prize Complex. It is the aggravation of being expected to defer myjudgment to the implicit authority of the Oracle of Omaha.

Fuck off, Warren.

Sharing is Caring is Welfaring (Katrina vanden Heuvel)

2011-09-21T15:38:00.001-05:00

Fighting for real ‘shared sacrifice’

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Published: September 20

At Hyde Park,N.Y., this past weekend, hundreds of young andold New Dealers

I could get morepeople to go to an Ace of Bass reunion concert on a Tuesday night in downtown Detroit. What’s that,Wikipedia? Ace of Bass is still together and touring in support of theirSeptember, 2010 album The Golden Ratio?Impossible!

gathered to mark the 70th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’sFour Freedoms speech.

Also, the Four Freedomsspeech was inherently directed towards foreign policy, specifically a rebuke toisolationist tendencies. Even though I’m relatively certain Katrina’s going toparlay this (somehow) into a domestic policy piece, I’d still bet you $10 she’sgoing to promote isolationism at some point.

Delivered in January 1941, it laid out a bold commitment tofreedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want andfreedom from fear.

Only three of thoseare actual freedoms. “Freedom from want” is a petty attempt to wish awayscarcity, a universal condition that underpins the entirety of economics.

Roosevelt followed it threeyears later, amid World War II, with his remarkable elaboration of a basic“Economic Bill of Rights” for all Americans.

So, this whole thinghas nothing to do with the Four Freedoms speech and the 70^th anniversary,and the gathering of hundreds in Hyde Park. Theentirety of your little introduction is a structurally unsound bridge of freeassociation and intellectually lazy meanderings to the “Economic Bill of Rights?”This is bullshit. I MADE AN ACE OF BASS REFERENCE FOR YOU!

This is still the message of tomorrow.

Democratic venerationfor their heroes always makes me a little bit uncomfortable. Republicans don’teven get this weepy-eyed over Reagan, and he was a far, far better president. Hell,Nancy Reagan doesn’t even get this weepy-eyed over Reagan.

In so many ways, FDR’s leadership offers more thannostalgia. He demonstrated what we yearn for so clearly now: a moral voice,grounded in basic values; a clear stance on the side of working people; and awillingness to challenge the entrenched interests that stand in their way.

This is also the guywho tried to pack the courts, forced Congress and the States to ratify the 22^ndAmendment, and started Japanese internments. It is no surprise that the “moralvoice” of today’s left built a policy platform entirely out of consolidatingpower in the Executive Branch punctuated by brief, but gallingmisappropriations of that power.

Over the past few weeks, President Obama has reached forthat voice. He has now framed an argument that, given its scornful rejection byRepublican leaders, will define the 2012 election debate.

The president favorshigher taxes and the Republicans do not? I’ll take that argument ten times outof ten.

He would “jolt” the economy now to put people to work, byinvesting in teachers and infrastructure,

This is precisely whythe first stimulus failed to jolt the economy. After all, why would it?Teachers and infrastructure projects don’t actually produce anything that leadsto economic growth in the short-term. Indeed, it has precisely the oppositeeffect. Hiring more teachers out of the existing labor market reduces the sizeof the economically productive skilled workforce, plus it forces new trainingto accommodate career changes. Infrastructure construction, in the short term,slows travel times and increases transportation costs. Both of these adverselyimpact short-term economic growth and provide the precise opposite of a jolt.

cutting taxes on payrolls and small business,

Now that’s astaggeringly dishonest description of Obama’s plan, but I’ll take it. It is adeliberate and forceful acknowledgement that reducing taxes propels economicgrowth.

and extending help to the unemployed.

Also, someone pleaseexplain to me how paying someone to do nothing helps the economy. Anyone? NancyPelosi? Anyone? Anyone?

Republicans dismiss these common-sense and popularproposals, calling for more spending cuts and less regulation.

Considering that ofthe five job creating ideas above, three actively undermine economic growth inthe short term and two are purely Republican ideas that aren’t really in Obama’splan, this seems like an odd column to be writing.

To get our books in order, Obama would raise taxes on therich

22 words ago, sheargued that tax cuts propelled economic growth. I remember because it was onlyTWENTY TWO WORDS AGO! Yes, I counted. Now, either KVH has short-term memoryloss on par with the guy in Memento, or she failes to understand that theinverse of a tax cut propelling economic growth is a tax hike impeding economicgrowth.

while gaining savings by ending the wars abroad

Of course, this wasgoing to happen anyways, making these “savings” somewhat disingenuous.

and reducing Medicare and Medicaid’s unnecessarily highpayments to drug companies.

In other words, notpaying the drug companies market value for their products, thereby imposing apseudo-tax on drug companies, further inhibiting growth and undermining theirforward-looking research efforts.

Republicans rise in defense of tax cuts for the wealthy

We rise in defense ofall tax cuts, which--if memory serves from a mere fifty four words ago--propeleconomic growth. The idea that we can tax the wealthy to cure our woes is notonly economically backwards, it’s morally unjustifiable. Taxes on the wealthyare government-backed barriers to the fulfillment of our own American Dreams. Theyare impediments to class mobility that have been designed to hobble the notionof free enterprise and rebalance the calculus in the risk and reward equation.This is they tyranny of the majority at its worst. I refuse to validate theeconomic lynch-mob that has decided that the wealthy are to blame, and thatsome sort of self-gratifying lust for revenge will actually improve their ownstanding. It’s lazy and it’s self-serving. America is, and deserves, betterthan that.

and insist that deficit reduction come solely from cuts inSocial Security, Medicare and Medicaid and other “entitlements.”

No air quotes. SocialSecurity, Medicare and Medicate are, without qualification, entitlements. What’smore, each one of the holy trinity of liberal sacred cows is structurallyunsound as American demography shifts to an older population.

The president stands for shared sacrifice; the Republicansfor sheltering the privileged few.

One would figure thatif Obama wants to tax only the rich, he doesn’t promote sharing the sacrificeat all. He favors concentrating it. Indeed, the sane would come to theconclusion that “shared sacrifice” is merely a bumper-sticker euphemism for ajob-killing, American Dream-killing, class warfare.

Progressives will have no problem standing with thepresident in this fight.

We know. It’s the 80%of the country that isn’t batshitcrazy that is at issue.

But with a head filled with the clarity of Roosevelt’s FourFreedoms and Economic Bill of Rights, I can’t help challenging the definitionof this debate. Shared sacrifice has become the establishment trope, and it isused by liberals in contrast with the Republican politics of privilege.

In other words, “sharedsacrifice” is universally acknowledged as bumper-sticker euphemism for left-wingtripe. It’s fun to be right.

But shared sacrifice in the circumstances of this country,where the rewards of the economy are not shared, isn’t a moral posture. It is amoral outrage.

So once again, we seethat Katrina vanden Heuvel is a flat-out communist. I know because she thinksthe economy spits out “rewards” like fucking gold bars coated in shamrocks tothe lucky rich. So that’s fun.

Look at the past thirty years. America has grown, but grown apart.The few have captured virtually all of the rewards of growth,

Every transaction inthe modern economy is a transaction of choice, except those with the government.There is no force of compulsion in modern economics except taxation and fraud. Noone became wealthy (legally) by exploitation. They produced something of valueand sold it to another party who believed that they could derive more valuefrom it. The wealthy are wealthy because you and I decided that they should beby the value of what they produced.

Deciding tore-allocate this wealth ad-hoc through the blunt instrument of government isfoolish, inefficient, and a clear invitation for America to descend into the type oftyranny our founders feared. Instead of our allocation of wealth being decidedby 300 million self-interested consumers, it would be decided by about 600elected officials and their advisors. Who’s advocating the consolidation ofpower with the rich here? Me, who wants assets distributed via capitalisticcommerce, or Katrina, who wants unlimited power to redistribute assets on awhim in federal hands.

Freedom is a scarceasset, and there is only a fixed amount to go around. Every bit of freedom wegrant the government is a freedom we take from ourselves. I was raised tobelieve that freedom, no matter what anyone says, is my birthright.

while most families have struggled to stay afloat. Themedian wages of men age 25 to 64 declined by nearly 30 percent over the past 40years.

That’s not even closeto true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Income_men_women_1953_to_2005.png

A bipartisan conservative consensus, enforced by powerfulcorporate interests, defined our politics.

Uh…she’s serious,right?

Corporate trade policies purposefully exposed working peopleto global competition,

You can thankconservative free trade policies for the boom of new products now available atlow prices, providing millions of jobs in different sectors of the economy.

Also, did I call thatshe’d go isolationist or what? You owe me $10.

while launching a war on unions.

We saw what unionsdid to Detroit.The rust belt is a carcass. Don’t tell me the unions were innocent bystanders.

CEO remuneration purposefully gave executivesmultimillion-dollar personal incentives to cook the books,

And yet, of thethousands of publically traded corporations, audited annually, only a handful haveengaged in fraud over the last 20 years. This is because the Boards of Directors,the CEO’s bosses, have a vested interest in not permitting fraud. The idea thatfraud is rampant in the business world is a silly conspiratorial fantasy.

or to merge and purge their companies.

First, there isnothing wrong with merging two companies, downsizing a company’s workforce, orshutting down operations all-together. However, it is another silly liberalconspiratorial fantasy that these actions often produce wealth. Wealth iscreated by growing a business, not by shutting it down. Also, mergers, by natureof the markets, virtually always favor the acquired firm over the acquiringfirm.

Bankers freed themselves from adult supervision and openedthe casino.

Far from being asobering adult influence, the government is the most childish and irrationalforce in the market. What’s more, the stock market is not a casino.

The few benefited enormously, while most of us fell behind.

You who took norisks. You who produced, created, invented nothing. You who did not havemarketable skills to meet the new economy. You who expected to be taken careof. You fell behind. Get rid of the income tax model and a boatload ofregulations, and you could catch up. I’d love for you to be wealthy. I’d loveto be wealthy. Take risks. Create something. Develop your unique skills.

This ended, of course, in a financial wilding — the housingbubble — with bankers peddling what they knew was junk.

And subsequentlylosing their asses.

They kept dancing, in the famous words of hapless CharlesPrince, former president of Citibank, hoping to get out in time.

The problem wasn’tthat the bankers bundled complicated new securities; it was that there wereunderlying assets--debt obligations--that could never be repaid.

But they danced with the confidence that if they blewthemselves up, the government would put the pieces back together. And so itdid.

Unless you’re LehmanBrothers. Or Bear Stears. Besides, conservatives were the ones calling for allowingthe system to fail. We agree that moral hazard is bad for the efficiency of themarkets. However, you think that moral hazard is the unavoidable result ofhaving a market; I think it’s the unavoidable result of having a governmentinvolved in the market.

The resulting crash wiped out about $8 trillion in housingvalue

Actually, theintrinsic value never matched market prices. This is pretty much how you definea bubble. The value was never there.Only the price was.

and blew up the economy. Unemployment soared, as did federaldeficits as tax revenue plummeted

Hey! Another cogentpoint! Tax revenues are far more contingent on the market cycle than they areon tax rates. This concerns me, because if liberals understand these basic points,as KVH appears to here, then their arguments should crumble under the weight oftheir own contradictory premises. Yet the liberal mind manages to forget basicideas like this when they matter.

and payments for food stamps and other support for thejobless rose. From 2007 to 2010, the national debt increased as a percentage ofGDP from 64.4 to 93.2.

Yeah. We know.

No one should forget. Wall Street and big corporations hadthe party.

What party? They wentthrough the same downsizing as every other company in America.

They rigged the rules.

Rigging the rules andwriting complex derivatives to be sold to sophisticated investors are two verydifferent things.

They pocketed the rewards.

What rewards?

They created the mess.

People not being ableto pay their mortgages created the mess. Government policies to encouragepeople getting mortgages that they couldn’t afford created the mess. Banks and derivativefinancing merely exacerbated a market inefficiency that they failed toadequately valuate.

They got taxpayers to save them.

Please. Government jumped to save them. It’s not like theyhad to beg.

The conservatives argue that the vulnerable should pick upthe whole tab.

No, we argue that thebanks should have been allowed to fail, enter bankruptcy, renegotiate theirdebt obligations and write off some assets, and emerge in a growing economy.

Now that it hasn’thappened, we argue that conflating errors of judgment from some bankinganalysts with the nefarious and ill-defined sins of all rich people is simplytoo stupid to actually be tax policy outside of Zimbabwe.

And even some liberals call for a “shared sacrifice” thatwould mean the most vulnerable in the society — the seniors, the poor, thedisabled and the sick — should help to clean up the mess.

The structural instabilityof Medicare and Medicaid has absolutely nothing to do with the recession. SocialSecurity is only proximally related, but the recession only sped up a processthat was already destined to occur.

The fact is that most Americans have already sacrificed.They are the victims of bad policies skewed to benefit the privileged.

Really? Outside of theowners of Solyndra and LightSquared, which policies are those that benefitwhich of the privileged?

Real shared sacrifice would require that we send the bill tothose who had the party and created the mess, and ask them to pay their fairshare.

That’s not shared sacrificeat all. It’s basic free market pricing, which I find very heartening for KVH’ssake. Here’s the problem: the government created the mess. The government can’tcollect from the government, and the only way for the people to collect fromthe government, hilariously, is to reduce tax rates—which is precisely theopposite of what KVH is proposing.

That’s where Roosevelt’sclarity is so important. It reminds us that we must ground our policies inmoral vision

Again, Roosevelt was the least active champion for freedom inthe 20^th Century. Internment camps. Packing the Supreme Court—or atleast trying to.

— the freedoms that we would protect,

And those that KVHwould jettison.

the economic justice that we would champion.

And the basicequality that KVH would ignore.

Let us build our policy out from there, not by positioningcarefully to contrast with an extreme right.

The extreme right hasthe moral vision. The left only has warmed-over Marx.

Let our values — not our extremists — drive our policies.

I’ll agree to that.Conservatives believe in liberty, thus favor low taxes. Conservatives believein equality, thus are opposed to taxes that target any specific demographic. Conservativesbelieve in justice, thus are opposed to imposing penalties on “the rich” inretribution for some imagined crime against the middle class. Conservativesbelieve in the power of the people, thus our rejection of cries for “power tothe people.”

We know that this iswhere the erosion of our liberties always comes from: an intellectuallightweight with a shrill voice spouting off vaguely formulated articulationson fairness and sacrifice. This woman is a dangerous buffoon. She deserves nothingbut lament, scorn, and ridicule.

Political Horror So Bad It's Good (Eugene Robinson)

2011-09-19T18:37:00.000-05:00

Finally! Tax andbudget policy! That’s my wheelhouse! Ring the bell; I’m all laced up and readyto go.

Obama’s tax plan is common sense, not class warfare

Doesn’t this kind ofseem like giving up on a headline? You gave away the whole farm, Eugene. Also, you’re aboutto contradict yourself, but we’ll get to that.

By Eugene Robinson, Monday, September 19, 2:22 PM

“Class warfare!” scream the Republicans, in a voice usuallyreserved for phrases such as “Run for your lives!”

Maybe in a GiantShark vs. Crocosaurus. (Seriously, check it out. ) That’s because the unintentional hilarityof the President’s proposal is that he’s successfully parodied himself into thecaricature of the insatiable left-wing leviathan with a lumbering,incomprehensible narrative of logical contortions. It has the rest of usrolling on the floors. Sure the proposal is dangerous and foolish, but it’snever going to pass, and it’s important to keep a sense of humor--as any giantshark/crocosaurus type of scenario teaches us.

Why yes, it does feature Steve Urkel running down the beach
with an assault rifle. Why would it not?

Spare us the histrionics.

It must be exhaustingcastigating so many imaginary foes.

The GOP and its upper-crust patrons have been waging anundeclared but devastating war against middle-class, working-class and poorAmericans for decades.

Except all of thesuper wealthy are liberal! Hollywood actors, professionalathletes, people who read the New Yorker,and billionaires begging to pay more taxes just doesn’t jibe with theconservative ethos. But, again, as long as youfind fulfillment from crusading against false premises, don’t let me get in theway.

Now they scream bloody murder at the notion thatlong-suffering victims might finally hit back.

So…liberal tax policyis class warfare? Please allow me tointerject that this seems, on the surface, to undercut the title of thisprecious little temper tantrum, as well as the shoddy argument that PresidentObama has hastily constructed for himself.

President Obama’s proposal to boost taxes for the wealthy by$1.5 trillion

Rejoinder: everyoneshould already know, federal receipts are mean-regressive at 18.2% of GDP, andshow absolutely no empirical correlation with tax rates, particularly topmarginal tax rates. If you’ve sifted through the fancy financial jargon,congratulations! Here are some fun words as a reward: Jousting Proust.Everlasting gobstopper. Newfangled gizmo. Boobs.

over the next decade is a good first step toward reforming asystem in which billionaire hedge-fund executives are taxed at a lower ratethan their chauffeurs and private chefs.

Keep in mind, the$1.5T tax is supposed to be part of the effort to create jobs. Hilariously,this guy has multiple economicadvisors, each paid handsomely to ignore the rudimentary principles of macroeconomicsthat they pawned off on their grad students to teach.

Republicans whine that since they oppose raising taxes onthe rich —

Technically, theyoppose all tax increases, but continue.

and control the House of Representatives,

Thanks to Obama doingthings like this from 2009-2010.

which can block such legislation — Obama’s proposal shouldbe seen as political, not substantive.

That’s pretty much acarbon copy of what Democrats said about Cut, Cap, and Balance. Also, about 5other proposals Republicans had to raise the debt ceiling. The motto of thatfight was that we needed serious attempts at legislation that can pass adivided legislature. Now, all of a sudden, bucking the Republicans’ soleimmutable governing principle with proposed legislation deserves seriousconsideration? Please.

This is just a campaign initiative, they say, not a“serious” plan to address the nation’s financial and economic woes.

Well, consideringthat it’s a tax increase under the guise of a jobs plan, it’s unintentionallyhilarious.

But that’s pure solipsism:

Or, precisely theopposite: practical.

Whatever does not fit the GOP’s worldview is, by definition,illegitimate.

The bill is illegitimatebecause it lies to itself about its own purpose. It’s political chicanerybecause it was never intended to pass. The two are separate issues.

By this standard, Obama could propose only measures that arein the Republican Party’s platform —

And this was the guywho didn’t really get why Republicans were so resistant to adopting a debtceiling bill that was squarely in the Democratic Party’s platform. I get beinga partisan. What I don’t get is the glaring hypocrisy.

which obviously would defeat the purpose of being electedpresident as a progressive Democrat in the first place.

Of course, Obama wasn’t elected as a progressiveDemocrat; he was elected as a centrist Democrat. People are starting to regardthe latter as a political unicorn.

Outside of the Republican echo chamber, polls consistentlyshow

Polls—that is theballot boxes on election days—consistently show the country fleeing theDemocratic Party in droves, so it takes some chutzpah (See that, NY-9 voters?That’s my olive branch to the newly conservative Jewish community. Welcome!) toframe the Democrats as populists.

the American people consider unemployment to be the nation’smost urgent problem, not deficits and debt.

And yet, there is noconceivable tie between raising taxes on the rich and creating jobs. The twoare antithetical. Obama himself acknowledged as much less than a year ago afterthe November “shellacking.” Remember? When he extended the dreaded Bush taxcuts? Now you remember.

Obama was on target with the American Jobs Act he proposedthis month, the only question being what took him so long.

Vacations,incompetence, tone-deafness, general arrogance, misguided priorities, and ageneral dearth of economic know-how.

Americans do have long-term concerns about debt, however,and by large margins see an obvious solution: a balanced combination ofspending cuts and tax increases.

Which is kind of likeasking a kid whether he likes Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, orboth. Both, bitches! Michaelangelo fighting Optimus Prime to the death! (I mayhave dated myself a little there.) The point is that when you ask a childishquestion, you get a childish response.

In other words, they want precisely the kind of approachthat House Speaker John Boehner rejected during the debt-ceiling fight — andthat he vows to reject again. Why did Republicans begin squawking about classwarfare even before Obama had a chance to announce his proposals?

The class warfarecard is kind of like the two of clubs in Obama’s game of hearts—it always getsplayed first. The race card is the queen of spades. If you don’t play hearts,these metaphors are kind of lost to you. Sorry.

Because by calling on the rich to pay “their fair share” oftaxes,

Which is both vagueand undefined.

the president has hit upon a clear and simple way toillustrate how unequal and unfair our society has become.

By refusing to speakin specifics and playing to the basest instincts of an increasinglysophisticated electorate?

Since the beginning of the Reagan years, the share of totalincome captured by the top 1 percent of earners has doubled while the sharetaken by the bottom 80 percent has fallen.

And yet, it wasirrelevant when the pie was growing. The idea that the rich are taking from thepoor is the type of redistributionist nonsense that has led Obama to believethat by reapportioning money through the vehicle of government, that he cancreate wealth. It can not; it can only destroy.

The rich are getting richer

And the poor are alsogetting richer! That’s how a growing economy works!

at the expense not only of the poor but of the middle classas well.

Sigh.

Studies demonstrating this trend tend to be dry and, let’sface it, sleep-inducing.

Eugene Robinson justcalled you dumb. Which, I suppose, is no worse than linking you to Giant Sharkvs. Crocosaurus, (seriously, check it out)

But the perverse disparity in tax rates between thesuper-rich and the rest of us is enough to grab anyone’s attention.

Beautiful. Yes, thewealthy do pay more in income taxes.

The very wealthy earn much of their income through dividendsand capital gains, which are taxed at 15 percent.

So, already you’retalking about framing national economic policy based on a perceived slight by.0001% of the population. Brilliant.

This low rate would apply specifically to a wildlysuccessful hedge-fund manager who made, say, $50 million last year. Bycontrast, an insurance company executive who made $500,000 — just 1 percent ofwhat the hedge-fund manager took home — would pay a top marginal income taxrate of 35 percent. Even a teacher who made just $50,000 — 0.1 percent of thehedge-fund haul — would pay a top marginal rate of 25 percent.

Here’s thedifference: the school teacher and the insurance company executive are bothalso saving, whether through a 401k, IRA, personal savings account, or pensionprogram. When they pull that money out of the hedge fund, they are also taxed at 15%. The fact that thisimpacts their livelihood less is a testament to which industry they chose towork in, not a function of some unfair conspiracy. Plus, let’s also give alittle love to the hedge fund managers: these guys are extremely good at whatthey do. Successfully managing a hedge fund is kind of like playing centerfield for the Yankees against 10,000 other Mickey Mantles. And still winning.

By increasing thecapital gains tax rate, though, Obama is not only increasing the taxes onteachers and insurance executives alike, he is also putting a thumb on thescales of the capital budgeting equation. All companies have to make a decisionhow much of their operation to finance by debt and how much to finance throughequity (and preferred stock, and other more complicated financing vehicles, butlet’s keep this Robinson-accessible). By increasing the capital gains tax, thegovernment has essentially disincentivized stockholders from putting theirwealth in equity (or encouraged short-term stockholders that increase pricevolatility). This disincentivization sucks money out of the equity markets. Thereplacement funds must come from debt financing. And the primary lesson of the2008 recession, if you recall, was that debt financing and overleveraging aredangerous tools. Yes, tinkering with this tax rate has the potential to causeeconomic ruination.

Either that or theentire financial industry will move to Switzerland,the Seychelles, or Malta.

Obama proposes tax legislation that would erase thisdisparity.

And create all sortsof exciting new ones, rife with government inefficiency and smothering bureaucracy!

He also vows that unless Congress enacts comprehensive — andfair — tax reform, he will allow the Bush tax cuts for households earning morethan $250,000 a year to expire at the end of 2012.

That’s fine. He’ll beout by then. Also, how is this brinksmanship any less dastardly or nefariousthan what the Republicans did with the debt ceiling debate? Oh right. Thedifference is that Eugene Robinson approves of this one.

The overall plan that Obama announced Monday would cutdeficits by about $4 trillion over the next 10 years — without gutting programsthat bolster the middle class and aid the poor.

Instead, he wouldsimply gut the middle class. It’s much simpler that way. More direct.

New tax revenue and money saved from ending the wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan

make up most of thetotal.

The end of the warsin Iraq and Afghanistanwill be realized, but only because they’re actually spending cuts. Forgive, fora moment, that they were never supposed to be permanent budgetary additions,and appreciate the value of simply taking something off the books.

Obama’s proposed savings in Medicare and Medicaid are modestand tailored so that their impact is progressive.

The bone requisite hasbeen thrown to the apoplectic left.

The president correctly decided that ensuring SocialSecurity’s long-term solvency should proceed on a separate track.

In other words, hepussed out.

All this should be heartening to those who really want topreserve these vital programs.

Not I, but we’lladdress that some other time.

The headline from Obama’s plan, though, is the call forwealthy Americans to pay taxes like everybody else.

Thereby upending theeconomic homeostasis with the delicacy and purposeful foresight of a 5-year-oldshaking a snow globe.

If Republicans believe the current system is fine, Obamasaid, “they should be called out. They should have to defend that unfairness. . . . They ought to have to answerfor it.”

We’ve already heard their answer.

And we’ve heard Obama’s retort: “This is not class warfare.It’s math.”

Except that Robinson explicitlyacknowledged it was class war. Remember? It was the first thing he said after poorlyimitating Republicans, (and giving me an opportunity to rattle off a Giant Sharkvs. Crocosaurus reference for the first of three glorious times this article.)So, either Obama’s wrong and this actually is class warfare (true) or EugeneRobinson is a blithering idiot who can’t stay on topic for four sentences (alsotrue.)

In the end, what doesit matter? Eugene Robinson has screeched about hating the rich for a fewparagraphs, so he’s probably all tuckered out by now. Obama has pulled off thelast vestiges of the moderate’s façade, and I got an opportunity to talk aboutcapital budgeting. Wins all around.

The Innate Contradiction of Progressive Constitutionalism (Ruth Marcus)

2011-09-16T10:37:00.000-05:00

I’ll generouslyoverlook the capitalization errors in the title and, unlike Ruth Marcus, get tosubstance: the Constitution.

Recovering the Constitution from conservatives

By Ruth Marcus, Published: September 15

Tea Party types and other conservatives talk about howthey’d like their country back.

Don’t worry, Ruth. We’re taking care of it one district at a time

I’d like my Constitution back.

Maybe when you pry itfrom my cold, dead fingers.

The rise of these self-proclaimed constitutionalconservatives

Let the drippingdisdain wash over you. Soak it in. It means we’re winning.

is an ominous development

Apparently, conservativesare never just wrong; we’re always dangerous.

that has received too little notice — and too littlepush-back. Until now.

That’s not asentence, and you’re not leading a movement.

Under the banner of “Constitutional Progressives,”

Liberals have finallyfound the most concisely contradictory form of self-definition. Good for them.

a coalition of liberal groups has begun making an important,two-part argument: first, that a progressive government agenda is consistentwith constitutional values;

That’s a tough slog. Noticealso that she claims it is consistent with “constitutional values” and not “theConstitution.”

and second, that the constitutional conservative approachrepresents a dangerous retrenchment of the government’s role.

Take out the “dangerous”part, and that’s exactly the point. The government has used minormisinterpretations of the Constitution (particularly the commerce clause) onthe part of the Supreme Court to justify unfathomable government bloat. Thedanger here is that we’re cutting our defense budget to pay for social programsand entitlements. Of course conservatives want to retrench.

This bid to “rebut the constitutional fairy tales beingpeddled by the Tea Party,” as Douglas Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center put it,

This would be a wholelot more impactful if you gave an example or two of conservativemisinterpretations of the Constitution…or any Constitutional justificationwhatsoever for this mumbo jumbo.

could not be more timely, with the dizzying rise of TexasGov. Rick Perry (R).

Who has his ownproblems with conservatives (as I so ably outlined here). The difference is that the governor ofTexas is rarely constrained by the United States Constitution, as the UnitedStates Constitution is, as the name indicates, a document designed to guide andlegally bind the federal government.

The constitutional conservative critique, as articulated byPerry, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and others, goes far beyond the familiarlaments about activist judges.

You missed the point,Ruth. The laments about activist judges are that they permit government tooverstep its constitutionally permitted role.

It is, at bottom, an argument against the 20th century —specifically against the notion that the Constitution envisions and empowers amuscular federal government

It doesn’t.

able to ensure that its citizens have clean air, healthyfood and safe workplaces.

Please find thejustification for any of those three enumerated in Article I, Section 8. (Hint:you will not find them without some legal contortions.) For that matter, pleaseexplain why ay one of these necessitates federal legislation instead of stateor local legislation.

To grasp the radical nature of the constitutionalconservative approach, consider the record of every Republican president sincethe New Deal.

The bestConstitutional argument Marcus has presented thus far: it is, therefore it mustbe permissible.

Richard Nixon ran on the pledge of appointing “strictconstructionist” judges, but he created the Environmental Protection Agency,telling Congress that “our national government today is not structured to makea coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, thewater we drink and the land that grows our food.” Nixon didn’t doubt — as dothe modern constitutional conservatives — that environmental regulation was anappropriate and constitutional role for the federal government.

I think we all knowthat Nixon’s undoing was a failure to appreciate the limitations to his power.The EPA shares that trait.

Likewise, George W. Bush inveighed against judges“legislating from the bench.” Yet he presided over the largest expansion ofMedicare — the addition of a prescription drug benefit — in the history of theprogram

Oddly, the actions ofthe legislative process do not in any way undercut Bush’s opposition to theimagination of new laws by the judiciary.

and oversaw a sweeping new role for the federal governmentin assuring quality education by local schools. Bush didn’t question — as dothe constitutional conservatives — whether these were permissible activitiesfor the federal government.

I think we all knowthat Bush’s undoing was that he never actually governed domestic affairs as aconservative.

Also, nothing tothrow in Reagan’s face? I expected better research out of you, Ruth.

The constitutional conservative vision is dramaticallydifferent. It sees a hobbled federal government limited to a few basicactivities, such as national defense and immigration.

Read: the itemsspecifically enumerated in Article I, Section 8.

The 10th Amendment, reserving to states the powers notgranted to the federal government, would be put on steroids.

How is it possible toput the 10^th Amendment on steroids? The interpretation of the 10^thAmendment is not particularly complicated, nor is the language obtuse or arcane:if there is a power or right not specifically mentioned within theConstitution, it does not belong to the federal government. The language iswritten to be absolute, so the interpretation should be absolute. That theSupreme Court has neglected and malnourished the 10^th Amendment isnot evidence that it’s newfound prominence is unfounded or unjustified.

The commerce clause, giving the federal government theauthority to regulate commerce among the states, would be drasticallydiminished.

New bestConstitutional argument set forth by Marcus: “the framers didn’t really mean the‘interstate’ part of the interstate commerce clause.”

Certainly, there’s a legitimate debate about the proper roleof the federal government and the scope of federal vs. state power. But that isa different argument than the one long thought settled during the New Deal:that the Constitution grants the federal government power to regulate a broadarray of activities in the national interest.

If we are notpermitted to re-open issues thought to be settled, either by popular conventionor by Supreme Court decision, then we would have a lot of disenfranchisedblacks still drinking out of separate drinking fountains (foremost among alitany of terrible Supreme Court decisions).

The danger posed by the constitutional conservative approachis to attempt to lash together debates about what the federal government shoulddo and what the Constitution allows it to do.

No, it’s an attemptto get government to stop doing things they’re not legally authorized to do. Likegiving a half a billion dollars to a failing solar panel manufacturer and thensubordinating the debt debenture to subsequent private investment. Or mandatingthat private citizens purchase health insurance. Or regulating the derivatives market.Or any one of ten thousand other things that the federal government doeswithout a mention of the constitutionality of it.

A white paper by the liberal Center for American Progressspells out the potential consequences of the constitutional conservativevision.

Let me guess: Mel Gibson?

Programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaidwould be deemed to exceed the federal government’s enumerated powers.

If they’re thatinvaluable to society, we can either amend the Constitution or shift the burdenof these programs to the states.

The federal government would cease to have any role ineducation,

Great! Someone pleaseexplain to me how the presence of the federal government enriches any child’seducation.

eliminating funding for public schools and college financialaid,

eliminating federal funding for public schools andcollege financial aid. There’s still state, local, and private fundingavailable.

and in combating poverty, ending food stamps andunemployment insurance.

Again, these shouldbe state programs anyways.

Laws on everything from child labor to food safety would beoverturned.

And replaced by statelaws. Stop me if this sounds redundant.

None of this is likely to happen, of course, for the simplereason that most Americans don’t want it to.

Please explain to mewhen exactly popular opinion made something constitutionally permissible.

When Perry was pushed during a debate about the implicationsof his views on the constitutionality of Social Security, for example, he wavedoff the question as an interesting intellectual exercise.

And yet, none of thisaddresses the question of whether Social Security actually is constitutionallypermissible.

But the emergence of the constitutional conservativeargument has real-world consequences — even without a constitutionalconservative in the White House. It shifts the legal debate significantlyrightward, energizing and empowering conservative judges and justices.

And Ruth Marcus wantsthose miserable bastards beaten down and dejected.

And it changes the nature of the political debate as well bynarrowing the turf on which, at least in the view of some lawmakers, thefederal government is deemed authorized to operate.

That’s a bad thing?

“This is a way to weaponize the Constitution to prevent areal debate about how the government can solve national problems,” Kendall told me.

In case Kendall wasn’t paying attention, that debate has beensettled; the federal government can’tsolve national problems.

Strong words,

Really?

but the constitutional conservative vision is too extreme tocontinue to ignore it in the hope that it will fade on its own.

So, having made itthrough this entire article, it appears that conservatives have laid out awell-articulated and comprehensive interpretation of the Constitution thatenvisions a limited federal government. We have cited the constitution, soughtto understand the intention and mindset of the men who wrote it, and allowedthat understanding to guide a reasoned interpretation of current events. Bycontrast, “Constitutional Progressives” have succinctly rebuffed: “Nuh-uh!”

There was not asingle Constitution-based argument in this painfully elongated assertion. Theclosest Marcus got was a reference to the commerce clause that painfullyomitted the phrase “and among the several States.”

This wasn’t a seriousattempt to present a liberal or progressive interpretation of the Constitution.Instead, it was a political accusation that conservatives want to take awaySocial Security under the guise of Constitutionalism. There aren’t any courtcases pending on the constitutionality of Social Security. Notice, however,that she didn’t once mention Obamacare, and how the conservative interpretationof the Constitution appears to be making serious headway in the courts.

This is just the nextstep in the progressive movement’s attempt to find an answer to the Tea Party. Rememberthe “Coffee Party?”

Opinion Nuggets: The Gray Lady's Bobblehead

2011-09-15T10:46:00.001-05:00

Gail Collins is right. The Perry/Bachmannkerfuffle over mandatory HPV shots is a major score for Bachman politically anda serious liability for Perry. But, as per usual, Collins completely misses thepoint as to why.

About thevaccine. It’s been proved to be effective in reducing cervical cancer insexually active women, and it apparently works best if you begin the shotsaround age 12. The intense opposition from the social right appears to be basedon the idea that once the kids had the shots they’d be more likely to have sex.Or, in the convoluted and creepy words of Rick Santorum: “Unless Texas has a veryprogressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way of theircurriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having little girlsinoculated at the force and compulsion of the government.”

Let’s start with the obvious: “About the vaccine”is not a sentence. Collins undisciplined attempts at conversational writing simplygive the appearance of amateurish writing. This is no less worthy of derisionthan the aimless ramblings that follow, as it reflects both on her professionalismand on the sagging reputation of the Times’opinion page.

On substance, just about every sentence in thisparagraph fails to make the grade (except those quoted from Rick Santorum). Thefirst sentence isn’t actually a sentence. The second looks like it’s copied andpasted straight from Wikipedia and/or Merck’s website.

The wheels really fall off in the third sentence.It starts inauspiciously when Collins misunderstands which factions object toPerry’s vaccine policies. She dismissively and mistakenly tabs the “socialright” as Perry’s antagonists—a particularly odd claim given Perry’s bulletproofstanding with devout conservative voters. At the debate, these were the smatteringof folks that cheered wildly when he said that he would always err on the sideof life. They were grossly outnumbered by Perry’s detractors, yet Collins flipsthe roles. This is, of course, because Collins fundamentally misunderstandsthat all conservatives object toPerry’s policy because a) it is a gross misuse of executive authority at theexpense of the legislative process and b) whether passed by executive fiat orby legislative deliberation, it uses the bludgeon of government to dictatehealthcare decisions. Conservatives do not object to this vaccine or tovaccines in general; we object to overreaching mandates. A failure to grasp these basic concepts leadsCollins down the primrose path to babbling idiocy.

By this time, Collins accusing Santorum—who was speaking in on live television instead of writing with an editor to parse every word—of convoluted and creepylanguage doesn't even meet the bar of a pot/kettle situation. It’s a pot/anything-not-blacksituation. What’s more, she omits—either intentionally or though massiveincompetence—Santorum’s preface that the basis for school vaccines and inoculationsis to prevent the incidental spread of communicable diseases throughinteractions associated with being at school. In other words, a child shouldn’tget Pertussis or Diphtheria just because their schoolwork requires that theywork in close proximity to each other. The full quote from Santorum is:

“I believe your policy is wrong. Why —ladies and gentlemen, why do we inoculate people with vaccines in publicschools? Because we’re afraid of those diseases being communicablebetween people at school. And therefore, to protect the rest of the people atschool, we have vaccinations to protect those children.

Unless Texashas a very progressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way oftheir curriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having littlegirls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government. This isbig government run amok. It is bad policy, and it should not have beendone.”

FULL DEBATE TRANSCRIPT (See page 3 for above quote)

Santorum’s point was simplythat no mandate may justifiably cover sexually transmitted disease because noclass or school-related work may justifiably require sex. In fact, he put this difficult to articulateidea quite succinctly. Far from being creepy or convoluted, his point wason-topic and a necessary reminder of exactly why conservatives favor someschool vaccines and precisely where we draw the line.

Gail Collins, for her part,is off somewhere reading Jennifer Rubin’s blog post today about Republicans assault on intellectualism and smugly nodding along like abobblehead.

Opinion Nuggets: Doing the Time of their Life

2011-09-13T18:37:00.001-05:00

"You just made a fool of yourself in front of T-Bone."

Neither is there time norreason for a full write-up today; the idiocy of today’s New York Timeseditorial on criminal sentencing is at least concise enough for me not tobelabor the point. The wizards at the Gray Lady posit that the sentence of life withoutparole is doled out too freely given the severity of the sentence. I do not concur.

Thesentence [of life without parole] is no less severe when applied to adults. Yetlife without parole, which exists in all states (Alaska’s version is a 99-yearsentence), is routinely used, including in cases where the death penalty is notin play and where even an ordinary life sentence might be too harsh.

From 1992 to 2008, the number in prison for lifewithout parole tripled from 12,453 to 41,095, even though violent crimedeclined sharply all over the country during that period. That increase is alsomuch greater than the percentage rise in offenders serving life sentences.

The American Law Institute, a group composed ofjudges, lawyers and legal scholars, has wisely called for restricting the useof the penalty to cases “when this sanction is the sole alternative to a deathsentence.”

First, to be clear: my scornextends to prattling ninnies at the ALI with no less rancorous condemnation. Dumbasses.

More importantly, did thesevenerable scholars consider that the reason why “crime declined sharply allover the country” was because “thenumber in prison for life without parole tripled?” There is only one force thatwe know with absolute certainty that deters crime: an increase in the costincurred by committing that crime. Sometimes that takes the form of harsh or uncompromisingjudges, hard-nosed cops, and relentless prosecutors. Other times, it takes the (admittedlymore awesome) form of granny packing a sidearm. Liberals despise both.

There’s nothing valiant aboutcondemning justice for its sometimes gritty byproducts. Issuing a blanket condemnation of a specific prison sentence is about as nonsensical as refusing to use the number two. By breaking the socialcontract, criminals forfeit their constitutionally protected rights. We’re notgiving out life sentences without parole for parking tickets or smoking a dimebag. These are very bad people who have, with certainty beyond a reasonable doubt,done very bad things. I see not problem with sticking them in a very bad place.(Sadly, Canadais not a viable possibility—for now—so we’ll have to stick with prison.)

The Paradox of the Conservative Voter (Original)

2011-09-12T14:18:00.000-05:00

There are two dominant ideas at play in the politicallandscape of the right: that the country is naturally and overwhelminglypredisposed to conservatism, and that Republican political leaders are not trueconservatives.

Get into it deep enough with any conservative worth hissalt, and he’ll cite the 40/40/20 makeup of the American electorate (40%conservative, 40% independent/moderate, 20% liberal). This statistic, unchangedover decades, is rightly trumpeted as evidence of the profound sympathy thecountry has for conservative ideas and principles. Yet often it raises profoundquestions about where and how the generally accepted political center isformed.

Likewise, conservatives are far quicker than liberals tolament their elected leaders as inauthentic Johnny-come-latelies or nefariousliberal wolves in conservative sheep’s clothes. Look at the questions beingasked of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, or even Rick Perry by conservative figures,and you will search in vain for congruence from the left. Even as Obama’ssupport on the left wanes, the questions are about his political judgments andthe tone of his speeches, not about whether or not he’s truly a liberal.

The problem is that these two narratives don’t jibe. You can’targue that the country is predominantly conservative while the country’s intellectualleadership is predominantly liberal without inviting some skepticism. The lefthas used the natural assumption of competence that most Americans grant theirelected officials (or at very least the natural deference they at feel to theinstitution which those elected officials serve) to spin the narrative to theirliking. If the ruling class is intelligent and liberal, and the conservativemajority is under-represented in the ruling class, it evinces a dearth ofintelligence in the conservative majority. Hence, NASCAR, pickup trucks,flag-waving, and rural living have degenerated over decades of liberal assaultinto one amalgamated caricature of the toothless yokel. Add to this the massiveleftward tilt of academia, and you have the undying refrain that liberals are simplymore intelligent and refined than conservatives.

For their part, conservatives have come up with their ownexplanations for this phenomenon. Though most are plausible, they fail todissuade the nagging dissonance that results from these simultaneous facts. Thetwo most frequent arguments are that the liberal media dampens the conservativemajority’s impact at the ballot box and that the liberal media pulls conservativeelected officials to the left through classical Pavlovian conditioning. Ihappen to believe that both are true, but even with both factors at work, thecacophony of contradiction remains.

The conclusion that I draw from this is not complicated:Republican voters are simply more demanding than Democrat voters. WhereasRepublicans need to see a candidate show an easy fluency with the core principlesthat comprise conservative thought, Democratic voters look only for assurances ontheir own individual issues: abortion, immigration, gay marriage, pro-union, anti-war,class warfare. No liberal president since Johnson has clearly articulated theprogressive agenda, and Obama actively avoids speaking of it. I’ve writtenbefore that I did not vote for John McCain in 2008 despite greatly fearing theObama presidency. I reasoned that McCain would act like a liberal under thebanner of conservatism. Liberal policies in the guise of conservative thought arefar more damaging than liberal policies openly acknowledged as liberal. Thatreasoning still appeals to me today. Yet that vote exacerbated a paradox thatcauses constant damage to the conservative cause.

This should be a lesson for Republican strategists (andSantorum backers). When conservatives get mired in the wedge issues, they lose.It’s not a matter of having the better argument; it’s a matter of thecomposition of the voting base of each party. Abortion should be the last thinga conservative talks about in a national election. Not only is it a losingissue for conservatives, it’s also completely irrelevant, seeing as it’sentirely a judicial matter. Similarly, conservatives should uniformlyacknowledge gay marriage as a state issue in a half a sentence (or two words: “stateissue”) before promptly changing the topic to more important issues—and no, gaymarriage is not an important issue.The resolution of the paradox can come only if Republicans stop swinging atpitch-outs. The wheelhouse is the discussion about the size and scope ofgovernment. Republicans win that argument ten times out of ten. When Republicansget caught fighting elections around the periphery of core conservativethought, we all lose.

Mrs. Thomas Didn't Teach Him Critical Thinking (Charles Blow)

2011-09-03T03:32:00.000-05:00

In Honor of Teachers

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Published: September 2, 2011

Since it’s back-to-school season across the country, Iwanted to celebrate a group that is often maligned: teachers.

Gotta love shamelesspandering that takes the guise of a bold contrarian espousal of principle.

Like so many others, it was a teacher who changed thedirection of my life, and to whom I’m forever indebted.

Yes, you owe yourformation to the people who spent the most time with you during your formativeyears. Bold and daring statements, indeed.

A Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll released this week foundthat 76 percent of Americans believed that high-achieving high school studentsshould later be recruited to become teachers, and 67 percent of respondentssaid that they would like to have a child of their own take up teaching in thepublic schools as a career.

Just spitballinghere, but one would conclude from those poll results that being a teacher isnot actually maligned, thereby undercutting the entire premise of this article.Yes, already. Ironically, this level ofincompetence is almost certainlydirectly attributable to Charles Blow’s incompetent English teachers.

But how do we expect to entice the best and brightest tobecome teachers when we keep tearing the profession down?

Should this same argumentbe extended to investment bankers? Weapons designers? Bio-engineers foragricultural companies? Medical researchers for Big Pharma? Anyone who worksfor any profit-seeking entity whatsoever? If so, we’ve successfully negatednine tenths of the liberal narrative.

We take the people who so desperately want to make adifference that they enter a field where they know that they’ll be overworkedand underpaid,

Actually, they’llbe underworked and overpaid (more on that later). The worst part, though, isthat Blow wants us to genuflect to their alleged selflessness. You want to be ateacher? Great; we need good ones. Just don’t expect me to nominate you forsainthood.

and we scapegoat them as the cause of a societywidefailure.

You want toattract the best and the brightest? You need to give them a reason to expectthat their efforts will be rewarded and the laziness and detachment of theirpeers will be punished. They need to feel less like cogs in a machine and morelike empowered, individual actors. They need a sense of responsibility fortheir successes and failings. To this end, student performance should indicateto each and every teacher in America that they are, collectively, a societywidefailure. Good teachers and school administrators will view this as a personalfailing.

A March report by the McGraw-Hill Research Foundation andthe Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that one of thedifferences between the United States and countries with high-performing schoolsystems was: “The teaching profession in the U.S. does not have the same highstatus as it once did, nor does it compare with the status teachers enjoy inthe world’s best-performing economies.”

Boy, that soundsquantifiable. Wasn’t there something earlier about 2/3 of parents wanting theirkids to become teachers?

The report highlights two example of this diminishedstatus:

• “According to a 2005 National Education Associationreport, nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within theirfirst five years teaching; they cite poor working conditions and low pay as thechief reason.”

Those poor workingconditions? Incompetent administrators and union-based compensation systemsdesigned to protect entrenched teachers who are less competent or engaged thannew graduates earning half their salary.

• “High school teachers in the U.S. work longer hours(approximately 50 hours, according to the N.E.A.), and yet the U.S. devotes afar lower proportion than the average O.E.C.D. country does to teachersalaries.”

Which isirrelevant because 1) The average workweek in America is 46 hours, with 38% of people working more than 50 hours. Inother words, using this extremely generous survey, teachers still fall wellwithin one standard deviation of the mean…when they’re not on vacation. 2) Teachershave an annual three month-long vacation, unprecedented in virtually any otherprofesssion. And no, they do not spend that time updating their lesson plans. 3) Teachers are better paid, on average, thanprivate sector employees (In Illinois,for example, the average teacher makes $58,686 versus an average state-widesalary of $53,966.) 4) Teachers unions intentionally defer salary tobenefits like healthcare and pensions, making salary an absolutely terriblemetric for compensation comparisons. 5) The rest of us, making less thanteachers, don’t get commended for our saintly sacrifice.

Take Wisconsin, for instance, where a new law strippedteachers of collective bargaining rights and forced them to pay more forbenefits.

The horrors!

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press,“about twice as many public schoolteachers decided to hang it up in the firsthalf of this year as in each of the past two full years.”

Great! Now thepeople of Wisconsin don’t have to pay those pensions and the school system getsan infusion of new blood. This seems like a win-win to me.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t seek to reform oureducation system. We should, and we must.

Boy, thanks forputting bold new ideas out there, champ.

Nor am I saying that all teachers are great teachers.They aren’t. But let’s be honest: No profession is full of peak performers.

Don’t look now,but that sounds an awful lot like what conservatives have been saying.

At least this one is infused with nobility.

See what I meanabout verbally fellating these guys?

And we as parents, and as a society at large, must alsoacknowledge our shortcomings and the enormous hurdles that teachers must oftenclear to reach a child.

It’s our faultthat teachers suck?

Teachers may be the biggest in-school factor, but thereare many out-of-school factors that weigh heavily on performance, like growingchild poverty, hunger, homelessness, home and neighborhood instability, adultrole-modeling and parental pressure and expectations.

Is there a solutionto poor education that doesn’t, in some fashion, end up with higher spending?

The first teacher to clear those hurdles in my life wasMrs. Thomas.

Oh Jesus, Ithought I was bored before.

From the first through third grades, I went to school ina neighboring town because it was the school where my mother got her firstteaching job.

Isn’t it cute howCharles wrote an entire article to defend his mother’s career choices? Also, isit any coincidence that a pampered, entitled government employee spawned ashameless liberal desperate to expand the government payroll?

I was not a great student.

Based on thetortured logic and poor grasp on basic fact pattern shown throughout thisarticle, I believe it.

I was slipping in and out of depression from a tumultuousfamily life that included the recent divorce of my parents. I began to growinvisible. My teachers didn’t seem to see me nor I them. (To this day, I can’tremember any of their names.)

And yet, they allstill got paid using the same compensation structure as Mrs. Thomas.

My work began to suffer so much that I was temporarilyplaced in the “slow” class.

“Temporarily…”Sure.

No one even talked to me about it. They just sent a note.I didn’t believe that I was slow, but I began to live down to theirexpectations.

Seriously, this isthe guy saying that it’s unfair that teachers are maligned. Does he really not see the problem here?

When I entered the fourth grade, my mother got a teachingjob in our hometown and I came back to my hometown school. I was placed in Mrs.Thomas’s class.

There I was, a little nothing of a boy, lost and slumped,flickering in and out of being.

This depressingstory is about a kid dealing with apathetic teachers for four years, not aboutfinding a great one for one year.

She was a pint-sized firecracker of a woman, with shortcurly hair, big round glasses set wider than her face,

That was probablya function of 80s fashion, but continue.

and a thin slit of a mouth that she kept well-lined withred lipstick.

On the first day of class, she gave us a math quiz. Maybeit was the nervousness of being the “new kid,” but I quickly jotted down theanswers and turned in the test — first.

“Whoa! That was quick. Blow, we’re going to call youSpeedy Gonzales.”

It’s a good thingyou’re black and not Hispanic. That little quip would have gotten her fired.Just kidding; nothing gets teachers fired.

She said it with a broad approving smile, and the kind ofeyes that warmed you on the inside.

She put her arm around me and pulled me close while shegraded my paper with the other hand. I got a couple wrong, but most of themright.

I couldn’t remember a teacher ever smiling with approval,or putting their hand around me, or praising my performance in any way.

Seriously…THIS isthe guy who wants ALL teachers to be universally praised. This guy , who had terrible teachers until the FOURTH GRADE is thegreat defender of all teachers? Is he blinded by ideology, or just too dumb toactually learn the lessons of his youth?

It was the first time that I felt a teacher cared aboutme, saw me or believed in me. It lit a fire in me. I never got a bad gradeagain.

I genuinely doubtthat; this column is a C- under even the most generous grading curve.

I figured that Mrs. Thomas would always be able to see meif I always shined. I always wanted to make her as proud of me as she seemed tobe that day. And, she always was.

Christ, this is sodesperately pathetic.

In high school, the district sent a man to test ourI.Q.’s. Turns out that not only was I not slow, but mine and another boy’s I.Q.were high enough that they created a gifted-and-talented class just for the twoof us with our own teacher who came to our school once a week. I went on tograduate as the valedictorian of my class.

Your mother isvery proud. I think. It doesn’t seem like she was very involved in this story.It’s not my place to say one way or the other.

And all of that was because of Mrs. Thomas, thefirecracker of a teacher who first saw me and smiled with the smile that warmedme on the inside.

Do you reallybelieve that the entire school system should be lauded because one teacher correctedthe glaring failings of 4 (including Kindergarten) others? Are you kidding me?

So to all of the Mrs. Thomases out there,

By my admittedly anecdotalevidence, that means he’s not talking to 80% of you crappy, overpaid teachers.

all the teachers struggling to reach lost children like Iwas once, I just want to say thank you. You deserve our admiration, not ourcontempt.

And yet, he can’tcondemn the teachers that ignored him—the teachers that were paid well to failhim. These teachers chief failing lied in treating this particular child likeall others and failing to find his particular strengths, weaknesses, insecurities,and challenges. Similarly, children’s interests are undermined by anadministrative system and a sycophantic populace that treats teachers as amonolithic bloc of saints. Yet Blow’s story clearly shows the differencesbetween good and bad teachers. Does he really believe that a system ofuniversal praise and seniority-based pay structures parse out the good teachersfrom the bad? There is a lesson to be learned here; but it is the opposite ofthe lesson that Blow has learned.

Warping Fairness: The Socioeconomic Doom of Liberal Tax Policy (Ruth Marcus)

2011-08-15T17:24:00.000-05:00

Rick Perry’s warped tax ‘injustice’

By Ruth Marcus, Monday, August 15, 1:58 PM

“We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of allAmericans don’t even pay any income tax.”

— Texas Gov. Rick Perry, presidential candidacy announcementspeech, Aug. 13

Really? Of all the ills in the world, of all the problemswith the economy, all the difficulties with the tax code, this is the one thatPerry chooses to lament?

Yes, and rightly so,because the moment that 51% of the country uses the government to siphon thewealth of 49% of the population, Democracy yields to the tyranny of the majority.The income tax is particularly insidious because it disincentivizes economicproduction, making the disparity all the more glaring. That “shared burden” isa euphemism for more contributions from the upper class is a perverse joke.

Perry’s statement conjures visions of

America

as Slacker Nation, wherethe overburdened wagon-pullers drag an increasingly heavy burden offreeloaders.

What Perry’s wordsevoke is cultural decay as a result of intrusive government. Never in ournation’s history has the idea of the American Dream been in so much jeopardy. Acombination of entitlements and skyrocketing regulation have seriously threatenedthe concept of a self-made man, an all-American idea and the secret to 200+years of success.

His number is correct but, like other conservatives who haveseized on the statistic, Perry draws from it a dangerously misleading lesson.

No, he doesn’t. Here’swhere you start talking about irrelevant tax statistics that are meant to drownthe casual reader in bullshit.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Centerestimates that 46.4 percent of households will pay no federal income tax in2011.

Which is squarely in “holyshit, really?” territory.

This is, for the most part, not because people have chosento loaf.

Nonsense. Not payingtaxes is a function of low earnings, which are a function of a lack ofmarketable skills. A lack of marketable skills is a function of loafing. In acountry with a dearth of skilled (not educated, mind you, skilled) laborers, significant parts of unemployment are thefunction of a non-adaptive (read: entrenched, entitled, and lazy) work force.

It’s because they are working but simply don’t earn enoughto owe income taxes,

Well no shit. The factthat they’re working—perhaps very hard—at something the labor market doesn’t valuehighly is equivalent to loafing. Yet by coddling low earners with a sharplyprogressive tax system, the government is implicitly subsidizing inefficienteconomic activity. Nevermind theineptitude that goes into a prolonged $20,000 salary. At least they’re trying. Andby trying, of course, I mean showing up long enough to get employment benefits.

based on the progressive structure of the tax code andprovisions designed to help the working poor and lower-income seniors.

Helping the poorthrough progressive policy is another euphemistically perverse joke.

As the Tax Policy Center’sRoberton Williams has explained, “a couple with two children earning less than$26,400

$26,400 amounts to awage of roughly $13.20 per hour for one person per year or $6.60 per hour fortwo people working full time. Since $6.60/hr is 10% below the federal minimumwage (and several states are magnitudes higher) one parent must, by mathematicalnecessity, be loafing.

will pay no federal income tax this year because their$11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700 each reduce theirtaxable income to zero. The basic structure of the income tax simply exemptssubsistence levels of income from tax.”

No one claimed it wasillegal, only that the government policy that rewards it is immoral andcounterproductive. Which it is.

Does Perry truly see this as an “injustice”?

Yes, and so do I. Ofcourse, neither of us is advocating a 50% rate for the lowest tax bracket. I’mnot even arguing a flat system. Just enough so that these people have some skinin the game.

Does he believe his “dismay” should be alleviated by raisingthe tax burden on these households?

There is no taxburden. Raising the tax burden from zero to slightly above zero isn’t punitive.It’s just common sense.

Consider: Of those households that do not owe income taxes,about a third earn $10,000 a year

Which means that noone in that household works full time.

and a slightly smaller share earn between $10,000 and$20,000.

Which means thatthere’s probably no one in thathousehold that works full time.

More than three-fourths earn $30,000 or less.

Literally not a wordof that sentence was worth considering. It has absolutely nothing to do withthe argument that Perry was making.

In addition, the notion that these households pay no taxesis flat-out wrong.

Which is why it’sspecifically not what Perry said, Little Miss Reading Comprehension.

They pay — leaving aside state and local sales, income andproperty taxes —

Let’s not leave themaside. Sales taxes are slightly regressive, but only because of incomeelasticity. In fact, it reveals more about what’s wrong with the “regressive/progressive”scale of taxation than anything else.

State and local salestaxes, which are by and large scaled-down versions of the federal income tax (unlessyou’re in Texas—RickPerry shout-out!) are similarly progressive. And what’s more, the poor veryrarely own houses or property, making property taxes completely irrelevant tothis conversation, and also progressive.

So she leaves themout because all three of these tax groups track precisely with Perry’s argumentthat the tax code is oppressive on the wealthy and coddles the lower andlower-middle class.

federal gasoline

Which Democratswanted to increase in a colossally misguided attempt to stick it to Big Oil.Matt Miller was leading the charge into that brick wall of stupidity.

and other excise taxes

Which Republicansalso mostly oppose, as evidenced by the drum-beat of protectionist rhetoriccoming from the left as the right has stopped championing globalization.

and, most significantly, payroll taxes on every dollar theyearn.

Of course, this isfor things like unemployment insurance and Medicare—systems that unabashedlyfavor the poor. (Social Security is somewhat of an aberration due to the lowerlife expectancy of the lower class).

These taxes are regressive.

Technically, yes, thesetaxes are regressive due to income elasticity, but the rich still generally payvastly more than the poor in sales-related taxes. What’s more, there are goodarguments to be made for regressive tax policy at the upper end of thespectrum.

Everyone pays the same share, regardless of income, so theyhit the poor hardest,

Did anyone else’shead just explode? Because everyone pays the same rate, the poor get hurt. NowI just want to punch a hobo.

and they counterbalance the progressivity of the income taxcode.

They might not beequivalent to the progressivity to the income tax, but they certainly don’tcounterbalance it. Let’s not forget that the income tax is the primary vehiclefor taxation in this country, and by a yawning margin.

Indeed, factoring in payroll taxes alone, the Slacker Nationpicture looks very different.

It really doesn’t.But even so, it completely misses the point of Perry’s assertion, which is that51% of the poor taking from 49% of the rich undermines our democraticinstitutions.

Two-thirds of the households that pay no federal income taxstill ante up for payroll taxes. Fewer than one in five — 18 percent of allhouseholds — pay neither income nor payroll taxes.

Categorize that asanother “holy shit, really?” statistic. Yes, it’s that high.

Nearly all of these are elderly (10 percent) or have incomesbelow $20,000 (7 percent.) Assuming that Perry isn’t worked up about SlackerGrandmas, the relevant “slacker share” — people who are supposedly comfortablyensconced on that wagon the rest of us are pulling — is in single digits ratherthan “nearly half.”

Oh, because being oldor poor means you don’t really count in this scenario. Also, let’s not countthe people who only pay nominal fees for systems that are designed todisproportionately benefit the poor. Anyone else you want to exclude?Transients? Criminals? Do-gooder Artists?

Those are an awfullot of assumptions, and, frankly, they’re all irrelevant, because they amountto the same thing. Through tax policy, we have incentivized all of thesecarefully parsed constituencies to failure. Seventy years of progressivepolicies advocating higher taxes on the rich and increased government spending have resulted in that havelit the fuse on a ticking time bomb of economic malaise.

And, of course, they pay other taxes. An analysis by theCongressional Budget Office, taking into account all federal taxes, found thatin 2007 even the poorest one-fifth of households, with average income(including government benefits) of $18,400, paid 4 percent of their income infederal taxes. By contrast, the middle fifth (average income $64,500) paid 14percent of income and the top fifth (average income $264,700) 25 percent.

Whoa whoa whoa! Ithought you said that the progressivism of the income tax was counterbalancedby the regressivism of sales, excise, and payroll taxes. Can I chalk that oneup as a bald-faced lie?

In short, the wealthy pay a greater share of their income intaxes — but the poor don’t, as Perry implies, pay nothing.

Again, that wasn’tthe implication. Indeed, he made a particular point of specifically saying “incometaxes.” Go back and read the quote. You decided to start the article with it!YOU chose the quote. You can’t make up a subtext and argue against your ownmade-up subtext. Well, at least not if you frown on argumentative masturbation.

About those rich people: Perry seems to believe it is wrongto ask more of them.

It is.

“ ‘Spreading the wealth’ punishessuccess while setting Americaon course for greater dependency on government,” he said.

It does.

Perry needn’t worry. In the past several decades the wealthhasn’t been spread so much as concentrated — at the top.

Christ, she couldn’tmiss the point more if she were blindfolded. The argument Perry makes is thattax policy undermines the free market and enforces inefficiency. A largeeconomic disparity is the natural and inescapable result of liberal economicpolicies that promote corporatism instead of capitalism. Entitlement spending keeps the poor poor and governmentinterventionism keeps aggregates massive sums of money in the pockets of thepolitically connected.

The share of total income going to the top 1 percent ofincome earners more than doubled from 9 percent in 1970 to 23.5 percent in 2007.(The Great Recession has since narrowed the gap.)

Again, completelypredictable product of liberal policies.

And while, as noted above, the rich pay a greater proportionof their income in taxes,

You mean to say, “therich pay a ridiculous amount more money than the poor in taxes.”

the share of total taxes paid by the richest Americans iscommensurate with their share of national wealth.Examining the total tax burden— state, federal and local — Citizens for Tax Justice

Which is aprogressive group, meaning that their numbers are pretty much trash becauseliberals don’t really believe in math.

calculated that the top 1 percent of households (averageincome, $1.3 million) earned 20.3 percent of income and paid 21.5 percent oftaxes in 2010.

Which is, of course,an idiotic metric, as the measure of fairness is how much you put in versus howmuch you get out. Even if you want to judge income as “getting something out”of the investment in government—which no sane person should—it completelyignores anything about direct cash disbursements through various socialspending programs, or even about investment benefits from things like militaryexpenditure.

Indeed, the termprogressive is designed to indicate that it means a transfer of wealth fromrich to poor. It’s not a code word, or reading into the subtext. It’s overt.Arguing that the government doesn’t favor the poor over the rich with taxpolicy is just a flat lie. Indeed, the entire verbiage of the tax debate hingeson language that indicates that tax policy favors the poor.

The tax code is studded with a costly bevy of deductions andpreferences — mortgage interest, employer-sponsored health insurance,retirement savings — that benefit wealthier taxpayers over those with modestincomes.

Of course it is. It’snot because they’re good for the economy. It’s because politicans use them tocurry favor with very specific constituencies. Liberal politicians pick theconstituency to coddle, and Republicans go along because any decrease in taxesis at least a step towards sanity.

If Perry wants to go after injustice in the tax code, he’llfind ample targets. Failing to tax poor people enough isn’t among them.

You still haven’taddressed the point of Perry’s argument about injustice, which is that it isimmoral to have citizens that can vote but who don’t have skin in the game. Andno, an effective tax rate (with payroll taxes) of 4% is not having skin in thegame.

(Of course thisarticle did have the added bonus of providing the liberal argument that the taxcode is essentially fair, which means that raising taxes only on the rich wouldbe inherently unfair because it unbalances Ruth’s carefully constructed see-saw.)

But even Perry missesthe more fundamental truth. Our tax code is the subject of these ridiculousinquests because taxing income is downright stupid. Taxation is equivalent todisincentivization. As a result, we are disincentivizing income. If that soundscrazy to you, congratulations, you’re less crazy than Congress (which is kindof like being the skinniest guy in a Twinkie-eating contest.) In this age ofhigh debts, what should we be taxing? Consumption. Get rid of the income tax,implement a national sales tax at ~20% (give or take a few points) on finalgoods, exempt necessities like food and rent, and call it a day. No more IRS.No more tax accountants. No more April 15. Incomes would shoot up by 20-25% (sowould prices of final goods) and we would encourage more savings, therebyreducing the impact of recessions on personal economies. I’m telling you,consumption tax is where it’s at.

I have solved theworld’s taxation problems and ridiculed Ruth Marcus in the process. It’s been agood day.

Cohen's Ode to Incoherence

2011-08-02T20:13:00.002-05:00

Greenwith Tea Party envy

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ByRichard Cohen, Monday, August 1, 6:59 PM

Isuffer from Tea Party envy.

Aptly phrased—asthough it were a psychological condition straight out of the DSM-IV.

Thereis little about the actual party I like and there are some members I abhor, butI am jealous of its sense of purpose, its determination and its bracingconviction that it is absolutely right.

Thank you. Nowplease end the column here before you begin embarrassing yourself.

Inits own way, it waves a crimson battle flag while President Obama’s is a sicklytaupe — the limp banner of an ideological muddle.

And here’s whereit just gets silly. Obama is anideologue. He always has been. The difference between Obama and the Tea Partyis that ordinary Americans don’t recoil in horror when they hear about TeaParty values. Indeed the Tea Party wears its values on its sleeve; Obama guardshis ideology more closely than his close friendships with domestic terrorists.

Obamawould be a good White House chief of staff,

No. He wouldn’t.Even that position is vastly more managerial experience than he had prior totaking office. This is a man who has been told his entire life that he was incapableof failing. Now that the stakes are high, it’s why he is incapable ofsucceeding.

butas a president he lacks political savvy.

You want to knowwhy the Tea Party has the passion that it does? It’s because we don’t blame ourleaders’ failings on a lack of savvy.

Henever knew how to get ahead of the Tea Party wave.

That would havebeen quite the feat, seeing as he was the one who created it.

Henever knew how to marshal — or create — his own constituency. Republicaninvective notwithstanding, he lacks demagogic tools.

Hilariously,this comes in the same week that the Vice President of the Untied States andmultiple members of both houses of Congress have called Republicans (andspecifically Tea Party Republicans) terrorists, hostage-takers, and seditious.With all due respect, blow it out your ass, Richard.

Also, how would“Republican invective,” even if it’s all in Cohen’s addled mind, evince theabsence of Obama’s demagogic tools? That sentence doesn’t make any sense.

Hetries to solve problems instead of, for the Republicans, creating them.

Again, thissentence doesn’t make any sense. It’s as though he’s just sneezing outarbitrary prepositions. Despite being a the grammatical equivalent of PriscillaPresley’s misadventures in cosmetic surgery, I can still say with relativecertainty that the sentiment that it’s groping to express is also flat-outwrong. Anyone with half a brain can see that the debt crisis was entirelycreated by Obama. Even Jim Cramer thinks so, indicating that absent half abrain, anyone with an extensive array of props and sound effects can also seeto Obama’s colossal ineptitude.

BarackObama does not do pain.

Please. OnlyClubber Lang “does pain.”

Still,Obama came to the White House at a tough time for a Democrat.

A 78 seatmajority in the House, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, a jubilant andself-congratulatory electorate, and an economy that had just about bottomed outunder his predecessor? A president couldn’t possibly walk into a bettersituation.

Washingtonhas gone topsy-turvy.

I know.President Obama’s stalwart cadre of media guardians are now trying to ply therevised history that Obama walked into a bad situation. The world certainly haschanged in three years.

Theliberal party, the Democrats, has turned conservative.

No. Theelectorate simply demanded that they stop the lunacy last year. And let’s notforget that they want to raise taxes in between recessions. (Yes, double-dip iscoming.)

Itslawmakers want to conserve Social Security and conserve Medicare and conservemyriad other programs that have turned into patronage plums for importantconstituencies.

In other words, “whynot bankrupt the country if it keepsgetting me elected?”

TheRepublicans of the Tea Party, on the other hand, say they are conservatives,but they are really radicals — maybe even nihilists.

Why would Obamahave to demagogue when you do it so cravenly for him?

Theywould rather destroy than compromise.

This is theliberal trap. By accusing conservatives of destruction, conservatives have oneof two choices: 1) refute that a 10% decrease to a baseline that increases by15% can, under no definition of the word, be described as destruction and therebyalienating the right with their timidity, or 2) admit that we do want to destroy wasteful andineffective government programs, thereby alienating independents, who are generallythe dumbest voters this side of a middle school class treasurer election.

Theyare drunk on bromides about Big Government and Small Business and the virtuesof a balanced budget, no matter what damage all that does to an already sickeconomy.

Here is whatCohen simply can’t understand: we genuinely believe that large governmentcorrupts and taints the economic liberty that serves as the lifeblood of theeconomy. We never believed that thegovernment can grow the economy.

Inanother era, folks with this mentality would be yelling “Power to the people”

You pitiable littledullard. Advocating for limited government isadvocating for the power of the people.

orsome such thing, because a good slogan is more persuasive than careful analysisany day.

Because we aren’tmindless zealots, the Tea Party doesn’t actually have aslogan. “Taxed Enough Already” is a name origin that is still less often echoedthan the homoerotic “teabagger” vulgarities of Jon Stewart and hisself-loathing ilk. Indeed, conservatives never have goodslogans, whereas everything liberals say is some derivative of “we’re here,we’re queer, get used to it.”

You can, as they say,look that up.

That’s also not aslogan.

Obama is the presidentof political ennui. I say this out of empathy. He is like many of us,post-ideological.

Please. Don’t blame thePresident’s ineptitude on “political ennui.” If he was that bored with theprocess, he shouldn’t have spent two years begging America for the job. Thereason that he did is that he isn’t bored. He does believe ina hard-left agenda. He’s not post-ideological and neither are you.

The rousing causes ofyesteryear have faded — civil rights, voting rights, women’s rights and theantiwar fervor of the Vietnam era. Even gay rights has lost its urgency.

True. Conservativesmoved beyond all of these issues in the 70s, when they were actually put tobed. Liberals have been throwing haymakers at ghosts for 30 years.

Gay people get electedto public office and can marry in certain states. The outcome of this fight isnot in doubt.

Gay rights is theultimate irony of liberal lunacy. Liberals want gays to be able to marry. Why?It’s not about equality. If that were the case, gay Americans and sympathizersto the cause would have started their own churches and married each other. Yetthey haven’t—at least not in any significant number. Over the last fifty years,liberals have quilted a patchwork of government benefits to married couplesmade possible by the existence of the expanded role of government. Hadgovernment truly been limited, the only thing keeping gays from equal rightsfifty years ago would have been their pastor. The political remedy for arecalcitrant clergy is simply changing churches. It would have taken about tenminutes and a Sunday morning whim. Instead, what was the political remedy forfixing the perceived inequity in big government? Thirty years of squanderedpolitical activism. The corruption of the Civil Rights movement. Absurdcurriculums for school children about androgynous kangaroos or Suzie trying tofigure out how she came out of two vaginas simultaneously. And. mosttragically, the permanent degradation of the gay community into the pet victimsof the Democratic Party. Conservatives aren’t, for the most part, aghast at theidea of a man holding hands with another man. We resent the idea that ourgovernment is the one forcing to acknowledge this and that the unavoidablegravity of political correctness is pulling us to preface our objections with“it’s cool that you’re gay, but…”

Obama’s slogan was“Change.”

Technically, he had abunch of slogans. “Yes we can.” “Change we can believe in.” “Please don’t askJoe Biden any questions.”

It was supposed tosuggest no more politics for the sake of politics. No more special-interestlegislation. No more bridges to nowhere. But ever since the New Deal, theDemocrats have been the party of programs.

Which is to say,Democrats are the party of special-interest legislation. Democrats are theparty of bridges to nowhere and government-sponsored cowboy poetry, andfederally-funded cocaine binges for monkeys.

They spend money,

Even when they don’thave to.

and now there is reallyno money to spend. For the Democrats, this is a considerable challenge. Theyare empty of political innovation.

This is actually apretty stunning acknowledgement that liberals don’t know how to govern withoutmassive deficit spending. Beyond that, it also acknowledges that every areawhere government could reasonably expand to has already been expanded to.

The Tea Party is not. Itknows precisely what it wants to do. It stands in shimmering contrast to Obama,who seems vaguely at a loss.

These are the refreshingmoments where he gropes for clarity. It’s like watching a baby take its firststeps.

He had ideas galore, butthey were merely interesting and not powered by ideological passion. He liked.He didn’t love.

And then watching thatsame baby fall on it’s ass, and wondering, as a parent, if your child’sinability to walk at 5 is somehow your fault.

Afghanistan is theepitome of Obamaism: More troops and then fewer troops and the goal is not towin, just merely to end it so that it does not look like a loss.

Yet more evidence thatliberals can not be trusted to protect this country.

It’s a vaporous policy,a war in the spirit of the one waged in Libya, which could have ended by nowhad the United States not stopped its active participation.

Or not gotten involvedat all.

Does he want to win?Does he care about losing? What’s the cause? Obama’s wars lack music.

After listening to thePost’s editorial writers shower praise on Obama for nuance in foreign policyand dismiss comparisons of Libya to Syria as incongruent, it seems now thatconservatives were precisely correct in their assessment of Obama’sgeopolitical idiocy (and the idiocy of the guilt-ridden lunatics like SamanthaPowers that advise him.)

Also, on a more personalnote, I was absolutely correct in calling for more political assassinations.

The odd thing about theTea Party is that it uses Washington to attack Washington. This is a version ofHannah Arendt’s observation that totalitarian movements use democraticinstitutions to destroy democracy.

Excuse me for a moment;my head just exploded.

How the hell can anideology of smaller government be totalitarian? That’s like saying that vegansare pro-slaughterhouse or that peace protestors are a cog in the militaryindustrial complex.

(This is what Islamicradicals will do in Egypt.)

Have done. As memoryserves, conservatives predicted that as well. But then again, we’re talkingabout Egyptian jihadists and theocrats, not Egyptian libertarians—which don’texist.

Note that the Tea Partyis nowhere near a majority — not in the House and not in the Senate. Itsfollowers have only 60 seats in the 435-member House,

Do you think he knowsthat the Tea Party isn’t actually a political party? It’s a House sub-caucus ofthe Republicans, many of whom are sympathetic non-members.

but in a textbookapplication of political power they were able to use parliamentary rules todrive the congressional agenda.

As opposed to what?Guns? This isn’t Syria. What exactly were you expecting?

As we have known sinceLenin’s day, a determined minority is hands down better than an irresolutemajority.

Lenin was a Bolshevikyou fucktard. Bolshevik, in Russian, literally means majority party. After theypurged the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks stopped being the majority party andstarted becoming the only party.

The Tea Party hasrecklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States. It has shrunkthe government and will, if it can, further deprive it of revenue.

There’s nothing recklessabout it. We want to diminish the power of the federal government domestically.That is a winning electoral argument. You know how I know? Because it won in2010.

The domestic economywill suffer

For the guy who seems tohave not learned anything from Soviet Russia, I’ll take my chances witheconomic freedom.

and the gap between richand poor, the educated and the indolently schooled, will continue to widen.

Indolent? How doesexcessive spending fix laziness?

International relationswill lack a dominant power able to enforce the rule of law, and the bad guyswill be freer to be as bad as they want.

This is a bad joke,right? This is basically a tacit admission that neoconservative foreign policywas right all along. Someone owes an apology to Donald Rumsfeld (among others).

Maybe the deficit willbe brought under control, but nothing else will.

By the criteria Cohensets out (profligate federal spending and a hyperaggressive foreign policy),George W. Bush was the best president since Lyndon Johnson.

I worry — and I envy(but will not forgive) those who don’t.

Somebody get thisneurotic fruitcake a yoga mat. I’m worried he’s going to have an embolism righthere.

100th Post Extravaganza (Sponsored by Grover Norquist)

2011-07-31T01:56:00.000-05:00

Liberals are on a bender right now. There panties arethoroughly bunched at the conservative politicians and Tea Party Republicanswho really, genuinely, truly, super-dooper-times-a-gazillion meant it when theysigned a pledge not to vote for new taxes or tax increases. They’re absolutelygorging themselves on hating Grover Norquist, who runs Americans for Tax Reform.

Here (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-high-price-of-the-taxpayer-protection-pledge/2011/06/08/AGAFaqNH_story.html)

And Here (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dangerous-dealings-with-the-default-caucus/2011/07/21/gIQAktWMTI_story.html)

And in cartoon form here (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-norquist-anti-tax-pledge/2011/07/21/gIQARqzjSI_video.html)

And snarkily here (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/opinion/sunday/bruni-norquist-taxes-and-a-dangerous-purity.html?scp=3&sq=Grover%20Norquist&st=cse)

And government sponsored here (http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/137800715/the-man-behind-the-gops-tax-pledge)

It actually beats the “hostage-taking GOP” meme that remindsus all of fonder days when liberals were still wringing their hands overcrosshairs on political ads and the “rhetoric of violence.” As a result, Norquisthas been summarily elevated to niche celebrity as the right-wing boogeyman. Previously, this post has been ably heldby Karl Rove (who had the gall to get Republicans elected), Donald Rumsfeld(who had the gall to believe that the world was better off without SaddamHussein), and Ken Starr (who had the gall to believe that perjury was a felony)…amongothers.

As an intellectual force, Norquist regularly mops the floorall the most popular people at all the most fabulous DC parties:

Chris Matthews doesn’t seem to understand politics (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DncElYQmAF0)

Client #9 doesn’t seem to understand economics (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENbQ2StXKRY&feature=related)

And an entire smattering of know-nothings get woodshed’d onjust about everything: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbvQjYUd_L8&feature=related)

I’ll cut short the tour of YouTube. Norquist isn’t the pointof this whole thing; he’s in the hand that the magician is waving around whilethe other hand is fishing for the rabbit. Liberals are absolutely aghast that Republicanswant to govern in absolutes. The entire narrative is set up around laudingflexibility, promoting compromise, praising capitulation. John McCain has madea thoroughly underwhelming career out of being the least-hated mortal enemy ofthe liberal media. This isn’t new either, but it’s been in exile since the Gangof Something or Other (probably led by a certainSenator from a certain state ofArizona) struck a deal to coerce Democrats to allow Bush’s judicialnominees through in 2005 (conspicuously, this media reflex seemed absent circa2006-10). The media noise is the Pavlovian reinforcement mechanism that forcedus to sit through 5 decades of limited government as a pipe dream. It’s whydespite Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and two decades of conservativeascendancy, the government continues to grow to an unprecedented girth.

Forget for a moment that if Republicans are beingrecalcitrant on resisting tax increases, Democrats must therefore have beenequally obstinate on insisting on tax increases in the first place. Yes, it’sthe Law of the Conservation of Political Priorities in action, but there’s moregoing on here. This isn’t about the debt ceiling, or revenue, or class warfare oreven maintaining tax increases as a theoretical construct for deficit reduction(despite it being economic hogwash). This is about fearing the absolute nomatter the irrationality. Civics 101: the point of government is theestablishment of an absolute set of rules so that affairs aren’t settled by thebiggest club. Those existence of absolute rules is what keeps civilization afloatand

That’s why we have the Constitution. It’s why we havewritten laws. The Constitution is our nation’s one sacred, inviolate text. Itis the law. Hundreds of thousands of intelligent men and women have spent 224years parsing every word. There is no reason that our politicians should becompelled to be flimsy and arbitrary in writing laws that are, by definition,hard and fast. When liberals’ bender of flexibility and compromise wears off,the American people are left with the hangover of rigidity and the absolute. Welive in a republic—not a democracy--for good reasons. The voters can’t dictatewhat a representative will do when he gets to Washington. However they can, andshould, pin a note to their elected officials’ lapels that says “Good luck inWashington. Remember why we sent you. We’ll be watching.”

Obviously the denunciation of pledges and the politics ofabsolutism is wildly irrational for ordinary citizens. For the media, therationale may simply be the result of intellectual laziness, faulty logic, andpoorly-drawn conclusions. More likely, however, is the precarious position ofthe career Washingtonians facing a shrinking government who resent having theirinfluence on political affairs supplanted or diluted by the influence of thevoters. Those posturing about the virtue of compromise have directed theirentire argument towards preserving a less democratic republic.

Tip of the cap to the House Republicans. I know your seat ishot right now. Thanks for remembering that your constituents can light a firethat President Obama can’t.

Comprehensive is Bullshit

2011-07-28T11:51:00.000-05:00

Any conservative that has everargued with a liberal about immigration has been foiled by one word: “comprehensive.”Liberals use it as a convenient deflection; it only really makes sense toconservatives. After all, why do a half-assed job when the whole ass isrequired? The problem is that instead of fixing portions of the problem, we endup holding out for the whole shebang. After all, why on earth would building aborder fence be contingent upon clarifying a path to citizenship for existingillegals? If that logical frameworkmakes sense to you, you’re either a liberal or have never been taught themeaning of “non sequitur.”

Toastute readers, this is starting to sound familiar in the context of currentevents. Indeed, compromise on the debt limit is more and more implausible thelarger the framework of the deal. Both Obama and Boehner are looking forsomething that they can call “comprehensive” because each has an eye towardshis legacy. Yet the deal’s size pits dearly held programs against staunchconservative principles. That’s not a coincidence or a problem; conservatives andliberals have a substantive gulf in ideologies and disagree about boatloads.The actual problem is that by agreeing that a deal has to be broad in scope,conservatives have vastly underplayed their hand. Indeed, precisely theopposite is the most effective legislative structure of a debt deal. Here’s howit should go down:

SpeakerBoehner should call the House to session tomorrow morning with no fewer than100 legislative proposals. Each should mention a specific spending cut and aspecific monetary increase to the debt ceiling. For example:

Cut funding to the State Department by 5%;increase debt ceiling by $75B.
Cut all funding to the United Nations; increasedebt ceiling by $100B.
Cut funding to the Department of Education by15%; increase debt ceiling by $50B.
Reform baseline budgeting procedures; increasedebt ceiling by $1.5T.

(Please note, these numbers are completely arbitrary. I’mnot a congressman and I don’t have research staffers. Also, the specifics alsoaren’t that important for an essay on legislative tactics.

Indeed, these collective cutsshould increase the debt ceiling by vastly more than the President requested.The result is that Democrats in the Senate and the President will have theopportunity to select from a veritable buffet of spending cuts. Republicanswill be given the cover of increasing the debt ceiling many, many times over.If the President rejects all of the bills, Republicans can argue that thegovernment is shutting down because the President is recalcitrant in protectingexorbitant research grants for the NEA or subsidies to peanut farmers inGeorgia.

Politicallyit’s a Bacon Explosion for Republicans: it gets conservatives exactly wherethey want while still allowing Senate Democrats the leeway to select theprograms that they can do without. Certainly they won’t be happy about it,but I think just about everyone in Washington wants an escape rope from thedebt ceiling debate. This is precisely when astute negotiators win the dispute.