Category: Uncategorized

Tax Outrage Sydrome

Tax expert Roberton Williams, interviewed by Derek Thompson at the Atlantic has some notes on the political landscape for reform (as currently proposed via Wyden Gregg, which itself only has life so long as the President disavows any and all knowledge of it):

From a political perspective, you say, “We’ve got to do it because you can’t trust big government.” That’s it. That’s all you can say. That’s the only argument I can see [against radically simplifying the filing process for ~80% of Americans by having the IRS essentially pre-fill your form].

Uh, no. The GOP will allow meaningful reforms over their dead bodies. You can pry said bill from their cold, dead hands. Why? Because they are utterly dependent on the government being perceived as a faceless automaton meant to screw you out of your money with no perceptible civic gain in return. Period.

Making healthcare delivery work, making tax codes simpler, efficient government-run response to disaster, making the trains run on time, or whatever other example of government actually working you want to use: none of them comply with the current GOP vision for government. They are fundamentally opposed to all of it. And will fight any attempt to fix it. To. The. Death.

Witness the various tax pickles that Obama’s nominees found themselves in. This wasn’t because they’re all crooks. It’s because our tax codes are vastly overcomplicated. Did the Democrat fight to make that point? Of course not. The nominees largely just withdrew. Instead of a teachable moment, the administration got a fundamental reduction in the available pool of nominees: those with very, very simple tax histories who also decide each and every interpretive question that may arise in favor of the IRS. I think you’ll find vanishingly few CPAs or tax-preparers out there who decide that way. In fact, this problem is sufficiently prevalent that it comes up in the interview (emphasis original):

a study I think in Alabama where they went to a number of preparers with a fake tax case that legally couldn’t qualify for the earned income tax credit. But this particular tax preparer’s thing was to tell people, “We’ll get you the EITC.” And guess what? In only one case did the tax preparers say, “You don’t qualify for this credit.” You pay people a couple hundred bucks for a tax return, you want a real return. You want a credit. If you don’t get it, there goes the business model.

Precisely. Combine this tendency with a complex, multi-national employment record and you’re simply not likely to survive the confirmation process. And, writ large, the GOP likes it this way. They want government to look as ineffectual, impotent, and its processes as internecine as possible. That is the foundational principle of Grover Norquist’s “Starve the Beast” and really all of Reaganism as practiced today. It’s why Medicare Part D (and many other Bush era spending programs) was passed without funding it: the GOP wants financial meltdown such that the government is forced to eliminate said spending programs.

The GOP as currently constituted is and always will be against good policy until such time as they are forced to change tactics. Period. The existence of good policy (and its outcomes) fundamentally weaken their entire volitional paradigm. Period. Democrats need to message accordingly and queue legislation initiatives (like this tax reforms package) that highlight that. Period.

They never will.

Competiton

The Jane Hamshers of the world really need to sit down and consider this kind of thing in light of their own unyielding demands for some theoretical, perfect-out-of-the-gate plan that they feel could pass if given the chance and, at least, 55 newly minted progressive Senators:

Congressman Alan Grayson, (D-Orlando), today introduced a bill (H.R. 4789) which would give the option to buy into Medicare to every citizen of the United States. The “Public Option Act,” also known as the “Medicare You Can Buy Into Act,” would open up the Medicare network to anyone who can pay for it.

You see, the current iteration of health insurance reform isn’t it. It’s a starting point. To which popular things, like the public option, or a (vastly superior) Medicare buy-in program can be added. And it’s a hell of a lot harder to argue against a buy-in program when it can be presented as legitimate competition to commercial plans as opposed to some cog in a giant death panels machine. That’s also the moment that all the poisonous rhetoric the GOP employed in the run-up to reform bites them squarely in the ass.

Medicare began as a quite limited program you wouldn’t recognize today. Wasn’t even called Medicare; it was the catchily named Kerr-Mills Act that created Medical Assistance for the Aged (MAA). Can’t imagine why they changed that. But I’m sure everyone blogging about it was quite disappointed with it. Just sayin’.

Pass. The. Damned. Bill.

Gravity (and other theories)

Yglesias wants to know:

If Mitch McConnell & co were really so sure that passing health reform would be a political loser for Democrats and that organizing around repeal will be a big winner, then wouldn’t they be making it easier to pass the damn bill?

It’s not that if McConnell believed what he said he’d be voting for the bill. But if your opponents are determined to inflict a wound on themselves, why not just let them, in a procedural sense? Why not stop the bitching and moaning about reconciliation? Why not stop talking about gambits to stick the reconciliation process up?

Because the GOP true-believers know that if anything is potentially more destructive to The Democrat (as party in charge) than either passing or failing to pass something, it’s the spectacle of a slowly unfolding legislative FAIL itself (regardless of outcome; the long process is, in and of itself, a failure).
People hate the process of our government more than anything. The outcome, whether good, bad, or indifferent really is beside the point. The longer ‘Merica is forced to watch Washington in the act of gridlocking itself, the better the GOP thinks it looks. And the GOP is completely an unalterably right about this one thing. As Clinton once said, “It’s better to be strong and wrong, than right and weak”; these slow-rolling legislative fits are, to the polity at large, completely indistinguishable from weakness, both in terms of legislative will and of ideas. And, of course, the beauty is that the GOP is entirely responsible for the slow-roll and will never, ever be made to pay a price. Period. As in: Not in this lifetime. Just how it is. Like gravity.

The Democrat, utterly unaware of any of this for reasons that are beyond unclear, acts as a both implicit and explicit enabler of this sort of behavior. Again and again. And wonders why it gets the same results.

Party of Terror

Talking Points Memo reports:

[Pentagon shooter John Patrick] Bedell even railed against the concept of public education. “Government control of the schools that shape minds is pervasive in today’s world,” he said. “The imperative to defend the freedom of conscience must lead us to eliminate the role of the government in education and leave parents and communities free to raise their children as they see fit.” He denounced public education as “no more legitimate than a government-run church for universal religious training.”

They also includes the audio of his manifesto. One wonders just how many of these events it will take to have an impact on the broader political discourse.

Sadly, though, I anticipate that the primary impact will be people like Palin parroting the “government takeover of schools” line as a trope against education within the week, all the while using the construction as a dog-whistle meant to hail this fuckwit as a brave, patriotic man as opposed to the half-baked, fully lunatic, execrable little domestic terrorist that he was.

Always Bad for the Democrat

Jamison Foser takes a look back to the most recent legitimately questionable use of the reconciliation process, the Bush tax cuts, to gauge what must have been a veritable torrent of “end of democracy” style editorials and hard-hitting analytical articles and investigations. Right?

The Senate reconciliation vote occurred on May 23, 2003. In the month of May, only one New York Times article so much as mentioned the use of reconciliation for the tax cuts — a May 13, 2003, article that devoted a few paragraphs to wrangling over whether Senate Republicans could assign the bill number they wanted (S.2) to a bill approved via reconciliation. The Times also used the word “reconciliation” in a May 9, 2003, editorial, but gave no indication whatsoever of what it meant.

And that’s more attention than most news outlets gave to the use of reconciliation that month. The Washington Post didn’t run a single article, column, editorial, or letter to the editor that used the words “reconciliation” and “senate.” Not one. USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press were similarly silent.

Cable news didn’t care, either. CNN ran a quote by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley about the substance of the tax cuts in which he used the word “reconciliation” in passing — but that was it. Fox News aired two interviews in which Republican members of Congress referred to the reconciliation process in order to explain why the tax cuts would be temporary, but neither they nor the reporters interviewing them treated reconciliation as a controversial tactic.

And ABC, CBS, NBC? Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Yep. This time around? Well, that’s totally different, of course:

the media are referring to reconciliation as the “nuclear option” and portraying it as an obscure procedural gimmick being considered in an attempt to circumvent Senate rules and “ram” health care legislation through Congress. The conservative media are going so far as to claim that use of reconciliation would be “unprecedented.”

The Democrat has got to work on its messaging. It’s all that matters. The GOP has sewn the earth with salt re: governance and, really, any sense of shared civic concern whatsoever for over two decades. Any chance to poison the perceived relationship between citizen and government has been used to reassure the populace that government never, ever can provide anything to the governed that couldn’t be better provided by the private citizen.
An equally ferocious, equally long-term effort will be required to reacquaint people with the everyday things that evil big government is doing for them. Most of which are directly enabling enraged GOP voters to live the solitary, exurban lifestyles that make up so much of the current GOP base. That the western “Red” states are livable at all: entirely the result of government spending and ostentatiously generous water policy. Period. That no one living in those states seems to realize this: the fault of the Democrat, and dangerous for the country. This (and messaging on a thousand issues just like it), more than anything, needs to be rectified. And soon.

Post Office eBox

Has it occurred to anyone else that our Post Office, lately a money loser, needs some fundamental rethinking?

Rather than stop Saturday delivery or just raise the cost of a stamp, why not really think about what this organization should be doing long term.

America currently has among the lowest internet access speeds in the civilized world. Especially in more rural areas, there simply isn’t anything other than dialup. And won’t be.

So: gradually re-purpose the Post Office over the next 5 to 10 years. They’re already nationwide and maintain offices in every (or nearly every) zip code. Perfect. Make it such that any citizen can contract with them for internet access and email (and a permanent, personalized domain along the lines of lemkin.po.box or somesuch; yes, this means the government takeover of a new TLD: Shock, horror.). Price access rates inversely to market availability. It would cost more to buy PO.Box domains in, say, Manhattan, NY than in Manhattan, KS, based entirely on existing availability and a given market’s existing broadband penetration. This keeps the government from taking over broadband.
And, obviously, the Post Office itself wouldn’t run out there and start laying fiber, they’d more likely sub-contract somebody else to go do it; the real role of the PO here would be to write down some or all of the initial costs in exchange for longer-term cost recovery than any private firm can safely undertake. Structured properly, companies like Google would have a vested interest in seeing to it that such a nationwide project can be done quickly and as cheaply as possible. And would likely put some of their own effort behind it. This also has the knock-on benefit of requiring a lot of infrastructure investment and, more importantly, it creates a lot of jobs that are entirely or nearly entirely created through the private sector.

The point is: lack of broadband access in this country is a real and still developing crisis. We have a large operation tasked with enabling equal access to communication. So let them do that.

In an op-ed in Tuesday’s Post, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) offered an excellent example of this hypocrisy. Right off, the piece was wrong on a core fact. Hatch accused the Democrats of trying to, yes, “ram through the Senate a multitrillion-dollar health-care bill.”

No. The health-care bill passed the Senate in December with 60 votes under the normal process. The only thing that would pass under a simple majority vote would be a series of amendments that fit comfortably under the “reconciliation” rules established to deal with money issues. Near the end of his column, Hatch conceded that reconciliation would be used for “only parts” of the bill. But why didn’t he say that in the first place?

Hatch grandly cited “America’s Founders” as wanting the Senate to be about “deliberation.” But the Founders said nothing in the Constitution about the filibuster, let alone “reconciliation.” Judging from what they put in the actual document, the Founders would be appalled at the idea that every major bill should need the votes of three-fifths of the Senate to pass.

[…]

Hatch said that reconciliation should not be used for “substantive legislation” unless the legislation has “significant bipartisan support.” But surely the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which were passed under reconciliation and increased the deficit by $1.7 trillion during his presidency, were “substantive legislation.” The 2003 dividends tax cut could muster only 50 votes. Vice President Dick Cheney had to break the tie. Talk about “ramming through.”

E.J. Dionne. Thank you.