Tag: boehner

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?

  1. 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.

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.

Five Easy Tweets(es)

Looking at how Ruth Marcus addresses Boehner’s nonsensical output in her column this morning, dare I say that I see signs of actual progress. Perhaps even the Villagers are growing tired (and maybe even a little afraid) of the GOP’s shtick?

There are times when I flirt with the notion that the country would be better off with divided government.

She starts, ominously and predictably enough, with some Serious Person boilerplate: the compromise position on anything is always superior, even when one side’s position is empirically better relative to some definable long-term metric. But, for once, she quickly rights the ship, and this opener proves to be simply Reese’s Pieces for the many Broderians reading her piece on their homeworld:

The man who would be speaker outlined his agenda Tuesday in a speech to the City Club of Cleveland – economic policy reduced to, literally, five easy tweets. The Ohio Republican offered up a depressing blend of tired ideas, tired-er one-liners (“We’ve tried 19 months of government-as-community-organizer”) and cheap attacks. The cheapest: calling for the firing of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and economic adviser Larry Summers.

[…]

[Boehner says “job-killing” twelve] times, actually. As in “job-killing tax hikes,” “job-killing bills,” “job-killing agenda,” “job-killing federal regulations.” This is bumper-sticker politics, not a real economic plan. I’ve been skeptical that Democrats would get much political traction with their argument that the Republican agenda is just George W. Bush recycled, but speeches like Boehner’s make me rethink.

Even those two paragraphs appearing on the WaPo Op/Ed page would be cause enough for a minor celebration. But, being a professional, she saves her best for last:

The argument for immediate spending cuts is hard to square with the argument against tax increases. If the latter is harmful – a disaster, in Boehner’s words – then surely the former is as well. “When Congress returns, we should force Washington to cut non-defense discretionary spending to 2008 levels – before the ‘stimulus’ was put into place,” Boehner says. This would be more convincing if he were willing to identify specific cuts. It is, even more, an enormous dodge. Stimulus spending is a sliver of the long-term fiscal problem.

Democrats – and the country – would benefit from a responsible opposition party. I’m still looking for evidence of one.

So am I. But there are two important points in here, both of which being concepts that almost never see the light of day in the MSM:

  1. That you can’t say that massive non-military spending cuts are critical, but that any and all tax increases are unthinkable.
  2. That tax-hikes would be a disaster, but that we need not ever worry about the fiscal impact of said non-tax-hikes at all, and that we may furthermore consider them “free” is nonsensical on its face.

Getting those two simple concepts into wide and repeated circulation: a big deal. Now, of course, when Obama returns from vacation to fire his cabinet, well, that’s something else.

Pundits blame the victims on Obama Muslim myth

southpol:

[…] Dave Weigel came the closest, writing that “At some point it became acceptable to question Obama’s American-ness, which naturally begged the question of whether he was a secret Muslim… and the WorldNetDailys, tabloids, and Drudge Reports of the world were ready to keep begging that question.”

This is the Overton Window in action. Republicans have a host of beyond-far-right outlets to scream and holler relentlessly about whatever their preferred issue of the day is and Democrats never, ever employ a similar tactic with the left. A year-long, sustained chorus about single payer, for instance, simply didn’t materialize. The left wing is either too pragmatic or too cynical with regard to their chances on these issues. That and the Democratic leadership repeatedly lets the GOP determine the talking points; e.g. Boehner is reportedly going to call for the firing of all Obama economic advisers. When The Democrat engages him on that ground, his ground, and they will, the ultimate outcome will then be that some of the advisers have to go or, at best, take a severe public dressing down. All good outcomes for the GOP in an election year.
Whether or not they should go is quite beside the point. You are allowing your opponent to set the agenda and define the margins that contain what will be viewed by the David Broders of the world as the “sensible and serious” solution. Again and again.
This is precisely why Rep. Alan Grayson is such a valuable and yet underutilized asset. With a dozen people like him talking about Cheney’s blood-drenched teeth (or what have you) and a few media outlets doing likewise, suddenly the true moderate position, or even one (gasp!) marginally to the left of center, looks awfully sensible. Instead of using Grayson in this way, the modern Democrat runs and hides from him and others, going so far as to extract the occasional tearful apology when some genuinely affecting truth leaks out. This is the primary failure of leadership in the Democratic party, and nothing will change until this does.
The facts do not matter; presentation and framing is everything. You, the Democrat, are fighting an organized party, its dedicated propaganda outlet that happens to be a wildly popular source of “news,” and a distributed right-wing noise machine on web and talk radio that reliably sets the discourse for the rest of the MSM. You’d better bring your A-game and act like you’re in a 24/7 campaign for your political life. And they never do.

Pundits blame the victims on Obama Muslim myth

I think the case for [repeated government shutdowns] happening is twofold. One is that conservative politics is now much more dominated by a set of overlapping, competing media figures who are more interested in ratings than in majorities. The other is that if John Boehner has the courage of my convictions, he’ll believe that a government shutdown will risk sending the economy into a double-dip recession and that ultimately Barack Obama will be blamed for the bad results regardless of what polling says in the moment.

Matthew Yglesias, with emphasis on “ratings” and “Obama will be blamed”: yep, yep, yep, a million times yep.

Where’s My Belt?

John Boehner, March 2009: It’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ it

Barack Obama, yesterday: “At a time when so many families are tightening their belts, he’s going to make sure that the government continues to tighten its own,” Obama said.

Paul Krugman, today: We’ll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn’t been a success.

And if you look at the policies that we’ve seen over the course of this year from the administration and his Democratic colleagues in Congress, they’re all these leftist proposals.

John Boehner ®, House minority leader, who clearly took to heart the President’s words about corrosive and nonsensical framing of Obama’s center-right legislative record as some sort of “Bolshevik plot.”