Tag: go die in the streets

Most Republican voters believe, with good reason, that Romney stands a strong chance of winning the nomination and beating President Obama. The question is whether he would put repeal front and center—whether he would emphasize it in the general election campaign, and whether he would go to the mat for repeal once in office. Would Romney’s campaign build enough momentum for repeal to achieve 60 votes in the Senate and defeat a potential filibuster? If not, would Romney be willing to advance repeal in the Senate via reconciliation, the complicated and unconventional process that takes only 50 votes but which would also require a far greater expenditure of political capital?

Jeffery H. Anderson makes me wonder if he’s even been paying attention. If we assume that the posited chain of events occurs: GOP holds some kind of House majority and gains a new but non-60 vote majority in the Senate (and, of course, President Mittmentum) then it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to derive the complex psychohistorical formulas for what happens next?!?!?
The GOP eliminates (by simple majority) the filibuster on the first day of the new Congress. The MSM declares this an entirely reasonable, “sensible center” approach to governing. Wholesale dismantlement of the New Deal follows, coupled to and justified by the oncoming tax revenue collapse from a 0% effective tax rate on the rich and consumption-based, maximally regressive tax on everyone else.
It’s what they’ve been talking about for years. They are entirely serious. They mean to do it at the first opportunity, and this would be it. There will be no fiddling with reconciliation or anything approaching “normal order” as we define it in 2011. How many times do they have to say this stuff before someone in the MSM takes them seriously and asks a follow-up or two? Or, for that matter, before The Democrat starts using these positions against them. (Shrill! Class War!!).
The far-right GOP candidates and elected officials are not “blowing smoke” or “providing red meat” for the “true believers.” This is who they are. Everyone else can kindly go die in the streets.

Only Off by 3.3 million

Steve Benen notes the systematic nature of claiming “zero jobs” created from the stimulus despite the conclusion from the Congressional Budget Office that

“President Barack Obama’s stimulus package may have created or saved as many as 3.3 million jobs last quarter and lowered the unemployment rate by as much as 1.8 percentage points”

Let me make this as clear as I can: The Facts Do Not Matter. Unless and until Wolf Blitzer stops the debate and says “then how do you square that statement with the findings of the CBO and 99.9% of world economists who have all concluded…” we will make zero progress.

The modern GOP is entirely predicated on empty boilerplate, outright lies, and brazen platitudes specifically designed to play well for the low information, low attention voter. That is the essence of the Tea Klan: I want all the government services I prefer to be provided for free, everyone else can kindly go die in the streets; here is my entirely unsubstantiated “plan” to make that happen. The cheers at the notion that an under- or un-insured 30 year old in a coma should simply be allowed to die coupled with boos at any notion of immigration being a powerful and useful economic engine for the country say pretty much everything you need to know about the broader movement. God help us if these folks ever discover just how much of the “Texas Miracle” occurred at the hands of legal and illegal immigration into the state. Thus it should come as no surprise that the audience questions last night reflected this sort of poisonous vacuity relative to the actual state of affairs of numerous, seemingly straightforward issues facing the country.

By way of example, there was a long, multi-participant disquisition on how waste, fraud, and abuse totaling in the tens of millions and maybe even into THE BILLIONS could impact the deficit and debt of an approximately four trillion dollar budget. Not one candidate stepped in to even imply that these maximally estimated waste numbers were extraordinarily small potatoes in the context. And neither did Wolf Blitzer. So what was he doing there, exactly?

The same goes for Social Security. Interminable amount of discussion about a program that is largely self-funding and will not be a significant deficit driver for decades and need never drive the deficit should the government choose to make long-term, minor adjustments to the program. Cost growth within Medicare will have destroyed the federal government long before we ever have to think about Social Security as a threat to the solvency of the government. Did that merit a mention? Did Wolf hold anyone to account for that seeming incongruity?

The same goes for “Obamacare.” Each of the candidates begged for “market-based” private insurance solutions to health care delivery in this county. Precisely what, pray tell, do they think “Obamacare” is? Did Wolf bother to ask?

This is all before we even touch lengthy discussions of tax policies featuring 0% rates, 9% national sales taxes, and every other kind of pie-in-the-sky nonsense without even a whisper of how such a rate of collection could even partially pay for existing military budgets, much less everything else dread government does (but don’t cut my pet program!). Was any of this even tangentially addressed? Did anyone get asked what sort of total spending their wonderful tax plan would presage and how that would change federal priorities as we know them (assuming for the moment that the candidate pushing their idea got exactly what they were asking for)? Doesn’t that seem like the sort of thing a moderator should be doing, Wolf?

Of course not, because within our modern media construct the facts do not matter. The facts are the last thing they are concerned with. This was an event entirely predicated on and existing only to produce new sound and fury signifying nothing that will nonetheless be dissected and replayed purely from a horse-race perspective until the next one of these intellectual disasters transpires. It’s why they’re having 52 of them: to feed the mill. What, you thought it was to better understand the relevance and relative merits of the various platforms?

Until we in America force the broader media to start doing its job (by taking our eyes and ears elsewhere), we will continue to get exactly this kind of crap, which is precisely the sort of leadership such an electorate deserves. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Only Off by 3.3 million

Perry’s Millions

Rick Perry has quite a nose for land speculation:

Discharged from the Air Force in 1977 aged 27, he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives seven years later, in 1984. At that time, the Perry family reported income of $45,000, largely from Mrs. Perry’s work as a nurse.

[…]

in 1993, there was a piece of ground that computer billionaire Michael Dell needed to connect his new house near Austin to city water mains. Dell neglected to appreciate the land’s importance. But Perry did discern it. He bought the land for less than $120,000 – then sold it to Dell two years later for a $343,000 profit. Uncanny.

[in the 2000s] A Texas real estate developer sells land to a Texas state senator – the senator who happened to represent the development’s district. The state senator sold the land to Gov. Perry. Gov. Perry then sold then land – back to the real estate developer’s business partner. Perry scored a profit of $823,000.

These are his real GOP bona fides: living the concept that political power is only to be used for enrichment of self and then, where possible, your richest and therefore most generous supporters, be they actual biological persons or the frequently GOP-personified corporate interests. The policy outcomes of this stance, whatever they may be, are entirely beside the point beyond their utility in enriching self or key supporters.
After all, the GOP goes out of its way to prepare the populace for the repeated failure of government, it delights every time a corruption scandal comes to light, and it uses said failures and scandals to further weaken the operation of government, sand the legislative gears, and generally hamstring government oversight, all to better enable their preferred uses of political power: enrichment of self and key supporters. There is no third thing. Anybody not already in on the deal can kindly go die in the streets.

Perry’s Millions

Results [matter]. If I were the one in charge of this pop stand, I’d direct my economics team to come up with the “If I were a prime minister instead of a president, this is what we would do” plan. And if all they came up with was minor tax breaks for hiring, “patent reform,” and “trade deals,” I’d, you know, fire them.

Duncan Black, being exactly right. The key thing that needs to happen in the immediate future (e.g. the imminent “jobs speech”) is for Obama to set the stage such that the eventual legislative outcome makes very clear exactly who is obstructing economic growth and recovery efforts.
The only way to do this is to swing for the fences and wait for the GOP to obstruct it. Not only does this paint the GOP as the party of economic obstruction, it also allows the eventual compromise to be closer to your “dream plan” than it is to whatever constitutes a GOP “go die in the streets” policy outcome. By taking the traditional “sensible Obama” defensive crouch approach and starting with the bar set at the lowest possible level (e.g. what they think might pass the House) all in the vain hopes that this time the GOP will suddenly start playing along for America, you’re actually only working to guarantee an outcome that favors the GOP in every way, politically, economically, and (most importantly for Obama) in 2012.
Once again: This is why they fail.

File Under: Cogent

Hendrik Hertzberg deftly summarizes why Obama is systematically losing the left (the only folks who supported his Presidency to begin with):

Obama’s seeming refusal to hold [invoking the 14th Amendment to the Constitution] in reserve (“like the fire axe on the wall,” in Garrett Epps’s words) is emblematic of his all too civilized, all too accommodating negotiating strategy—indeed, of his whole approach to the nation’s larger economic dilemma, the most disappointing aspect of his Presidency. His stimulus package asked for too little and got less. He has allowed deficits and debt to supersede mass unemployment as the emergency of the moment. He has too readily accepted Republican terms of debate, such as likening the country to a household that must “live within its means.” (For even the most prudent householders, living within one’s means can include going into debt, as in taking out a car loan so that one can get to one’s job.) He has done too little to educate the public to the wisdom of post-Herbert Hoover economics: fiscal balance is achieved over time, not in a single year; in flush times a government should run a surplus, but when the economy falters deficits are part of the remedy; when the immediate problem is what it is now—a lack of demand, not a shortage of capital—higher spending is generally more efficacious than lower taxes, especially lower taxes on the rich.

The whole piece is fantastic, but this paragraph could easily form the basis of a savage, intellectually driven attack on Obama from the right. Well, it could if such a concept as “appealing to the intellect” or “thoughtful” even existed over there anymore. They’re too busy arguing over who loves the country the very most or who would starve the most children to death in their first 100 days to worry one little bit about convincing even a single Democrat or independent to join their particular crusade. For once: this is why the GOP will fail.

File Under: Cogent

We’re seriously talking about defaulting on our debt, and cutting Medicare and Social Security, so that Google can keep paying its current 2.4 percent effective tax rate and GE, a company that received a $140 billion bailout en route to worldwide 2010 profits of $14 billion, can not only keep paying no taxes at all , but receive a $3.2 billion tax credit from the federal government. And nobody appears to give a shit. What the hell is wrong with people? Have we all lost our minds?

Matt Taibbi (via paxamericana)
No, Matt, we haven’t lost our minds. Instead, we’ve all been told for twenty years that government can do nothing right, that taxes are the root of all evil, and that anyone else receiving so much as one red cent of guvmint money is a freeloader and likely a sub-human of some variety.

Where’s the Left’s Grover Norquist, out there day in and day out agitating and extracting oaths over Social Security or Medicare or in favor of single payer health care? Where have they been for twenty years, messaging relentlessly, and not just when their pet subject is “in the news” for a week or two (and we’re lucky to get that)? Where have the folks been who organize guaranteed primary challenges of Democrats and Republicans who stray from their oaths? Where is the Progressive News Network, the most popular national news organ on television, daily vomiting outright lies and relentless spin tuned to the broader national political message and aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator?

Until some version of one or all these things show up: we will fail. This is why.

Source: paxamericana

In short, the Boehner plan would force policymakers to choose among cutting the incomes and health benefits of ordinary retirees, repealing the guts of health reform and leaving an estimated 34 million more Americans uninsured, and savaging the safety net for the poor. It would do so even as it shielded all tax breaks, including the many lucrative tax breaks for the wealthiest and most powerful individuals and corporations.

Robert Greenstein, writing about the “Boehner plan” at the nonpartisan CBPP.
Said it approximately one billion times: this isn’t some side affect. It’s the intended consequence. The debt ceiling is simply a useful construct for ramming the same old policy of “zero social safety net, all wealth and benefits to top 2%” GOP dream government setup. All it is, was, or ever will be. If they fix the debt ceiling this morning, they will be using the next federal budget (which will need to be done to have a government post-September) to push the exact same line by this afternoon.
The GOP does not care about deficits. If they did, they’d have taken any of the four increasingly huge deficit cutting plans offered them. They want low to nonexistent tax rates on the top 2%. Simple arithmetic will show anyone that this means eliminating the social safety net; as Ezra Klein has noted: the federal government is better thought of as an insurance conglomerate with a large standing army. To cut taxes to “GOP preferred” levels, services have to go. And to get rid of those hugely popular and helpful services, a large number of people using them have to be convinced said services (and government in general) aren’t working or even in their interest at all. This is the core GOP governing strategy in fifty words or less. Everything they have done and said in the past several decades of tight, lockstep messaging with the aid of the most popular “news” network on television has been aimed at and in service of making those 48 words reality.
Everyone not already up the ladder will kindly go die in the streets. Today they’re using the debt ceiling, tomorrow it will be the FY2012 budget, the next day it will be veterans benefits or whatever else comes to hand. And until they are forced to pay a steep political price for steadfastly using gridlock and economic hostage situations as a negotiating strategy, they will continue to use them. That Congressional and Executive Democrats seemingly haven’t figured this out yet is why they fail.

If a bondholder misses a payment for a day or two or three or four — what is more important is you are putting the government in a materially better position to better pay its bills going forward.

Paul Ryan being serious and courageous and, yet again, showing just how absolutely determined the GOP is at all levels, extreme far right or merely far right, to have a default on the debt of the United States. Why, we’ll barely notice it’s even happened.
It’s the only way they see getting the White House in 2012. It’s been the plan all along. They assume Obama will get the “egg on his face” and they’re probably right. Once in control it’s goodbye filibuster (assuming the Democrats lose the Senate), goodbye social safety net, and hello freedom is just as free as what of it you can afford to buy. After that, when the money’s gone: kindly go die in the streets.
But hey, taxes will be pretty low. On the already rich, anyway.

Suck it, Granny

Brian Buetler, TPM: If the Biden group comes up with big cuts, trillions of dollars worth of cuts, but without substantially [cutting] Medicare, it won’t get your vote?
Mitch McConnell (R, KY), Senate minority leader: Correct
Lemkin: I mean, what’s the point of governing if you can’t tell a few old people who’ve finally run out of money to kindly go die in the streets? They should have thought of this before they agreed to take part in Medicare and/or get sick. It’s all about personal choices. Also: Death panels. Real ones. Run by Mitch McConnell and his cronies. Trillions in cuts aren’t the point of any “deficit reduction” talk by the GOP. All they want, all they have ever wanted is an excuse to foist the same old laundry list of punitive attacks on the social safety net coupled to lavish giveaways to their chosen few at the very top. That is all this is, was, or ever will be about. Time for the Democrats to start messaging accordingly. Well past time, in fact. After all, Mitch McConnell stands a pretty good chance of being Senate majority leader in 2013.