Tag: GOP

A Sacrifice! A Sacrifice!

Dean Baker:

In total, the economy has lost close to $1.3tn in annual demand as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble. This explains the economy’s weak growth and high unemployment. There is no simple way to replace this demand.

We can gather together a coven of market-worshipping Republicans and sacrifice all the workers and retirees we want, it still will not replace the demand gap. We can love the private sector as much as we want and it still will not make firms go out and invest and hire when they don’t see demand for their products.

A Sacrifice! A Sacrifice!

All of a Piece

I’m not sure how many times the Republicans have to say the same stuff, plainly and in modern English, before it begins to sink in to the minds of those in the media that they, the Republicans in Congress, want Obama to fail in his bid for reelection and to achieve that goal, they need the American economy to fail.

You, as a GOP House mover-and-shaker (aka Tea Klan fanatic), are faced with the newly rising popularity of Obama (e.g. he’s in the 50s for the first time in a while), the first positive news on housing starts in a long, long time (driven more or less entirely by huge demand for apartments, since vanishingly few folks can qualify to buy houses anymore, at least not considered relative to the bubble excess and the fact that home foreclosures are still relatively high), a suddenly more optimistic public attitude re: the economy, and none of your own GOP candidates for the nomination are exactly setting the woods on fire, and may well be instead burning down the house relative to your broader chances both up- and down-ticket come 2012.

All that considered, do you, the rank and file Tea Klan fanatic, feel comfortable handing that same Obama you want to fail a sure-fired way to boost the economy even more as 2012 rolls along? Or do you want to apply the emergency brakes? With this most recent nonsense, I think no sensate being could still deny that we have our answer.
Now, of course, there is some subtlety to their position. They don’t want the extension of this particular tax break because it a) doesn’t help their prime audience in any way (aka the 1%), because those folks either don’t draw traditional paychecks and/or said pay is a relatively tiny fraction of their entire portfolio, so they could care less and won’t notice either way b) it legitimately does help the broader economy and quickly since we’re in an aggregate demand slump and this is cash in the pockets of the 99% who actually create that aggregate demand in, uh, aggregate, and c) is a quick and relatively easy way to sand the gears of the economy, and they think they can sell it to their crazed idiocratic supporters through ever-willing conduits like FOXnews and the Wall Street Journal (The latter of which is already overboard) using such time-honored tools as goalpost moving and poison-pill additions. No one will ever know, and if they do, we can convince them to blame “Democrat leaders in the Senate.” Who, for once, have grown a pair and are doing their part to (rightly) hang this on the GOP. They even have a “Tea Klan tax hike” style meme going. It’s like they’ve finally gotten hip to the way the other side messaged in, oh, 1992.

But frankly this is a pretty simple calculation for the GOP. Braveheart and all the rest are just window dressing that, as usual, the MSM is lapping up. The real story, the one far too shrill to actually report: Anyone or anything getting in the way slowing the economy can kindly go die in the streets. Tax proposals benefiting the 1%: always welcome. Wedge issues that reliably bring this or that fractional percent of old white voters to the polls in November: always welcome. Anything that might actually help the economy and, by extension, Obama: forget about it. And they have.

Both Sides Not Equally at Fault

TNR’s Timothy Noah has a nice piece up detailing polls that show the general public largely gets that it’s the GOP being more obstructive, more extreme, and (even among Republicans) ultimately less popular and more deserving of being shown the door. But then Noah writes the funniest thing I’ve read in a while:

I hope the “objective” press reports these findings accurately, and doesn’t bend itself into a pretzel trying to portray this poll as mere generalized disgust with partisan bickering in Washington.

What color is the sky in your world, Tim?

Both Sides Not Equally at Fault

A Jobs Pipeline

This kind of crap (linking the payroll tax cut extension to the Keystone XL pipeline) is precisely why we’d be better off as a nation if Obama had come to the Rose Garden back on Day Two and announced his immutable opposition to wind power, trains, mass transit of any kind, single payer health care, mortgage adjustments and cram-down, and massive civil and criminal penalties for the banksters in general and claw-back of Wall Street salaries specifically. Had he done so, odds are at least two or three of these items would have gotten done per “give us x or we destroy the country” showdowns. With a heavy heart he’d show up and sign the dreaded bill(s). By now he’d have a legislative record on par with the New Deal and the Great Society and would be hard pressed to find new things to “oppose.”

We are in an era in which whatever the President is for, the GOP is against. If it angers the dirty fucking hippies, then so much the better. They don’t even hide it anymore. Here’s Ohio’s Representative Jim Jordan:

“Frankly, the fact that the president doesn’t like [the Keystone XL project] makes me like it even more’’

It is long past time to plan accordingly and make them pay political prices for this. Over and over again. Start picking the things they love the most and convert them into policy proposals that you can live with or even like. Come out for them. Propose the legislation. Force votes. Make ads about the inevitable “flip flop” in their districts. All 50 states. Lather, rinse, repeat.

A Jobs Pipeline

Basic Human Rights

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct; but, in fact, they are one and the same. […] Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.

It is violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished. It is a violation of human rights when lesbian or transgendered women are subjected to so-called corrective rape, or forcibly subjected to hormone treatments, or when people are murdered after public calls for violence toward gays, or when they are forced to flee their nations and seek asylum in other lands to save their lives. And it is a violation of human rights when life-saving care is withheld from people because they are gay, or equal access to justice is denied to people because they are gay, or public spaces are out of bounds to people because they are gay. No matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we are, we are all equally entitled to our human rights and dignity.

It is, however, a mortal certainty that a) Obama is no different than Bush –and– b) that the 2012 election will have no impact whatever on the policy of the country. A pox on both their houses, and all that. May as well not vote, or just vote for whomever makes me chuckle on the day and just learn to live with the GOP-tapped nominee as a result. Nothing will change anyway.

Well, let’s just check in on what the GOP candidates are thinking re: the gays and their “rights”:

Governor GoodHair:

there is a troubling trend here beyond the national security nonsense inherent in this silly idea. This is just the most recent example of an administration at war with people of faith in this country. Investing tax dollars promoting a lifestyle many Americas of faith find so deeply objectionable is wrong.

President Obama has again mistaken America’s tolerance for different lifestyles with an endorsement of those lifestyles. I will not make that mistake.

Meh, he has no chance anyway. What about perennial frontrunner Rick Santorum?

Obviously the administration is promoting their particular agenda in this country, and now they feel its their obligation to promote those values not just in the military, not just in our society, but now around the world with taxpayer dollars.

He said he’s for traditional marriage, and now he’s promoting gay lifestyles and gay rights, and he’s fighting against traditional marriage within the courts, and I think he needs to be honest.

I said “Meh;” show me somebody up front. How about Newt, on the horror of gay marriage:

I believe that marriage is between a man and woman. It has been for all of recorded history and I think this is a temporary aberration that will dissipate. I think that it is just fundamentally goes against everything we know.

Reminiscent of Cain’s “wash it off” approach.

And, of course, Mittmentum holds the same basic view on most days:

The story on same-sex marriage is that I have the same position on that, that I had from the very beginning. I’m in favor of traditional marriage, I oppose same-sex marriage. At the same time, I don’t believe in discriminating in employment or opportunity for gay individuals. So I favor gay rights, I do not favor same-sex marriage. That has been my position all along.

Elections have consequences. There are major differences between the governing approach of the two major parties. You’re getting one or the other come 2012. Vote. Vote in primaries, especially. Show up to town halls. Occupy things. Yell and scream if you feel the need. But vote. Every time. It will make a difference. Maybe not a difference that’s immediately and tangibly Your Own Personal Heaven, but even the little ones add up. Just like this.

Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal.

Newt Gingrich, disgraced former Speaker, defends his opposition to child labor laws in truly convincing fashion. Ladies and gentlemen, your GOP-2012 front runner.
Source: Washington Post

The surtax would impact around 345,000 taxpayers, roughly 0.2 percent of taxpayers, or one in 500 of them. Those people would pay on average an additional 2.1 percent of their overall income, or just over 1/50th of that overall income, in taxes.

In a majority of states, only one-tenth of one percent, or one in 1,000 taxpayers, would pay this surtax.

And how many people would benefit from the payroll tax cut? According to the group, around 113 million tax filing units — either single workers or families that include more than one worker — would see their payroll tax cut extended. That’s a lot of people — well over 113 million workers, in fact.

Citizens For Tax Justice runs the numbers on the proposed funding mechanism that would extend the payroll tax “holiday” currently scheduled to end December 31, 2011. I don’t have to remind you that Republicans are categorically against this tax increase, because it harms the “job creators” out there in that 0.2 percent.
The vast majority of the GOP’s 1% constituency wouldn’t even see so much as a dime’s difference, whilst everyone earning a paycheck would stand to receive ~$1000 dollars more in an aggregate demand crisis. So, of course, we prevent the tiny increase for a tiny fraction of the richest people on Earth in exchange for a further insult to our tottering economy when the payroll tax extension is worth ~$250 billion to our economy. Great policy.
Source: Washington Post

A mature society is one that can distinguish between 1) times when lawbreaking requires new, more robust laws, 2) when the appropriate conclusion is that there will just always be some level of crime, and 3) when the prohibition itself is incompatible with a free society.

Conor Friedersdorf, weighing in on SOPA and other draconian “law and order” approaches to the innerwebs. Which, of course, must be destroyed such that it may better serve our Galtian Overlords.
Sadly, we’re not even close to assessing the three points he lays out, because doing so would require us to throw our lot in with a bunch of pointy headed analysts and require looking into some “data” and “numbers” and making conclusions based on empirical reality. None of this is currently allowed in public discourse or decision making at any level. In fact, recourse to analysis and empiricism is frequently pointed to as a disqualification for office. And so the Republic crumbles.

Upstairs/Downstairs

John Kyl (R, AZ), Saturday: [tax increases are] the wrong medicine for our ailing economy, […] [any possibility of a potential future increase only serves to] put a wet blanket over job creation and economic recovery.
John Kyl (R, AZ), Sunday: The payroll tax holiday has not stimulated job creation. We don’t think that is a good way to do it. [Thus we want to raise taxes on every American that currently receives a paycheck]. The best way to hurt economic growth is to impose more taxes on the people who do the hiring. As a result, the Republicans have said, ‘Don’t raise the existing tax rates on those who do the hiring.’ [That is to say, the 1%. Who aren’t, uh, actually hiring. But still. Don’t raise THEIR taxes. Raise the 99%’s taxes. Only that will get the old economy going again!]
Lemkin: Again, the MSM will see no dissonance whatsoever in these positions. Of course raising taxes on most everyone in the country to avoid a tiny tax increase on a tiny fraction of the country makes the best economic sense in an aggregate demand-based economic downturn. What other conclusion is even possible given this data? Surely both sides are at fault for low aggregate demand in the 99%; this is only fixable if both sides agree to lower taxes on the 1%. Again: what other conclusion is even possible?