Progressives Unfamiliar with Meaning of Progress; Party Like It's 1917

Get yourself some Tylenol. This might be a little painful to read.

Obama needs a budget to match his progressive ideals

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, April 19, 10:53 AM

For perhaps the first time since being sworn into office, President Obama has articulated, in eloquent terms,

I truly don’t understand the myth of Obama’s eloquence. He says “let me be clear” and follows it up with platitudes and nonsensical contradictions. “Let me be clear: the United States will always stand firm with our NATO allies so long as it’s done third phase of the new moon and so long as we don’t seek input from nations in the general North Atlantic region.”

what it means to be a progressive.

There will never be an eloquent defense of what it means to be a progressive because it’s a manufactured catchall term for a political philosophy of expediency in the furtherance of state-controlled society. Publicly acknowledging and supporting the true nature of progressivism, a euphemism for liberalism, would have ordinary Americans running in horror. This is because at its heart, it always devolves into communism.

In his budget speech last week, he spoke of our obligation to the broader community

So we owe ourselves, basically. Doesn’t this kind of sound like a trophy wife whose friends tell her that she owes it to herself to spend two weeks in an Icelandic spa?

to provide a basic level of security

What’s that old saying? Those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.

and dignity.

No free good in the history of mankind has ever engendered dignity. All it does is create dependency, which is ugly, brutal, and destabilizing.

Speaking of programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, he said what every good progressive believes: “We would not be a great country without those commitments.”

This is too destructive to be snarky about. The idea that America didn’t become great until 1965 is so insulting that it reframes the entire trajectory of American history away from the accumulation of liberty and towards the accumulation of entitlements. It is so antithetical to the American identity that it’s no small wonder that people believe Obama isn’t really an American; he has never actually understood America.

He fused a defense of progressive governance with a scathing critique of Paul Ryan’s cruel budget,

How is raising already confiscatory tax rates on a small portion of the population less cruel than returning spending to 2008 levels?

which all but four Republican House members have now voted for. And he demanded that the rich finally pay their fair share,

Sigh. How many times does it have to be said? The rich already pay most of the taxes. Raising the rates on the rich is simply designed as a mechanism for class warfare, not as a serious attempt to raise revenues. By this point, even a mongoloid chimp understands that lowering tax rates increases the tax base enough to keep revenues roughly level.

vowing to let the Bush tax cuts expire.

Why is that claim taken any more seriously than Republicans’ claims that they would repeal Obamacare? Of course they can’t; they only have one house of congress. Similarly, Obama would personally have to hold about 200 House members’ children hostage to get that tax increase.

It was a powerful speech,

This is getting beyond the point of verbal fellatio.

in many ways reassuring to progressives who have been demoralized by a president who appeared missing in action.

*was* missing in action.

But rhetoric and policy are not the same thing.

And yet you continue to let this jackass skate on rhetoric alone.

And in this case, as in far too many, the policy agenda the president has laid out is not worthy of, in his words, “the America we believe in.”

But not an America that the Standard & Poors’ credit raters believe in. Just saying.

To begin with, the president continues to let Republicans define the playing field in almost every instance. Why is the debate we are having not about whether to cut, but how much to cut?

Is that really a question that you need someone to answer? Because the American people collectively shrieked in horror about three months after electing Obama and scrambled to sweep Republicans back into government en masse about six months ago.

Why isn’t it about the urgency of joblessness instead of the perils of deficits?

The two aren’t connected?

The budget the president proposed is clearly influenced by a discredited conservative economic worldview.

Discredited by whom? Paul Krugman doesn’t count.

It shouldn’t be accepted as the “progressive” alternative in the negotiations soon to come.

The President’s plan may have been influenced by conservatives in the same way that Allied military strategy was influenced by German troop movements in WWII. It is by no means conservative, and it is not accepted by anyone at all.

What’s worse is that, even on this narrow playing field, the president isn’t fighting harder for those who need government’s support the most.

Military families?

He has jettisoned the Keynesian thinking this era demands,

Oh Jesus. She might as well start quoting Marx.

prematurely embracing what might be described an austerity-lite policy, one that all but guarantees mass unemployment as the new normal.

Please elaborate on such an outlandish claim. Seriously. How do tax cuts hurt the economy? It truly baffles me that liberals are somehow allowed to believe (allowed in the sense that they’re not laughed out of every serious economic forum in existence) that adding a quarter of a point to the cost of debt via Fed open market operations can cripple an economy, yet adding about 5% to every tax bracket is completely painless.

In his speech, he spoke eloquently of how there was “nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.”

Small businesses?

Nothing courageous, indeed. And yet it is President Obama who has said that for every $1 in tax increases, we should create $2 in spending cuts.

Which itself is asinine, because you can’t assume that rate changes, which is the only thing the government adjusts when altering income taxes, corresponds to nominal dollar figures. This is because tax rates have a dynamic and sometimes uneven effect on economic growth.

Faced with the choice between new cuts to the social safety net and new taxes for the richest few, it is not just Paul Ryan but President Obama whose acceptance of the way this choice is framed leaves the poor shouldering most of the burden.

The poor don’t shoulder ANY of the burden. They haven’t for years. Put simply, the poor don’t pay income taxes. At all. None. Zero. 0.00%; $0.00.

The most progressive president since Lyndon Johnson

Hilariously, she means this as a compliment.

should be willing to embrace a bolder opening gambit.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this issue didn’t just begin when Paul Ryan proposed a budget. You guys had two years to shove a healthy dose of John Maynard Keynes down our throats. It didn’t work, and the American people have taken notice. Your turn is over.

He should not be so willing to compromise on principle, even when ultimate compromise may be necessary.

No. Just no. He shouldn’t compromise even though he has to compromise? Fuck off, Katrina.

Real leadership might require compromise, but it cannot be defined by compromise.

So…he should play hardball, but with the understanding that he’ll eventually cave?

It must instead be defined by a clear vision for the future,

Despite saying “let me be clear” about three times a speech, President Obama has never shown clarity of thought on any issue of public importance.

and most important, a willingness to defend it. It should be focused not on what is possible, but instead, on the most that is possible; not the path of least resistance, but the path of maximum potential benefit.

Seriously, it’s like the woman is discovering negotiation for the first time. It’ kind of like watching a child’s groping attempts at cursive. (Which, for the record, is a worthless “skill.”)

Failing to do so is what can produce a Tea Party budget, such as the one adopted last week. As Paul Krugman put it in his column this week,

I’m sure the Times appreciates the Post’s support. Also, did I call that she’d cite Krugman or what? Damn I’m good.

the two parties “don’t just live in different moral universes, they also live in different intellectual universes.”

In other words: not only are Republicans terrible people, they’re idiots too! This from the people who lectured us on civility.

Any embrace or acceptance of that Republican universe by the White House is a retreat from the reforms this country desperately needs — and was promised.

What a rallying cry.

“No surrender! Except when you have to surrender! But really, only kind of surrender, because surrendering is necessary but unpleasant! And we really really don’t want to surrender. Until we do.”

Yet the president has again telegraphed his willingness to compromise, admitting in his speech that he did not “expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach” he laid out. What, then, does he expect it will look like?

Probably something sane.

The further right this process moves

I.e. the further towards the American people this process moves.

—    whether as a result of a political system warped and broken by corporate interests

It was an electoral trouncing in November, but blame corporations if you must.

protecting their privilege,

The privilege is to compete against the other privileged, a group which literally anyone can join. Apparently you’re privileged to squeeze out a profit by busting your ass to do things better, faster, and cheaper than everyone else. That’s how liberals define privilege.

or lobbyists actively gutting reform

Lobbyists spend most of their time actively pushing for reform. That’s why virtually everything passed in the last two years has been a legislative disaster jam-packed with special interest sweetheart deals.

 — the more disheartening the definition of victory becomes. Is merely preventing Republicans from ending Medicare what victory looks like now?

Republicans have proposed a market-based voucher system, not dismantling all spending to Medicare.

Yes, we need a defensive opposition, but while Democrats control the Senate and the White House, they cannot act merely as a minority party.

No worries. It won’t be an issue much longer.

Shouldn’t they be laying out a clear vision of a sustainable and fair economy?

They don’t have one. And what the hell does sustainable mean in this context? It’s as if she views the economy solely as a vehicle to financing non-market programs.

As the extremists take over the GOP, is the Democratic Party really going to be content to define success so modestly?

Look, I get that you’re pissed that conservatives had so much success painting Obama as an extremist. They were helped by that fact that he was actually (and still is) an extremist. That doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. This is a center-right country. Don’t forget it.

There are at least 83 Democratic members of the House who believe that we cannot exclude alternatives that would solve this economic challenge more justly and fairly.

Jesus, you’re so deep in the euphemism you didn’t even say what it is.

They believe we must challenge the limits of our narrowing debate and expand, as President Obama once called it, “our moral imagination.”

It was a nonsensical term then, it’s a nonsensical term now. Moral imagination. Jesus Christ.

They are the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), who last week introduced what they are calling the “People’s Budget,”

Sure. After we get done with that, let’s all pound some vodka, call each other “comrade” and stage a purge of all non-party members. Oh wait. That was the 1910s in Russia. This progressive thing is starting to sound kind of like regression.

an alternative both to President Obama’s proposal and the unconscionable Ryan Budget.

I suppose we are fortunate that we have a president to the right of outright Communism, but that’s kind of like giving thanks that you don’t have a giant metal rod lodged in your chest.

It lays out what a robust progressive agenda should look like. It protects the social safety net,

The status quo.

promotes a progressive tax policy

Also the status quo, but (without reading it) I’m assuming that they want to make American tax policy “more progressive.”

and makes significant cuts to the Pentagon by bringing our troops home from Iraq

Also the status quo. Since before Obama took office.

and Afghanistan.

Would have been the status quo, until Obama screwed things up.

It actually generates a surplus by 2021, according to Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the CPC.

So, by doing nothing but raising taxes on the rich and leaving Afghanstan, they achieve surplus by 2021? I don’t even have to look at this nonsense of a plan to understand that their accounting is pure bullshit.

This is the kind of budget our president should be proposing.

He would literally get laughed out of office, so…be my guest.

This is the kind of budget the progressive community should be rallying around. One that makes millionaires, billionaires and corporations pay their fair share.

Compare that to a budget that just makes millionaires and billionaires.

It’s like they think that their own misguided, childish spite is more important than economic growth.

One that protects the poor and middle class. But it is the kind of budget that establishment Democrats and media elites are inclined to ignore and dismiss.

Yeah. Because it’s both embarrassing and crazy.

We can be, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently put it, a country “of the 1%, for the 1%, by the 1%.”

The 1% that pays for 34% of the government.

Or we can be a country that believes in — and embraces — shared sacrifice.

Which, of course, is a euphemism for shifting the sacrifice to someone else.

A country not defined by the greed of the few but by the needs of the many.

Holy shit. That communism stuff before was kind of tongue-in-cheek. This isn’t. This is flat-out, Stalin-loving, Mao-reading, beorgeois-hating, state-worshipping, gulag-populating, one party-ruling propaganda for communism. From each according to his ability; to each according to his need. Someone please get Katrina a little red star for her hat.

That’s the only kind of America really worth believing in.

America is a nation of free men. It is defined not by the “needs of the many,” but by the capability of the individuals to pursue their own fortune. This means failure and strife and hardship, but it also means wealth, production, and the overwhelming equalizing force of the dollar.

There is nothing to love about deference to need. By shackling America’s productive capacity to needs, it enslaves producers to leeches who would siphon their ability. It encourages the moderately able to instead leech. It debases the human spirit and undermines the basic dignity that America was designed to preserve. It is the purest form of evil, the urge to shame a man into subjugating himself to you and make his prowess yours.

This is more serious than my snarkiness. Katrina Vanden Heuvel has issued a call to arms for communism in the United States in one of the nation’s leading newspapers. This is what the other side looks like: a hammer and sickle swaddled in the stars and stripes.

You're Welcome, Jeff Immelt.

Alright you curmudgeonly shrew, let’s do that thing I do.

The wrong economic debate

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, April 5, 10:56 AM

There’s a janitor who lives in a studio apartment just outside of Stevens Point, Wis.

Sweet. If there’s a down-home girl with fading looks or an up-town debutante looking for excitement on the other side of the tracks, this is pretty much a Springsteen song.

Or Billy Joel.

Or something equally awesome.

He cleans the math and science buildings at a state university,

So you’re saying he’s a state employee. In Wisconsin. Where we just learned that the average Milwaukee teachers annual total compensation flirts with $100,000. This is where the rope suspending my disbelief begins to fray.

Also, blue collar Springsteen-style heroes don’t clean schools. They either clean in downtrodden manufacturing plants or gritty bars where bikers puke in the pee-trough. This shit is worse than Secret Garden.

a job he’s been doing for about 18 months, after a year of unemployment. He’s 43 and last year made $24,622.

Fuck that’s pathetic. That guy would make more on unemployment, which, for the record, he would’ve qualified for throughout about 12 of those terrible months he spent cleaning the University.

He doesn’t have kids, so he doesn’t qualify for a child-care tax credit.

Whew. Thank God this world-beater didn’t procreate.

He doesn’t own a home

But I’m guessing the dude owns a kegerator. (Why can’t I contribute to the hypothetical janitor’s backstory?)

or a hybrid car — those credits don’t apply to him, either.

In my head, the guy drives the same beat-up Trans Am he did in high school. Except now the passenger side door is made of cardboard.

He hasn’t been enrolled in school since the 10th grade, so he definitely doesn’t qualify for any education credits or deductions.

FINE. He drives the same beat-up Trans Am he did when he should have been in high school.  Does that help alleviate the dissonance of the cross-narration?

Oh, the passenger door is still made of cardboard.

He just learned that Gov. Scott Walker’s new budget has slashed his benefits

That sneaky wench! I knew she chose Wisconsin for a reason.

and that next year he’ll be bringing in about 16 percent less per month.

Sounds like this guy is really regretting having actively avoided developing a marketable skill set his entire life.

Also, I’m not sure that math squares, but I’ll let it slide.

And when he sits down to do his taxes next week, he’ll find that he paid the federal government around $1,400 in 2010

Seriously? This dude might as well pay in pocket lint. That’s 5.7%.

About a thousand miles to the east, in Fairfield, Conn.,

Aw sweet! This story is a trans-class love affair!

General Electric, one of the world’s largest multinational corporations, posted a $14.2 billion profit for 2010.

Woot! I just imagined that I fist-bumped a symbolic representation of GE. And that symbolic representation just happened to be a squirrel named Reggie. The fist-bumping logistics with a timid rodent were indeed tricky, but I pulled the complex meneuver off like a champ. (Natch.)

When its accountants were finished working their magic, the company didn’t owe a single dollar in federal taxes.

That squirrel deserves another fist-bump.

“People can think what they think,” said Jeff Immelt, GE’s chief executive, in response to a growing anger to this story, first reported last week by the New York Times.

Yeah! Fuck ‘em. It’s not like you have any political responsibilities or anything gay like that…http://www.biztimes.com/daily/2009/2/6/obama-appoints-immelt-to-economic-recovery-advisory-board…Oh. ….Shit.

What else is there to think, one wonders, but that with the muscle and money of lobbyists and lawyers, with the access and influence built over generations, GE has done not just the audacious but the outrageous. And it is not alone.

So you’re saying that GE has good accountants and tax lawyers? Get right out of town!

Exxon Mobil, for example, made $19 billion in profits in 2009 but paid no federal income taxes. In fact, it received a $156 million rebate from the IRS. Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, even though it made $4.4 billion in profits and was handed a nearly $1 trillion bailout by taxpayers. The list, inconceivably, goes on.

Literally all of those examples were primarily the result of tax-loss carry-forwards, which is another way of saying “shut the fuck up about things you don’t understand, you horse-faced trollop.”

That may have been a bit harsh.

And yet the conversation in Washington hasn’t turned to aggressively closing the loopholes that GE’s lobbyists created for its accountants to exploit.

Nothing riles a liberal up like raising taxes.

Still, I fundamentally agree, but not in a way that KvH would like. The tax code is long, convoluted, and arbitrary. The only thing more predictable in Washington than the calls to simplify the tax code are the efforts to obfuscate it. The simplification always work. For about a year. Then our politicians-slash-amateur-sociologist (and truly, I can’t think of a lamer hobby) decide that the country is really just a giant beaker of blue goo that only needs a low simmer from the Bunsen Burner of Keynesian economics and some very meticulous stirring to start defying the laws of science/economics.

Within five years, the tax code is so convoluted that the IRS can’t figure it out, tax revenues are down, and fraud has ravaged the effectiveness of the poorly-conceived and even-more-poorly-implemented tax incentives. (That’s best-case. Worst-case scenarios generally involve the desertification of Iowa. Think about it.)

It hasn’t turned toward ending the ridiculous tax breaks on corporate dividends and capital gains

It takes either gigantic stones or crippling ignorance to seriously advance a full-throated defense of the double-taxation of savings in the midst of an economic crisis caused by a deficiency in savings.

that allow hedge fund managers and the very wealthy to pay the government a lower percentage than their middle-class employees.

Wow. That was quite the jump. Blink and you’ll miss it. Apparently because some wealthy corporations have low income tax rates, wealthy individuals are somehow culpable. I was under the impressions that liberals despised the idea that corporations had the same rights as individuals when it came to political donations. (After all, that was literally the only issue of the Citizens United decision.)

But that’s just the beginning of this outright lie. The wealthy decidedly do not pay less in taxes—either by nominal value or by percentage—than the middle class.

And finally, the cherry on top: corporate taxes aren’t paid by corporations anyways. Producers raise prices  to accommodate tax increases on sellers (depending, of course, on the price elasticity of demand and the price elasticity of supply for the market in question.) In effect, KvH is advocating that you should be stark-raving mad that you don’t get to pay a higher price for a washing machine.

Instead, Congress is debating whether $33 billion in cuts to the social safety net is enough to make the Tea Party happy.

It’s not.

While Republicans in the House have stopped talking nearly altogether about jobs

Well, Republicans have rightly calculated that it’s not worth the political capital to convince the American people that the unemployment figures are staggeringly misleading and, in many ways, intentionally deceptive. Instead, they’ll let the President get his good news out of the way before discouraged workers start flooding back into the labor market in the next few months.

Plus, the best job-stimulating activity they could engage in is cutting taxes. They just fought tooth and nail to keep the Bush tax cuts in place in December. After that, they can remove the obscene regulations around businesses and try to shut down the printing press to ease inflationary pressures.  Finally, they can boost investor confidence by solidifying the budgetary situation and getting the country’s fiscal house in order.

Come to think of it, Republicans haven’t talked about anything other than jobs.

 (and have embraced a budget that could cost the economy 700,000 of them, according to Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi),

As in Moody’s, the credit rating agency that keeps threatening to downgrade treasury securities because of the crippling debt that the Republican proposal seeks to fix? That Moodys?

the head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, someone charged with finding a way to sustained job growth, is none other than Jeff Immelt himself, tax evader in chief.

I’m pretty sure that this counts as an honest-to-God instance of libel. Tax evasion is a crime, after all, and there is scant evidence that Jeff Immelt did anything illegal. Tax avoidance is just good business practice.

Also, it’s intellectually dishonest. Immelt is finding plenty of jobs for accountants and tax lawyers alone, but high profitability is generally a good indicator that GE will start hiring for new positions. (I feel like I’m teaching the “slow” class when I have to explain things like that.)

This is a systemic problem that neither belongs to nor can be solved by a single man. But for Immelt to keep his post with the administration now would be bad politics, bad policy and bad messaging. Yet as I write this, it doesn’t look as if he will be asked to step down.

Still, I am hopeful.

First you make libelous accusations against this man. Then you imply that his allegedly illegal activity (although you’re the only one alleging that it’s illegal) is hurting job creation, meaning that he’s also, in your estimation, bad at his job. Finally, if that weren’t enough, you call for him to lose his job.

Well thanks, you skanky platypus, but you’re not helping. Okay, my ad hominem insults are getting a little weird.

I am hopeful because an incredible spirit and energy has been unleashed.

Damn. Now this is more of a 60s folk song. Bring back Springsteen!!!

It was first shown during the Wisconsin labor battle, and it is being sustained and nurtured, and broadened to communities across the country. People are showing that they will not abide a system that finances corporate greed on the backs of the poor and middle class.

Yeah! We only finance Union greed on the backs of the poor and middle class!

On Monday, the nation commemorated the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.,

Uh…

Well that was a pivot.

who was killed in Memphis, where he had gone to fight for the rights of sanitation workers.

Seriously, is this article about Unions or not? It’s getting a little late to make up your mind.

Thousands gathered across America for a national day of action supporting public employees, other working people and trade unions in a common quest for jobs, justice and decency for all citizens.

Well that’s vague.

They participated in teach-ins, protests, demonstrations and vigils,

Is it just me, or does protesting sound insufferably lame?

all with a simple and deeply American message: It is time for the richest, most privileged among us to pay their fair share.

Whoa whoa whoa. Slow down, hoss. First, we’re back to that really strange jump that you made about three paragraphs ago that because GE didn’t pay taxes, it must mean that all rich people are paying obscenely low taxes. Beyond being intellectually lazy and logically fallacious, it’ also demonstrably untrue.

But here’s the more important point: in an article when you invoke Martin Luther King Jr., it’s just uncouth to also promote the forceful application of power by the majority in an effort to target the minority. That you’re talking about economic classes is completely irrelevant; it’s antithetical to the equality that defined the civil rights movement.

They spoke of the widening gulf in American politics, between the powerful and the powerless, between those who most need the government’s assistance and those most likely, instead, to receive it.

Sometimes, this is like playing a card game against a toddler; you’ve got to just let it go. Otherwise, you’re stuck deleting paragraphs upon paragraphs of semi-intelligible rants that simultaneously pretend to be shocked by the ineptitude of an opponent while decrying the systematic injustice of the entire language of the issue at hand.

(Not that I did that here; that happened the last time I played Go Fish against my nephew. That cheating bastard’s mom wouldn’t let me read him the letter. Apparently I say “fuck” too much for a four-year-old.)

They are not alone. For all the disappointment that progressives feel about this Congress, there are members who have been leaders and allies on Capitol Hill.

Consider Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

I’ve considered him. He’s an avowed socialist and just batshit crazy. I mean seriously? A socialist? What the hell is that about?

Always the people’s champion, Sanders has called for closing corporate tax loopholes, which, if done, would raise more than $400 billion over a 10-year period.

Yeah…no it wouldn’t. It would just encourage even more American companies to realize their revenues and move their jobs overseas.

He’s also introduced legislation imposing a 5.4 percent surtax on millionaires that would yield up to $50 billion more a year —

Yeah…no it wouldn’t. It would just encourage even more American millionaires to move to more tax-favorable locations.

more than enough to protect Pell Grants and Head Start and other programs facing the chopping block.

He is joined by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.),

Yet another mark of shame for the People’s Republic of Illinois. Also, “Ill.” hasn’t been the abbreviation for Illinois for about fifteen years.

who has introduced legislation to create a separate tax bracket for millionaires and billionaires — an option that garners the support of 81 percent of the American people, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

I literally see no distinction between modern-day liberals and WWI-era Bolsheviks. Well, the Bolsheviks used the word “proletariat” more, but then that might just be a disconnect in translation.

The common sense, humane response at this moment is to fight to reset the terms of a suffocatingly narrow and wrongheaded debate.

Humane? Humane is not redefining the terms of a debate. Humane is manning up, grabbing your old man’s bolt-action rifle, going out back, and firing off a round into the face of a dog that got rabies while fighting off a wolf to save your life. That’s fucking humane.

...Now I’m really sad.

This is the heritage of the progressive movement and, indeed, our obligation.

If this is a manifesto, it’s downright terrible.

The best principles of our country have been trampled by corporate immorality

Fuck that noise. It’s not immoral to not pay taxes if you don’t owe taxes. We responsible adults call that “fulfilling fiduciary obligations.”

and right-wing extremism.

Tax breaks were progressive ideas. GE gets tax breaks for all of the useless “green energy” nonsense it does. You think that’s a conservative idea? If I had it my way, there wouldn’t be an income tax at all.  Or if there were, it certainly wouldn’t apply to corporations, because taxing corporations is just fucking stupid. It only leads to price increases, reduced consumption, and deadweight loss of economic efficiency.

But they can be restored. Martin Luther King Jr. knew as much when he fought for the sanitation workers of Tennessee 43 years ago. Now, we must know it too.

Seriously, if you get to invoke MLK in a unions rights issue, I get to invoke Jesus for tax issues.

Even MLK would agree Jesus wins in the roshambo of rhetorical overreach. 

The Era of Big Government is Over. Stage One: Denial.

Deficit hawks and the games they play

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

For 30 years,

In other words: since Reagan. Since the demise of Keynesianism as a serious economic philosophy. Since conservatives found their identity.

conservative ideologues

Keep in mind for future reference that he is implying that being an ideologue is somehow a negative.

have played moderate deficit hawks

[null set]

for suckers.

You'd think this might endow

I’m going to snicker quietly to myself, but I’m not going to make a penis joke. That’s the high road, people.

those middle-of-the-road deficit-busters

Again, [null set].

with a touch of humility.

I’m not entirely sure what point he’s trying to make here. Is it that the right has been tricking centrists into supporting deficit reduction that they already support? And that because of this Blofeldian deceit, that the centrists should then project modesty and meekness?

Fat chance.

Don’t act like your logical contortions make sense.

They stick with their self-righteous moralism, pretending to be bipartisan and beyond ideology.

Remember when he thought that being ideological was bad? Now, apparently not being ideological is bad. Quite a swing for two sentences.

In fact, they make the problem they want to solve worse by continuing to empower the tax-cuts-in-every-season conservatives.

Finally! A fair point! Not a good point, mind you, but a fair one. Dionne believes that lowering taxes significantly decreases revenues and accordingly increases the deficit. It’s woefully simplistic, economically myopic, and completely misdiagnoses the cause of the deficit, but let’s roll with it.

It's thus satisfying to see President Obama ignore the willfully naive who are wailing over deficits.

Is the assertion here that deficits aren’t a problem, that deficits aren’t an immediate problem, or that it’s satisfying to see the country’s leader pretend a problem isn’t there?

He knows that new revenue will have to play a big role in deficit reduction.

Read: we need tax increases.

He also knows that House Republicans are pretending we can cut our way out of this mess and would demagogue any general tax increases.

Of course, you can cut your way out of any deficit. Just stop spending. This is all theoretical, of course. The point is, the theoretical construct for cutting spending to eliminate a deficit is far more sound than the theoretical construct for growing revenues to implausible percentages of GDP while maintaining strong economic growth.

So he has proposed some serious spending cuts

[null set]

and some modest revenue increases

Read: new taxes.

to keep things stable as he embarks on a long struggle to move our dysfunctional budget politics to a better place.

He’s not even sort of doing that. He’s ducking for cover and hoping the issue goes away on its own.

This annoys his deficit-obsessed critics,

Again, is the assertion that the deficit isn’t a big deal, because you just praised the President for spending cuts and revenue increases.

by which I mean just about everyone who says he should simply embrace the proposals of the Bowles-Simpson commission.

It’s a good starting point.

Obama should smile, let them rage and go about his business.

What business? This is the job. This is, quite frankly, the most important part of the job. Without financial stability, we can’t fund essential functions of the government, like national defense and basic infrastructure maintenance. (Funding for a painting of Henry Ford in cow’s blood does not qualify as essential functions of the government.) He can’t go about his business because this is his business. This is what conservatives mean when we say that he’s not up for the job. Apparently, as Dionne displays, it’s not unique to President Obama. The progressive ideology is simply not suited to address the challenges that we are currently facing.

Let's look at history.

Excellent idea.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he won big tax cuts coupled with big increases in military spending.

::Swoon::

The tax cuts and a severe recession tanked government revenue.

Mostly the recession.

Unlike today's conservatives, Reagan at least acknowledged mathematical reality and signed some tax increases.

These were largely simplifications of existing tax code.

But these were insufficient, and it fell first to George H.W. Bush - the last truly fiscally responsible Republican - and then to Bill Clinton to restore budgetary sanity.

It didn’t hurt that we had won the Cold War by that point, and that the economy went gangbusters—based on nothing related to federal policy—for about twenty years starting after the recession of the early eighties. This was accelerated by outsourcing (opposed by Democrats), and budgetary policies and welfare reform put in place by Republican congresses and erroneously credited to Clinton.

But the conservatives who dug the hole

Why is it that the deficit wasn’t a big issue when GW Bush left office?

did nothing to get us out of it. On the contrary, they denounced the first President Bush for raising taxes,

First, I was six, so don’t put that on me. Second, the objection was less about the taxes and more about the blatant disregard for his word. Republicans don’t believe blindly that there should be no taxes to finance the government. Nor do we believe that reductions in taxes will always increase federal revenues (we actually understand the Laffer Curve.) Quite simply, we are a reactionary counterbalance to the certainty that liberals will promote policies that advocate tax increases on an already woefully overtaxed society.

and every Republican voted against Clinton's economic plan.

He had one?

For their bravery in supporting tax increases in 1993, Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994.

Which is when the policies that propelled to the boom of the late-90s were crafted. Kind of like how the Republican legislators of today are cleaning up the mess from the “brave” members who voted in favor of Obamacare.

By the end of the Clinton years, we had a handsome surplus.

Let’s not get carried away; it was a surplus, but not a particularly large or sustainable one.

In came the second President Bush who, with Republicans in Congress, declared the surplus too big.

No, they declared that taxes were too high. They were, and still are. There is a good argument to be made that the structural problems that we currently have in our economy were there in the 2000 crash, but that President Bush’s tax cuts and a policy that allowed the free market to course-correct shortened a very bad recession. Regardless, deficits always increase in recessions because revenues always dip. Spending is never as reactionary.

It was one problem they worked very hard to solve. Two tax cuts and two wars later,

We were attacked. One of these wars is universally agreed to be absolutely essential. The second was essential based on faulty intelligence. Even with that faulty intelligence, it still proved to be a good idea.

we were plunged into deficits - again. And the economic downturn that started on Bush 43's watch made everything worse, cutting revenue

Revenue is taxes, FYI.

and requiring more deficit spending to get the economy moving.

Spending DOES NOT get the economy moving!

Where were the moderate deficit hawks in all this?

I keep telling you, moderation is incompatible with being a deficit hawk.

They have a very bad habit. When conservatives blow up our fiscal position with their tax cuts, the deficit hawks are silent - or, at best, mumble a few words of mild reproach to have something on the record - and let the budget wreckage happen. Quite a few in their ranks (yes, including some Democrats) actually supported the Bush tax cuts.

And bless their little hearts for cowing to political pressure to do the right thing.

But when it's the progressives' turn in power,

We vote our leaders into power. It’s not a second-grade class election where everyone gets a turn by virtue of simply being there.

the deficit hawks become ferocious.

That’s more a cumulative effect. Having a national debt that is the size of our GDP is a terrible thing. We are on the precipice of having our debt rating downgraded, which will immediately increase the cost of servicing our debt by increasing the required rate for US bondholders. Our deficit has risen to roughly 10% of GDP (up from a Bush-era average just shy of 2%). The reason that there is alarm is because this is pretty goddamn scary.

They denounce liberals if they do not move immediately to address the shortfall left by conservatives.

Well to be fair, we denounce liberals for sport. It doesn’t mean we’re not right to gasp in horror at the easily predictable (and, frankly, widely expected) results of Obama’s spend-happy policies.

Thus, conservatives get to govern as they wish. Liberals are labeled as irresponsible

Can I make an editing suggestion? Let’s just keep it as “Liberals are irresponsible” and leave it at that.

unless they abandon their own agenda and devote their every moment in power to cutting the deficit.

Except that President Obama has spent precisely none of his moments in power to cutting the deficit. NONE MOMENTS!

It's a game for chumps. The conservatives play it brilliantly.

It’s not really a game. The country is broke.

By winning their tax cuts and slashing government revenue, they constrain what liberals can do whenever they get back into power.

That’s limited government, and it’s why conservatism is a movement that has always been predicated on strong presidential leadership. Liberals have unwittingly given astonishing power to the executive branch to regulate, to interpret broadly written laws, and to spend vast reams of freshly minted greenbacks We simply need a leader to wield it with the strength to dismantle the bureaucratic machine.

How do we know our difficulties stem primarily from a shortage of revenue?

We don’t. In fact, we know precisely the opposite.

Consider what would happen if we allowed all the tax cuts scheduled to expire in 2012, including the ones enacted under Bush, to go away.

Dr. Peter Venkman: This [government] is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.

Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?

Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.

Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.

Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!

Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...

Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!

Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Mayor: All right, all right! I get the point!

Okay, that’s from Ghostbusters in case you suck as a person and couldn’t already tell.

That would produce nearly as much deficit reduction over the next decade - roughly $4 trillion - as all the maneuvers of the Bowles-Simpson commission put together.

Of course, that assumes completely unrealistic revenue projections and economic circumstances, but by all means, let’s leave the serious matter of the federal budget to nincompoops living in a fantasy world.

If you want to be serious about closing the deficit, ending the Bush tax cuts is a good place to start.

Why? If you give the government more money, they’re just going to spend it on useless programs. This happened here in Illinois. Right after a massive “one-time” increase in the income tax to pay off the state’s debts, the governor proposed a budget that increased spending.

The commission's work showed just how effective conservatives have been. By saying they will never, ever, ever raise taxes,

To be fair, the commission had numerous tax increases, most of which I object to.

conservatives intimidate moderates into making concession after concession.

Is the argument here that raising taxes in a recession is a moderate position? I’m pretty sure that’s not why we had a 60+ seat swing in November.

In the end, the Senate conservatives on the commission - but not the House conservatives - supported some mild tax increases. But Bowles-Simpson proposed about twice as much in spending cuts as in revenue increases. You would think that moderates could at least hold out for a 50-50 split. But no, they'll do anything to win over a few conservatives.

Is it just me, or is it starting to get uncomfortable how stridently he’s arguing that we should give more money and power to the federal government?

As a result, any conservative who supports even the smallest tax increase is hailed as courageous.

This is completely counterintuitive to what you’ve been trying to say for about 3 pages of drivel. Conservatives that support tax increases should be roundly condemned.

Any liberal who proposes moderate spending cuts is condemned as a gutless coward unless he or she also supports slashing Social Security and Medicare. What's "moderate" or "balanced" about this?

Not sure. It’s completely un-tethered to reality, if that’s what you’re asking.

I hope Obama has the spine to keep calling the bluff of the deficit hawks until they get serious about changing the politics of deficit reduction. We can't afford another 30 years of fiscal evasion.

Are you out of your mind? We can’t afford another 2 years of fiscal evasion. We’re poised to need to raise the debt ceiling in about a month, and I have serious doubts that Republicans are going to go along without a budget that actually addresses cuts to the bloated federal bureaucracy and ever-increasing siphon of the private sector. Moody’s has been warning us about dropping our credit rating for two years, but the warnings have been fast and furious recently. Having the national debt surpass GDP is a colossal milestone—one that Greece and Ireland reached not so long ago.

If the asinine idea that we can tax our way out of debt persists, we’re going to have to move from the politics of a deficit to the politics of default.

Some Day I'll Quit You, Gail Collins

Gail Collins is at it again, and I'm here to dutifully document my disdain for every word she writes. It's addictive. 

Falling Off the Bandwagon

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: December 8, 2010

Dear Answerperson:

Oh dear God, she’s doing Dear Abby.

My boyfriend is a liberal Democrat and ever since the president announced his tax deal with the Republicans, he has been impossible to live with.

So…pretty much par for the course?

First he burned his “Audacity of Hope” sweater.

Did his mother knit it for him for Christmas? Who has a political sweater? Is Jimmy Carter back in vogue on the left?

Then he began messing up the cat’s litter box,

Try the literary classic “Everybody Poops.”

claiming he needed to draw “lines in the sand.”

Wah waaa (that sound effect doesn’t work as well in text)

Now he wants to call off our wedding

Don’t read into it that you just happen to have put on five pounds.

because he says that when you put your trust in people, they break your heart.

Miserable Moderate

All moderates are miserable. It’s the natural condition of being without a spine.

Dear Miserable,

Ask your boyfriend if he would rather spend the entire holiday season wondering what Senator Joe Lieberman will do next

I pitched that game show five years ago. It involved Joe Lieberman running through a series of puzzles based on cryptic clues from mimes. NBC wanted it, but really, who wants to put a show on NBC? That and I couldn’t find a non-creepy mime.

and whether Olympia Snowe will vote for cloture.

This game show pitch was far less successful.

Then he will turn pale and offer to take you out for a nice dinner.

But don’t ask him if you look fat in those jeans.

Answerperson

***********

Look on the bright side, Democratic base.

At least she understands who the Times’ readership base is.

You’ve been urging President Obama to get really mad.

IMAGE:

Ever since the inauguration, you’ve been waiting for him to take a stand, point fingers at the people who are blocking progress and demand that they get the heck out of the road.

He did that. He got laughed at. Really, for someone from the South Side of Chicago, this guy is incomparably wussy.

And this week he did it! Yippee!

Of course the liberal Democrats did not really plan on his getting mad at the liberal Democrats. But you can’t have everything.

“You’ll take what we give you and like it” also happens to be the Democrats’ tax policy.

“This isn’t the politics of the moment. This has to do with what can we get done right now,” the president said heatedly as he defended his tax deal with the Republicans against outrage from the Congressional left.

It takes a lot to make President Obama incoherent.

Specifically, technical issues with the teleprompter.

I think the vision of trying to corral 60 votes in the Senate

Also known as “his job.”

on the night before Christmas

Like last year?

sent him over the brink.

The lame-duck Senate has been extremely busy not passing a range of legislation.

Yet another example of productive obstructionism and necessary partisanship.

The votes on two Democratic proposals to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for everybody but the rich were 53 to 37 and 53 to 36. Of course, under venerable Senate tradition, that means they failed entirely.

Outrage in 2004; Sarcasm in 2010. Remember back when the Senate threatened to use the “nuclear option” to push through Bush judicial nominees? Gail Collins was all for the venerable Senate tradition back then.

It was at that point that Obama announced a deal with the Republicans to salvage unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless and create a sort of ministimulus bill with tax cuts for everybody, including the working poor, besides the dreaded, hated giveaway to the undeserving wealthy.

I can’t even tell anymore. Is this sarcasm?

“The American people are outraged!” said Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Judging the American people by what goes on in Vermont is like trying to get a pulse by grabbing someone’s little toe.

He wanted the president to draw that line in the sand,

Alternately, cat litter.

let the unemployment benefits lapse,

Agreed.

the tax code fall into limbo, and hold out until public opinion forced 60 votes to come around.

Which might eventually happen, but only after the left dwindles to a  House with 25 Democrat members in 2013.

If you really wanted the American people to rally around no-tax-cuts-for-richies,

And really, what’s more unifying for the citizenry than pilfering from certain citizens?

shouldn’t we have had this conversation before the election?

We did, but judging from the issues that Gail was talking about, I’m guessing she missed it.

It’s a lot easier to send Washington a message at the polls than on a protest march in a sub-zero wind-chill factor.

I really want to show my disdain for wealth, but I can't very well do it in my $185 North Face fleece.

No, we waited until now because the Senate leaders left the timing up to their members who were running for re-election, and the Democrats in question said they’d rather not have to go on the record.

Profiles in courage.

O.K., I’ve got to admit it. I’ve fallen off the line-in-the-sand bandwagon.

Speaking of falling off the wagon, this column makes me thirsty.

For one thing, opposing the Obama-Republican deal puts you on the same side as Sarah Palin,

::Play Darth Vader music from Star Wars::  THE HORROR!

who sent out one of her twitters

Much to just about everyone’s chagrin, the term is “tweets.”

from hell

“Helltweet” would be a pretty decent name for a metal band.

on the subject, and Christine O’Donnell, the former Senate candidate.

“Helltweet Minion” would be even better.

At a Tea Party meeting on Dec. 7, O’Donnell announced that it was a day of sorrow and “Tragedy comes in threes: Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth Edwards’s passing and Barack Obama’s announcement of extending the tax cuts, which is good, but also extending the unemployment benefits.”

Still not as bad as saying that there are 57 states.

(I am happy to note that O’Donnell has announced that she’s got a book deal and a new political action committee. Really, I don’t know what I’d do if she went away.)

Plus, the Senate has worn me down. The filibuster rule makes it impossible to do anything more difficult than passing rules against tainted food,

A bill made famous for banning school bake sales. When only outlaws have cupcakes…

and the Democrats have not made any serious attempt to get rid of the filibuster rule. So work around them, I say.

Exactly. Vote Republican.

We have no idea if Obama’s unheroic

Speaking of unheroes/antiheroes, doesn’t Obama remind you of a new kind of Holden Caulfield who is so angry at the world for not being as he believes it should be that he is literally unable to function in reality?

attempt to get a deal done is going to pass. The Democratic senators who totally failed to exempt the wealthy from a tax-cut extension are outraged at the president for giving up on them.

“This is beyond politics. This is about justice and doing what’s right,” said

Soon to be former

Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana as she slammed

Slammed? Not so much. Try the following: whined, squawked, rambled, droned,

“the almost, you know, moral corruptness” of tax cuts for millionaires.

Which is almost, you know, coherent.

It was a stirring statement,

It was stirring, yet Collins had to pluck a quote where she droned and fluffed more than a mousy freshman in his first communications class. The only thing she was missing was poorly scrawled note cards and her hands jammed defensively in her pocket. No wonder they were so enamored with Obama’s (snicker) godlike oratory.

and would have been even more so if Landrieu had not been one of the few Democrats who actually voted to put the tax cuts on the books in the first place in 2001.

Props to research! It’s fun to see how these dolts vote when they’re no longer terrified of being voted out of office.

Senator Harry Reid has already warned that members of his caucus “have concerns” that will need to be addressed.

Was this before or after he spent 10 minutes on the Senate floor droning on about Nevada beating Boise State?

He has one himself about legalizing online poker, a matter that the casino interests in his state of Nevada are very excited about.

Meh.

So this is what it takes to put the drama in Obama.

Well, that and Fox News.