Tag: yep

“Fiscally responsible” is code for cutting taxes on rich people and gutting Social Security. Those are their goals, and that’s always been the case.

Duncan Black, simplifying it for you.
I’d only add that these same forces, and (of course) their media enablers, repeatedly include Social Security despite the fact that SS has its own funding source, is not in any imminent danger, and does not contribute to the deficit at all, nor will it for at least 45 years, even if we do nothing. But, by all means, it MUST BE DESTROYED by the end of the week or we all die. It’s the only possible conclusion for any serious person.

Is Rahm Still Available?

Bill Daly, potential Obama Chief of Staff: [The Obama administration] miscalculated on health care. The election of ’08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left — not left.
Ezra Klein: The health-care law the president signed was modeled off of the health-care law the Republican governor of Massachusetts had signed, which was in turn modeled off of the health-care law the Republicans in Congress had proposed in 1993. That’s “left”? And meanwhile, Daley thinks the country had moved substantially leftward over that period — “after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left” — but that even a compromise bill based on Republican ideas was too far left for the country, which would imply that the administration he served in the early-’90s, which pushed a more ambitious health-care bill when the country was further to the right, bordered on communist.
Lemkin: Yep, and do we really want anyone who has ever been quoted peddling that particular brand of horseshit running the President’s days in the inevitable “Eliminate ACA or we destroy the economy of the United States of America now and forever through default!” battle that will be coming on in, oh, five or six weeks? I say no, but then I’m less than skilled in multi-dimensional chess…

Put it this way: suppose that from here on out we average 4.5 percent growth, which is way above any forecast I’ve seen. Even at that rate, unemployment would be close to 8 percent at the end of 2012, and wouldn’t get below 6 percent until midway through Sarah Palin’s first term.

Paul Krugman brings the optimism while not-so-gently chiding his fellow media travelers’ insistence that all focus be upon what are essentially made up problems of deficit and government spending. Employment is the problem. Fix that and you can work on wage growth and lessening income inequality across the spectrum, lard on some tax reform, and all these so-called existential spending issues and all the hooha over the “right” size of government will evaporate.
Even less clear is why the media forever focuses on the self-funded, no deficit impact at all for at least 40 years Social Security program when they do a story on the horrors of deficits. It’s a story for another post, but maybe (just maybe!) it’s because they don’t plan on needing it. Medicare, on the other hand, they know they need, know is a deficit ballooner, but just don’t care so long as they get theirs. Very Patriotic.

No, Tax Cuts Do Not Pay for Themselves

thebroadermarket:

By Jordan Eizenga 

One can understand the attraction for thinking that tax cuts should stimulate higher rates of economic growth. With greater after tax income, workers are more likely to work harder and longer and, facing fewer taxes, entrepreneurs are in a better position to start companies and hire new workers. The problem is that the data does not bear this out either. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a statistical agency in the United States federal government, notes that over the past decade of lower tax rates, the number of business start-ups has actually declined.

Even if tax cuts generated increased economic growth rates, both conservative and liberal economists agree that economic growth would not increase anywhere near enough to offset the cost of the cuts.

The whole thing is absolutely required reading.

No, Tax Cuts Do Not Pay for Themselves

…nobody, and I mean nobody, in a position of influence within the GOP cares about deficits when tax cuts for the affluent are on the line. Deficit hawkery is just a stick with which to beat down social programs.

Paul Krugman, reacting to the shocking news that the rising GOP House Majority will be moving to change the rules in ways “clearly designed to pave the way for more deficit-increasing tax cuts in the next two years. These rules stand in sharp contrast to the strong anti-deficit rhetoric that many Republicans used on the campaign trail this fall […] these new rules […] could have a substantial impact and risk making the nation’s fiscal problems significantly worse.”
As Krugman says: these guys don’t care about the deficit, now or ever. They simply use concern to whip up anger against then-as-now non-existent “Cadillac Queens of Welfare” and whatnot such that ever more wealth can be transferred to the richest of the rich. And rest assured: they won’t be satisfied until they have it all. It’s what is going on in corporate America, and it’s what is going in political America. Well, such as the two spheres are even distinguishable anymore it’s what’s going on…

Behold: Totally Awesome Criticism

Excellent analysis from Dave von Ebers of the Obama administration’s continuation of the wrongheaded indefinite detention policies that concludes thusly:

Obama is wrong to continue the Bush policy of indefinite detention of Guantánamo detainees, and the Executive Order we’re about to see will exacerbate, not solve, that problem. I disagree – vehemently, even – with what the President’s doing here.

Behold: Totally Awesome Criticism