Obama administration: Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s tax plan […] to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts for America’s millionaires and billionaires would nearly double the projected deficit by adding $4 trillion to it over the next decade. And [the GOP is] pretending that they would pay for it through a projected spending freeze, that fails to mention what they would freeze or cut, and that would only save $300 billion over that same period of time…
Senior GOP adviser’s response: It must be tough to have to work in [the administration’s] press shop and explain that letting people keep their own money is bad, and having to explain why you think the Bush administration economic policy is bad, but you want to make it permanent. Though I’m still curious: how much does their plan add to the deficit? Is it three trillion or 3.3 trillion?
Tag: 2010
Impressive (adj.)
Kate Dickens, aid to Mike Castle: [Christine O’Donnell] is a con artist who won by lying about Castle’s positions and her own life. Out of state support was enough to pull her through yesterday so she can rely on it through November.
Mitt Romney: Now is the time for Republicans to rally behind their nominee, Christine O’Donnell. She ran an impressive campaign. I believe it is important we support her so we can win back the U.S. Senate this fall.
Or: The Two Most Important Graphs The Democrat Won’t Show You. Ever.
We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!
Karl Rove, as reported by Ron Suskind, “talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him.”
Filed under context.
Filed under context.
Everything he’s saying is unfactual. He’s the same so-called political guru that predicted I wasn’t going to win. And we won, and we won big. So I think he’s eating some humble pie.
Christine O’Donnell referring to somebody named Karl Rove. I imagine this will go over well in the Hallowed Halls.
S is for Senate
Steve Benen hears Boehner say this:
If the only option I have is to vote for some of those tax reductions, I’ll vote for them.
and, like seemingly everyone with a mountaintop large or small, inexplicably takes this away:
Boehner, in other words, appears to be on board with the Obama proposal
Can we just not think in this country anymore?
- Is Boehner in the Senate?
There is no second thing. If the answer to Question 1 is “No,” then his opinion matters fuck-all. He said this to put a patina of reasonableness on the GOP’s entirely unreasonable and indefensible position that billionaires desperately need an extra $100k come tax-time. They know this meaningless statement will get wide play, much wider (read: vastly wider) than their ultimate actions to bottle this thing up in the Senate (and even that’s assuming the feckless Democrat bothers to bring it to the floor, itself a gigantic and likely foolhardy assumption).
If and when that all happens, the GOP will simply point to (meaningless) statements like this one as examples of their genteel nature and broad willingness to “work across the aisle.” The MSM will report the whole thing as “a Democrat failure to achieve 60 votes needed in the Senate” and Broder will pronounce himself suitably delighted that the GOP tried so very hard. Truly, they are the serious adults up to DC.
Is this so very hard to understand? Apparently it is.
Economic Policy Institute gives us a simple chart:
38.7% of all of the income growth accrued to the upper 1% over the 1979-2007 period: a greater share than the 36.3% share received by the entire bottom 90% of the population.
Those in the top 10% of the income scale received 63.7% of all the income growth generated over the 1979-2007 period. In contrast, the bottom 20% of all earners saw such a small share of income growth – just 0.4% – that it barely shows up on the included pie chart.
Let’s repeat: over the last ~30 years, the top 10% got about 60% of all income growth. Everybody else: not so much.
There should be no speech, no appearance, no utterance, no anything involving any Democrat anywhere a camera, microphone, or goodly crowd may gather that does not include this chart. Every time, every day, every hour between now and November.
Don’t hold your breath.
So on the one hand, a measure that will make a small dent in the deficit. On the other hand, a measure that will lead to a huge increase in the deficit. There’s no theory of the economy in which this really makes sense: If the market is worried about the government’s finances, this makes them worse, not better. If we need lower tax rates, then simply holding the tax rates at the level that produced 2010’s disappointing economic performance isn’t enough.
It’s also worth noting that these policies are both stale: The Bush tax cuts are, well, the Bush tax cuts. They’re tax policy from 10 years ago, designed to deal with a very different set of circumstances. And the 2008 budget is, similarly, just an arbitrary number from some point in the past. Our economic situation has changed dramatically in the past few years. Don’t Republicans have any fresh thinking on what to do about it?
Ezra Klein, doing a better job than Lemkin did. As usual.
Boehner’s Deficit
Rep. Boehner called for bipartisan cooperation on two new proposals: First, to pass a spending bill now at the 2008 level and second, to extend the current tax rates for two years.
Lest you think this was just another case of unsubstantiated example-making, rest assured that Boehner not only wants to continue Bush policy, he wants to continue it exactly, right down to the spending levels in place when W finally scuttled out of office. He provides no context as to why, how this helps the budget deficit long-term, or anything else for that matter. I’m seriously not sure he’s aware that those are even issues worth considering.
Left out entirely, of course, is the fact that while spending on a 2008 budget would be a smaller line item in comparison to 2010 or projected 2011 levels, keeping the full tax cuts puts us on the hook for vastly more deficit spending and, of course, spiraling debt. This is, apparently, completely okay. After all, one need not pay for tax cuts, or even budget against them in terms of available revenue. They are free. Always were, always will be.
Even as he says all this stuff, he goes so far as to call it all a “compromise.” Which, Webster’s apparently will tell us is when the GOP gets whatever it wants and the Democrat agrees to give it to them. This, by the way, is also a principle the GOP is on record as being the only acceptable way for Obama to govern: as a seat-warmer until a GOP President can be elected. No other changes allowed, voters be damned. All this with an apparently straight face. And is not challenged by the media or laughed at and mocked by the public at large. Or even by a back-bench Democrat.
This is why we fail.
American politics “seem to be getting worse because, sorry to say it, people get stupider and stupider every election cycle.” – Bill Maher
See, I would simply say “This is why we fail.”
Obama should have, at every speech (or, at the very least: every other speech) beaten home the essential failure and utter depravity of the previous administration and its numerous supporters and enablers in the Congress. People shouldn’t be able to hear the word “Boehner” (as just one example) without thinking of failed policy and economic destruction.
Instead, we got “small-ball, make-nice, compromise on everything and the GOP will come on board.” Boy, that worked out well. Boehner can come right out and say he wants to continue (or resume) Bush policies exactly as before without the least fear; quite the contrary: he’s treated as a big thinker. This is why we fail.
Lemkin 