Fiscal Vogueing
by digby
If you didn’t get a chance to see Maddow last night you missed this interesting segment on the fate of the current energy bill with Chris Hayes and David Roberts from Grist.
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The whole segment’s worth watching, but I thought this was particularly interesting and it seems like something the Democrats could be making more of:
HAYES: This is—this is infuriating for a million reasons but let‘s just—to increase the frustration, the CBO has now released its report on the Kerry/Lieberman bill, right, which shows it reduces the deficit by $19 billion, which seems to me like the kind of thing that maybe amidst this deficit hysteria we could get some, you know, conservative Democrats and Republicans behind.
ROBERTS: You might think. This is one of the great untold stories of the whole—of the whole climate fight, is that the bill—you can think of the bill as having two parts, there‘s all the energy stuff, which is bipartisan. Everybody loves it. It gives incentives to nuclear, to wind and solar, to electric cars. All that stuff spending. That‘s the spending side, which, of course, everyone in Washington loves to do.And then the other half is the price on carbon, which raises the revenue to pay for all that spending.HAYES: Right.
ROBERTS: And so, what you‘re seeing in D.C. is, everybody loves the spending half and everybody‘s scared to death of the other half, where you raise revenue.
So, you know, I—Chris, I don‘t want to be cynical about the sincerity of the deficit hawks in the Senate but—HAYES: Oh, never, never.
ROBERTS: — but it‘s peculiar that the ones that are the loudest about their deficit concern are the very ones lining up behind the most expensive, unpaid-for energy bill that you can imagine.
These deficit posers can get away with anything. This is happening on issue after issue but the Democrats can’t make anything of it because cynical Americans no longer care about hypocrisy. The assault on reason has left the body politic reeling.
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