No pre-write-up primer today. Onto the idiocy straightaway!
On climate change, the GOP is lost in never-never land
By Fred Hiatt, Friday, April 15, 2:37 PM
The Republican self-deception that draws the most attention is the refusal to believe that Barack Obama is American-born.
Undoubtedly, this would die down if Barack Obama started acting as though he were American-born.
But there are Republican doctrinal fantasies that may be more dangerous:
Oooh. Dangerous. Hold on, let me go grab my Bible and my gun.
the conviction that taxes can always go down, but never up, for example, and the gathering consensus among Republican leaders that human-caused climate change does not exist.
There’s nothing “gathering” about the momentum of climate-change skeptics. Indeed, there is no momentum because climate change hasn’t been even a minor issue since East Anglia Kyoto
I’m not saying that Democrats’ answers to the budget or climate challenges are necessarily right.
Yes you are, but by falsely portraying yourself as a moderate on complicated issues, you have framed yourself as a voice of reason, which you decidedly are not. Ruse
You can make a case for smaller government
A very good one.
or argue that there’s no point in America curbing greenhouse gases if China
Another excellent argument.
But it’s hard to debate blind faith.
Nonsense. It’s incredibly easy to debate blind faith. Faith is a religious attribute, and religion is infinitely debatable. Consider Christianity alone. Catholics and Protestants debated their faith for centuries, before Protestants split off from Anglicans, and then they started debating against themselves. Factions split, argue, grow, wither, reconcile, and split again all based on theological debates. Precisely to the contrary, faith is perhaps the most fertile ground for debate.
Secondly, faith always takes the affirmative form. One has faith that Santa Claus exists, not faith that he doesn’t. In the global warming shitstorm, (See what I did there? I threw in a little meteorogical/scatological reference to tie this back in. Hemmingway is my bitch.) if any side exercises faith, it is the left. There’s the blind faith that carbon dioxide not only correlates to persistently higher planetary temperatures, but causes them, the blind faith that recent warming trends will stand against infinite extrapolation, the blind faith that scientific consensus is not only possible, but belief-affirming simultaneously and present, and the blind faith that scientists are omnipotent and can diagnose what ails them.
When President George W. Bush and Congress lowered taxes in 2001,
This was supposed to be about global warming. Good for me. This stuff is much more suited for my wheelhouse. We shouldn’t be talking about something as irrelevant as climate change anyways.
the justification, unlikely as it seems today, was a budget surplus.
First, there was no surplus. http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/16. Not only did Clinton
Still, propagating misinformation isn’t a crime to me; I’m not a journalist. But then again, Neither is Fred Hiatt. Or John Hiatt for that matter.
What irks me is the absurd (tacit) assumption that the business cycle (the regular ebb and flow of expansions and recessions within the economy) has nothing to do with the deficit. Clinton’s best budgetary year was FY2000, which as those poor bastards born after 1993 don’t know, was the peak of the tech bubble. It was the very definition of irrational exuberance.
Anyways, continue.
When the surplus melted away,
Of course, the surplus never actually existed. And if it did, (which it didn’t) then it had dissolved long before the Bush tax cuts were enacted, even if the narrative of a surplus was used by the Bush camp to sell the tax cuts.
that didn’t affect the ideology. Surplus or deficit,
Actually, all deficit; the modern Republican party has never seen a surplus.
peace or war,
Is the argument that our military policy should be dependent on our tax policy? I’m pretty sure we still fund the military in peacetime.
healthy growth or steep recession —
Republicans have not advocated tax breaks during large expansionary periods for a couple reasons: first, there’s no real need when the economy is humming along, second, an overheated economy can increase inflationary pressures, requiring Fed action to contract monetary policy. Third, and perhaps most relevant to this particular day and age, tax cuts are easiest to sell in a poor economy.
anything is an argument for tax cuts.
Truer words have never been spoken. Life is an argument for fewer taxes.
You can get a taste of this illogical arithmetic
A basic misunderstanding of the word “arithmetic” gives me quite the interesting glimpse into Mr. Hiatt’s past: second grade math—failed.
in Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. The Wisconsin Republican lays out some ideas worth discussing to control entitlement costs.
Oh? Discuss them.
But by refusing to acknowledge that revenue will ever have to rise,
Revenue rises when GDP grows. This is fucking amateur hour.
even as society ages, he ends up, as the Congressional Budget Office noted (though not in so many words), in fiscal never-never land.
As the CBO doesn’t have the stones to note, the government doesn’t have the power to raise tax revenue with tax rate changes.
Pause and let that sink in, because this is what Mr. Hiatt blindly refuses to acknowledge or understand: conservatives despise taxes so much because we believe them to be, on the margin, entirely punitive, and not at all designed to generate more revenue for the government.
This isn’t blind faith. The numbers bear it out. Federal revenues as a percentage of GDP show no statistically significant correlation with tax rates. Instead, higher tax rates lead to a decrease in GDP, lethargy in class mobility, increases in costs incurred to defer or shield income, and an increase in fraud. All of these pressures decrease federal receipts.
In Ryan’s vision, all federal spending other than Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest payments will decline from 12 percent of the national economy (GDP) in 2010 to 6 percent in 2022 to 3.5 percent in 2050.
Baller. Have I mentioned that I dig Paul Ryan?
“For comparison, spending in this category has exceeded 8 percent of GDP in every year since World War II,” the CBO said.
That says more “why the hell are we at 12% if we can get by at 8%.”
“The proposal does not specify the changes to government programs that might be made in order to produce that path.”
Really? Should it? Should Mr. Ryan really have to lay out a forty year legislative agenda to be taken seriously?
Of course not — because they are changes that few Americans would ever support.
Speaking of things few Americans support, wasn’t this supposed to be about global warming policies?
The climate change denialism
Feel that? There it is. That relief that you’re feeling while writing this is the feeling coherence. It’s what happens when you don’t go off on long and useless tangents. Feels good, huh? Don’t let it linger too long, you’ve only got 450 words left to make a point.
is a newer part of the catechism.
It’s a damn good thing Fred studied for his SATs.
Just a few years ago, leading Republicans — John McCain, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty among them — not only accepted global warming as real but supported some kind of market-based mechanism to raise the cost of burning fossil fuels.
And you wonder why conservative tea party supporters don’t trust the GOP establishment?
Now polls show declining numbers of Republicans believing in climate change, and a minority of those believing humans are at fault, so the candidates are scrambling to disavow their past positions.
Rule of thumb: any time you’re on Al Gore’s side, you’re wrong. Worse than that, you should probably take a bath in lye to wash away that creeping feeling.
Palin, who as Alaska
Do you really have to swear fealty to the church of impending mand-made global disaster to believe that coal-belching power plants and smog-spewing cars are generally undesirable? (Though very often necessary.)
Pawlenty similarly acknowledged on “Meet the Press” last year that “the climate is changing,” but added that “the more interesting question is how much of that is man-made versus natural causes.”
Excellent distionction. Everything from oceanic current variations to solar flares to three-thousand–other-factors-that-I-don’t-know-about-because-I-don’t-really-care-about-this-drivel could cause temperature fluctuations over about a 30 year period (the span for which this data is actually reliable, based on my own well-founded distrust of everything that occurred before Ronald Reagan was elected president.)
When I asked last week how Pawlenty would answer that “interesting question,” his spokesman responded by e-mail: “We don’t know [the] cause of climate change.”
In other words, it remains an interesting question. Unanswered questions usually are. For example, Five times two is not an interesting question. (Grammar geeks would ponder whether it poses a question at all.) You know what is an interesting question? How do I build a bridge around Canada so that I can finally drive to Alaska
Climate science is complex, and much remains to be learned.
Read: I’m trying to use a weapon I don’t really understand. Which end points forward again?
But if you asked 1,000 scientists, 998 of them would say that climate change is real and that human activity —
Maybe if you’re polling cancer researchers and sociologists. Don’t worry, I’ll start polling climatologists about theoretical physics. You can start grilling the computer scientists and biologists on the properties of fluid dynamics.
the burning of oil, gas and coal — is a significant contributor.
Don’t worry about that; Prices are going up so fast that no one will be able to afford gas before long. (Yes, I sacrificed technical accuracy for snark on this one. Deal with it.)
But Pawlenty’s supposed uncertainty
Is his uncertainty somehow conspiratorial?
is convenient,
Oh Jesus, he is spinning a conspiracy theory.
because if we don’t know the cause, then there’s little point in looking for a cure. And any cure is going to cost money, or votes, or both.
Us grown ups call that fiduciary responsibility. A trustee of public funds is not authorized to throw fistfuls of money at problems that don’t actually exist.
Democrats aren’t honest
Cut it off there, and bask in the simple joys of out-of-context quotations.
in these areas, either. President Obama does a good job of explaining how the Bush tax cuts helped cause today’s deficit,
Read: lying about shit he doesn’t understand.
but then pretends that reinstating taxes on the rich alone can fix most of the problem.
What the hell? I thought we were still talking about global warming. Still, this statement means I’m bound by intellectual honesty to call Obama a moron.
As the polls on climate change shift,
Now we are again? I’m so lost. What was the point of going back to fiscal policy?
he talks about green jobs and energy independence instead of global warming, as if there’s nothing out there but pain-free, win-win solutions.
Maybe people are fleeing the global warming movement because they see a future filled with garage-burning Volts, crushing gas prices, and energy incoherence. Maybe people have decided to stop enabling the government’s fetishistic obsession with regulation for regulation’s sake.
To say that Republican irresponsibility
Read: lack of faith.
Read: I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Read: Asteroids do not concern me, Admiral. I want that ship!
Read: It’s a trap!
Shit, I’m in a Star Wars loop. Carry on.
Read: Who’s scruffy-looking?
makes it more difficult for Democrats to speak honestly is not an excuse.
I’m irresponsible because your irresponsibility makes me irresponsible.
But it is a partial explanation.
And the full explanation is…apparently not included herein.
And while Obama may wish the climate change conversation would go away between now and 2012,
He very much does. It’s hard to sell to the American people that you’ve been doing everything you can possibly do to create jobs while also telling them that you have to destroy jobs.
he at least is not pretending the phenomenon is fiction.
Oh, do science fiction writers count as scientists, because I might need to get their opinions on stoichiometry.
Does Pawlenty believe what he says now? I’ve spoken with the former Minnesota
Requisite name-drop.
I know he is a smart man.
You’re assuming that I trust your judgment, which I don’t. Anyways, now for the backhanded slap…
As recently as 2008 he was supporting congressional action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. I do not believe that he believes those 998 scientists are wrong.
Actually, calling a dude a liar flat-out is more of a forehanded slap.
Which leads to another question: Should we feel better if a possible future president is not ignorant about the preeminent environmental danger facing our planet, but only calculating or cowardly?
Even as transparently contrived as that statement is, either prospect is vastly better than having a present president who is ignorant about the economic danger facing our country and also both calculating and cowardly.
To paraphrase Pawlenty, I don’t know the answer to that one.
My favorite liberal delusion is that everyone agrees with them but each is too ashamed, whether by social convention or by partisan pressure, to admit it. They genuinely believe that they’re Kevin Bacon in Footloose, prancing around the oppressive patriarchal (and, lest we forget, fictional) society than bans dancing and hates fun. Yes. In this instance, fun is shutting down nuclear power plants and mandating that everyone drive a hybrid. Christ, these people are lame.
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