Harold Meyerson: Black People Love Taxes

Debt talks reveal the Republicans’ apocalyptic war on government

By Harold Meyerson, Published: July 12

As Default-on-Our-Debt Day

We’re not going to default on the debt. Hitting the debt ceiling will force some very uncomfortable budgetary prioritization, but the country easily has enough cash inflow to service existing debt.

creeps ever closer,

And if default does happen, it will happen months after the August 2 deadline, after the President and the Treasury have prioritized payments to only the most urgent needs, not on August 2.

America’s two major political parties have embarked on a round of ideological redefinition.

You know how I knew this was going to be a dumb article? Harold Meyerson wrote it. You know what proved it? That last sentence.

Republicans have subordinated even the appearance of concern

And after all, this is what we want politicians to focus on: appearance. Is it too late to bring John Edwards back? That hair is exquisite!

for many of their historic priorities — reducing deficits and the debt,

That’s kind of what this whole thing is about.

maintaining a passable system of roads,

Does anyone really believe that the interstate highway system is in jeopardy?

even reducing Medicare and Social Security payouts

Those dastardly Republicans want Grandma’s money! I might as well grow a pencil-thin mustache, buy a top hat and monocle, and start tying young women to train tracks. Also drop-kicking puppies and shouting at babies to “get a job,” but that’s taking things a step further than even the esteemed Snidely Whiplash.

— to the single goal of blocking any tax increase on anyone ever again.

This assumes that the deal that Republicans are getting is a good one. It’s not. The tax increases would take effect immediately whereas the spending cuts would be deferred by years—in many cases until the end of the decade. At that time future Congresses would forget all about these negotiations and ignore the cuts, instead opting for the path of least resistance, which is always more spending.

The fight over taxes is really about the concept of taxation as a viable option to reducing deficits. Democrats say yes. Republicans say no.

Taking the adage that “that government is best that governs least” to an extreme,

The extreme where “least” actually means “slightly less than planned baseline increases.”

at least some seem to view a government shutdown as a consummation devoutly to be wished. GOP presidential candidate and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty is running ads hailing the shutdown of his state’s government,

Where, again, the Democratic governor showed slavish devotion to raising taxes while the Republican legislature told him to kindly blow it out his ass. Sadly, since the shutdown, has the state of Minnesota faces a postmodern apocalypse in which leather-clad gangsters roam the highways of a desert wasteland with mounted machine guns and armored vehicles in search of scarce gasoline. That’s not happening, you say? That’s the Mel Gibson classic ‘Mad Max?’ My apologies. I haven’t had time to check the news.

the result of the same kind of political impasse that threatens to shutter the feds’ doors.

That’s not even close to true. This is a debate about the government’s ability to borrow more money, not about keeping the government open for business as it was during the budget battles.

If it was possible to give libertarianism a bad name,

It’s not? Then you must love Ron Paul.

today’s Republicans would be doing just that.

Republicans are conservative, not libertarian. I get the point that you’re trying to make, that the entire political spectrum is shifting right. (Which would be awesome, if it were true.) The positions stated above are not in any way, shape, matter, or form contradictory or inconsistent with conservatism, nor are they particularly libertarian. Indeed, it is not the positions or policies that have changed, only their priority and urgency, as determined by external events (like the national debt equaling GDP).

On the Democratic side, President Obama has moved so far to the right that

…he can now see the political center?

he has picked up many of the ideals the Republicans have jettisoned and embraced them as his own. It’s Obama who’s now the deficit-and-debt hawk and who has proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

In abstract. Keep in mind that we still don’t know what the President proposed.

Congressional Democrats oppose the president’s proposed entitlement cuts, but in fact they’ve already voted to reduce Medicare spending (though not benefits) by passing health-care reform,

An excellent point that brings us to another horrifying truth: Holy Shit! There’s ANOTHER new money-sucking entitlement program just around the corner!!!

and, as part of the current budget negotiations, have agreed to major cuts in domestic as well as military spending.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with entitlement cuts, you colossal jackass.

In Obama’s defense,

Now comes the requisite verbal fellatio.

the Republicans he has to deal with have moved so far right that they make even the Gingrich-era GOP with which Bill Clinton grappled look like the Berkeley City Council.

ROTFLMAOLOLOLOL! Berkeley City Council! It’s funny because they’re liberal. A most enjoyable knee-slapper, Harold. Goodness, it’s good to laugh again.

The fiscal constraints on his presidency far exceed those Clinton confronted, too. But if the factors that have pushed Obama rightward are at least intelligible, those that have prompted the Republicans to winnow their agenda to one-note opposition to taxes and spending are nowhere so obvious.

Probably because you’re confusing an agenda with a priority. Not raising taxes is not an agenda. It’s not even a plan. The question is why liberals have insisted on an agenda that demands tax increases that they admit are token panderings.

For one thing, federal tax revenue as a percentage of the gross domestic product is at its lowest level since 1950.

An intellectually curious person would ask why. An intellectually adept person would immediately see that tax revenue as a percentage of GDP dips considerably in recessions and spikes in expansions regardless of tax policy. Harold Meyerson will, with Krugmanesque adroitness, glide right past this very basic and obvious truth.

The correlation between low federal taxes and job creation looks more inverse than direct.

Keep in mind, the invocation of trend analysis—regardless of how idiotic the analysis is—shows that he has looked at a table or graph showing federal tax receipts.

The economy generated far more net new jobs during the ’90s (approximately 22 million during Clinton’s presidency alone), before the Bush tax cuts, than it has since (approximately zero).

Well goodness, this seems like an appropriate time to point out that tax rates were even higher in the 70s, when the economy produced fewer net jobs and lower revenues than in the 90s. This tells us a few things. First, Harold Meyerson was handed a graph that began in 1992 by an intellectually disingenuous think tank (alternately, he himself is intellectually disingenuous.). Second, that the period he’s measuring for Clinton’s presidency measured trough of the 1992 recession to the peak of the 2000 expansion (just before the dot-com bust), whereas the Bush numbers were peak-to-trough. Third, is he seriously implying that tax increases improve the economy, or simply that tax cuts don’t hurt the economy as much as others assume?  

Yet in opposing any tax increases on the rich as part of a debt-reduction deal, House Speaker John Boehner vowed Monday that “the House cannot pass a bill that raises taxes on job creators.”

Job creators? What job creators?

Corporations, Small Businesses, and Individuals.

Over the past two months, according to employment statistics, we seem to have completely run out of job creators,

Great point. We shouldn’t worry about who actually has created jobs in this country for the past two hundred years. We should just give up.

though American multinational corporations are having no trouble creating jobs in the cheap-labor nations of Asia.

The wage gap has shrunk considerably in the last ten years. Asia’s not so labor-cheap anymore. But it is tax-cheap.

Small businesses, however, cannot expand until American consumers start buying more, and American consumers can’t start buying more until they work their way out of the debt they incurred during the recent decades of pervasive income stagnation.

Trivia question: which political party, in the late 90s and early 00s advocated giving low-income Americans access to credit that they wouldn’t otherwise have qualified for?

The Republicans, that is,

What is?

have embraced market libertarianism at the very moment that America’s market capitalism is functioning worse than at any time since the Great Depression.

Which gives us an exceptional opportunity to point out that we don’t actually have market capitalism. Because liberalism is incompatible with capitalism.

Their timing is so perverse that we have to seek explanations for their radicalism that go beyond those of economic philosophy.

Explanations such as: common sense?

Republicans, to be sure, have long waged a war on government, but only now has it become an apocalyptic and total war.

That might have something to do with the level of deficits, the impending defaults across Europe, and the refusal of the Democratic Party to deal with the issue.

Then again, it may also be a reflection of a conservative electorate that demands that their politicians collectively grow a pair.

At its root,

Careful, he’s getting into “root causes.” I suspct that this is where the column will veer from dumb to crazy. Wait for it. Wait for iiiiitttttt….

I suspect, is the fear and loathing that rank-and-file right-wingers feel toward what their government, and their nation, is inexorably becoming:

A neo-Socialist dystopia in which freedom is sacrificed at the altar of liberal political correctness?

multiracial,

Read: “Republicans hate taxes because they’re racist.”

multicultural,

Read: “Republicans hate taxes because they’re xenophobic.”

cosmopolitan

Read: “Republicans are hicks and hayseeds that play banjos and smell funny and say things like ‘folks’…but we’re not elitist. I promise.”

and now headed by a president who personifies those qualities.

Read: “Isn’t he dreamy? If only he were single…”

I'm sure that no one cares that Meyerson just basically said that black people love taxes. 

That America is also downwardly mobile

Downward mobility is a function of upward mobility, and is a byproduct of allowing capitalism to work without interference. It is the polar opposite of Too Big To Fail, which liberals have so staunchly embraced. In other words, Republicans support downward mobility because the absence of class barriers makes capitalism work better.

is a challenge for us all, but for the right, the anxiety our economy understandably evokes is augmented by the politics of racial resentment

This would be an exceptional time to provide a modicum of evidence for a patently outlandish claim. Seriously, even for the professional left this one is shockingly craven.

and the fury that the country is no longer only theirs.

If anything, Republicans proved in 2010 that the country still was theirs. They did this by pummeling Democrats with the message of “Vote Republican: We’re Not Democrats.” That is how profoundly “the country” fears and despises the Democratic Keynesian lunacy. But more importantly, what on earth compelled this article to allegations of Republican racism? Why is it relevant? What is it based on?

That’s not a country whose government they want to pay for

Is the implication that Republicans would be have liberal spending priorities if the country were exclusively white?

—    and if the apocalypse befalls us, they seem to have concluded, so much the better.

When all of the Republican negotiators on the debt ceiling acknowledge the need for a deal that raises the debt limit, it kind of feels like Harold isn’t qualified to be writing about this.

Most Americans, thankfully, don’t share the right’s romance with cataclysm —

If you’re going to make something up, at least use a turn of phrase that doesn’t sound like you’re brainstorming titles for a trashy romance novel.

 something then-Senate Republican leader Bob Dole realized when he called off the shutdown of 1996, something that current Senate GOP chief Mitch McConnell realized Tuesday when he unveiled a cynical and circuitous plan to back off from the impending smash-up. Dole persuaded his fellow Republicans to stand down. It’s not clear, given the furies that possess today’s Republicans, that McConnell can do the same.

He can’t, because you’re going to vilify him anyways. On the margins, being called cynical and circuitious is only slightly less venomous than being called racist and xenophobic. Not to mention that it’s bad for the country. Well done, Mitch. Score another one for the entrenched Republican establishment.