Month: September 2010

Recessions Are For The Little People

by digby

Honestly, I just have to laugh:

Before August, Democrats generally were united in opposing any extension for the top rates and looked forward to a pre-election battle with Republicans. The chief debate has been over whether to make the middle-class tax rates permanent or to extend them for a year given the revenue loss of about $3 trillion over a decade.

Now Democrats are weighing whether they may have to accept a one-year extension of the tax rates for the wealthy. More Democratic lawmakers now fear attacks from Republicans, who argue that no one should pay higher taxes, certainly not before the economy recovers fully.

Right. This recession has hit everyone hard and you can’t raise taxes during a recession. Of course, some people aren’t actually in a recession:

In 2008, as the financial crisis raged, the stock market hit bottom and the Great Recession ate into the economy, the number of millionaires in the United States plunged.

But last year the number of millionaires bounced up sharply, new data show.

And after that decline and rebound, the millionaire class held a larger percentage of the country’s wealth than it did in 2007.

“It’s been a recession where everyone took a hit — with the bottom taking a bigger hit,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies economic inequality. But “the wealthy alone have bounced back.”

[…]

The consulting firm’s latest report on wealth, one of the first broad depictions of how wealth shifted in 2009, indicates that the number of U.S. households with at least $1 million in “bankable” assets climbed 15% last year to 4.7 million after tumbling 21% in 2008.

“Assets have recovered much faster than we expected, to be candid,” said Monish Kumar, a managing director at Boston Consulting Group.

Yes. You can see why we wouldn’t want to ask these unlucky duckies to pay what they paid under Bill Clinton in order to help fund some additional stimulus to put the rest of America back to work. They are, after all, the productive members of society and shouldn’t be penalized for all their hard work (sending emails to their brokers.)

I don’t know why Democrats can’t make a patriotic argument for taxing these people — they are benefiting while the rest of the country continues to struggle. But I know for a fact that they are persuading themselves that they will lose elections on the issue so they shouldn’t even try — Americans have been convinced that all taxes are evil and so it shall ever be. In other words, there’s no point in ever even trying to change people’s attitudes about anything. (That works out very well for the party that spends vast resources propagandizing the public. For the one that doesn’t — not so much.)

I would guess that allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire is off the table for the foreseeable future — the heavy lifting’s not going to get any easier a year from now when we are in the midst of a brutal presidential campaign. And deficit hysteria hasn’t even reached fever pitch yet. We might as well get used to the idea now. Nah guh happen.

* I should point out that there are quite a few, not all, who are just pimping themselves out for big donor dollars and others who are brainwashed by Randian bullshit and actually believe that the wealthy will start clipping coupons if they have to go back to the 90s era tax rates. It isn’t all strategery or cowardice. There are as many reasons for capitulation to the Republicans are there are brands of catfood.

Update: This post by Ezra Klein observes that inequality has made a huge comeback too, unsurprisingly.

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Village Fop Flop

by digby

Meet your new self proclaimed “left of center” op-ed columnist for the Village Post:

If the commission does its job right, it will recommend cuts across the government — the Pentagon, social programs, entitlements, veterans’ benefits — as well as tax increases. That’s the only way to solve the debt mess. Special-interest groups on the left and right, the real sucklings at the public teat, don’t want this to happen — so they derailed the effort in Congress to name a commission and now want to discredit Obama’s version.

The latest attempt came this week, again directed at the painfully blunt Simpson, who dared to question the expansion of veterans’ disability benefits to cover illnesses not necessarily related to their military service. “The irony,” Simpson told the Associated Press, is “that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess.”

Again, outrage rained from the critics (including, tellingly, some of those who objected to the “tits” remark). The Veterans of Foreign Wars protested that it “believes in fiscal responsibility, but veterans’ programs are sacrosanct.”

Simpson, an Army veteran, is again correct. If vets are sacrosanct, Social Security is sacrosanct, low taxes are sacrosanct and everything else is sacrosanct, we’ll have a whole herd of sacred cows and an economy like Greece’s.

The folksy and salty Simpson, who turned 79 years old on Thursday and stands 79 inches tall, has long been one of my favorites in politics.

That’s what passes for liberal in the nation’s capital. It’s Dana Milbank, of course, blithely waving his metaphorical lace hanky at an economically stressed nation wryly drawling that they are simply going to have to sacrifice even more. This is also why people hate liberals — they think Dana Milbank is one.

Of course, Villagers have been calling for the little people to sacrifice for some time now, always couching it carefully with the words “we” even though they will not be among those with brain injuries or feeble old bodies (the “entitled” people) who will be forced even further into poverty by these proposed cuts:

Here’s my favorite example from the wealthy Mrs Alan Greenspan way back in January of 2009:

MSNBC commentator: … The subtext of all of this [call to service] is “hey Americans, you’re gonna have to do your part too. There may be some sacrifices involved for you too.” Do you think he’s going to use his political capital to make those arguments and will it go beyond rhetoric?

Andrea Mitchell: It does go beyond rhetoric. He needs to engage the American people in this joint venture. That’s part of the call. That’s part of what he needs to accomplish in his speech and in the days following the speech. He needs to make people feel that this is their venture as well and that people are going to need to be more patient and have to contribute and that there will have to be some sacrifice.

And certainly, if he is serious about what he told the Washington Post last week, that he wants to take on entitlement reform, there will be greater sacrifice required from a nation already suffering from economic crisis — to ask people to take a look at their health care and their other entitlements and realize that for the long term health and vitality of the country we’re going to have to give up something that we already enjoy.

I’m sure Dana and Andrea will be at the front of the bread line.

He is, naturally, completely uninformed about the subject and hasn’t the vaguest clue about what Simpson is proposing and how it will effect real human beings. But that doesn’t matter because Old Alan is what Villagers love above all:

Simpson is exactly the right man for the debt commission: a dealmaker. His proposal for Social Security is hardly the most radical. Who would liberals rather have representing the Republicans on the debt commission? The Senate nominee from Alaska, Joe Miller, who says “we’ve got to transition out of the Social Security arrangement”? Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul, who calls Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” from which people should “opt out”? Colorado Senate nominee Ken Buck, who calls Social Security “horrible, bad policy”? Or Nevada nominee Sharron Angle, who wants to “phase Medicare and Social Security out in favor of something privatized”?

It doesn’t even occur to this fop that Simpson might have exactly the same goal as they do and is doing the job of advancing it a few more steps in the their preferred direction.

He’s right about one thing though. Simpson is a dealmaker, as I wrote the other day:

[Y]ou have to assume that Simpson’s fulfilling his designated role. He will make a deal. All he asks is that the geezer parasites, current and future, get it out of their heads once and for all that this society should provide some basic security for everyone.

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“He’s Alive Enough To Sue”

by digby

This pretty much sums up everything that scares and repulses me about the right:

Keep in mind that Hannity is the same fellow who wrote a book called “Let Freedom Ring.”

These are people who will fight to the death against the federal government’s right levy taxes to pay for roads and bridges yet have no problem with armed police bursting into your home without a warrant, announcing they are checking you into a hospital against your will and then shooting you repeatedly with electricity when you refuse. I think it clears up just what “liberty” means to these people, don’t you?

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Loving Their Grandkids To Death

by digby

Howie has a great post up today about the social security con game which you should in full. I just wanted to riff on one little piece of it because it struck me that we haven’t been clear about what’s going on. In the post he quotes a great letter from Bernie Sanders which contains this passage:

The truth is that the Social Security Trust Fund has run surpluses for the last quarter century. Today’s $2.5 trillion cushion is projected to grow to $4 trillion in 2023. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, experts in this area, say Social Security will be able to pay every nickel owed to every eligible beneficiary until 2039.

Got that? In case you don’t, let me repeat it. The people who have studied this issue most thoroughly and have no political bias report that Social Security will be able to pay out all benefits to every eligible beneficiary for the next 29 years.

It is true that by 2039, if nothing is changed, Social Security will be able to pay out only about 80 percent of benefits. That is why it is important that Congress act soon to make sure Social Security is as strong in the future as it is today.

That sounds pretty straightforward to me. We have created surpluses (with which we bought US treasury bonds like other smart investors such as the Chinese) and they are projected to cover 100% of benefits for the next 29 years after which it would only be able to pay out 80% of current benefits. So as soon as the immediate crisis is over, we should do the prudent thing and figure out how to ensure that we will be able to continue paying out 100% of benefits beyond the next 30 years.

Now Alan Simpson and Pete Peterson both make a fetish out of saying that the reason they want to “reform” social security is so it will be there for their grandkids. It’s the emotional thrust of their whole argument. They also offer constant reassurance that the “greedy geezers” will not suffer any loss. So why then, knowing that their grandkids are already going to see a benefit shortfall of 20%, are they trying to make the situation even worse and cause a shortfall of another 15 to 20%? It doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t logic call for them to find more revenue so their precious grandkids could have the same amount seniors get today? Or at the very least, if they can’t bear to raise taxes even for their own noble cause, why won’t they leave it at only a 20% shortfall rather than cut benefits even more?

Back when they were pushing privatization, they could say that they wanted to offer their grandkids the opportunity for a better “return” by allowing them to invest what’s left after the cuts in a roaring stock market. But privatization isn’t on the table this time, for obvious reasons. Now they are just nonsensically saying that their grandkids are being cheated and because they love them so much they need to cheat them even more. I’ve heard of tough love, but this is just cruel.

Maybe it’s too complicated, but in debates this fall I’d really love to see Democrats pose the question to their GOP rivals: if social security is going broke why are you trying to cut it more? I’d at least be interested in hearing how they explain why they are trying to destroy the safety net in order to save it. (Sadly, I suspect we’re going to see a lot of “consensus” talk from Democrats on this issue.)

Be sure to read Howie’s whole post which contains a lot of interesting info including the entire Sanders piece that concludes with this:

In the midst of all of the destructive rhetoric and ideas out there, there is one proposal that is simple, sensible and would keep Social Security strong and solvent in a fair and just way.

Under the law today, the Social Security payroll tax is levied only on earnings up to $106,800 a year. That means millionaires and billionaires get off scot free on all of their income above that amount. In other words, an individual who earns $106,800 pays the same Social Security tax as a multimillionaire. That’s wrong.

Applying the Social Security payroll tax on those with the most income, say over $250,000 a year, would correct this inequity. According to CBO, applying the tax to all income would provide all the revenue that Social Security needs for the foreseeable future– for our kids and grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Yes. Why the hell not? Just because Grover Norquist has a bunch of Republicans by the cojones with his little pledge doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to do this. But first they have to take SS off the table for the present and start making the case for this logical tax hike for the future. (These things take time to percolate — the Right will easily wait 20 years for items on their agenda to bubble up to the surface.)

Because when you step back and think about it, while Obama and boyz may have thought this was just a terrific Obama Goes To China legacy maker when they first fashioned this Grand Bargain strategy two years ago, it’s insane that we are talking about economic problem 30 years out when right now we have 10% unemployment and an economy that slipping back in to recession. Indeed, it’s so insane that it’s very presence on the menu explains why the administration is so willing to walk on this third rail: it’s Krugman’s Human Sacrifice to the Bond Gods theory. It isn’t science, policy or even politics. It’s magical thinking.

And yet, strangely enough rich people will do very well in all this regardless. Isn’t that odd.

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Cat Scratch Reaper

by digby

I don’t know exactly what he’s talking about here, but this tweet by @TedNugent certainly is evocative:

I am not a hunter. I am an operator. I provide solutions. Final solutions.

Creepy.

Anyone up for a CD burning party?

Yeah, you’re right. Where would we find the CDs? (8-track stomping party? No?)

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Spoiled Voters, Real Americans

by digby

Adam Serwer correctly took issue with Eugene Robinson’s assertion today that the American people are acting like spoiled brats. People are genuinely stressed and it’s human nature to want to take it out on the government, which is the only institution in which the average person has a say. But I would take issue with one thing. Serwer writes this:

[I]t’s silly to blame the American people for reacting to the results of Democratic governance. Unemployment edged up to 9.6 percent, the economy losing 54,000 jobs. As Neil Irwin reports today, “The current pace of job creation is too weak to put Americans back to work in significant numbers.” There’s no mystery as to why Americans aren’t dancing in the streets. A better argument might be that Democrats are being “spoiled,” since it’s their lack of enthusiasm about voting that is giving the GOP a major advantage.

But, you know, Democrats are Americans too. And they are also without jobs (or unable to change them) and are losing their homes and savings in this economy. At least the Republicans feel they have a path to improvement; Democrats feel politically abandoned. As everyone constantly reminds them, have no one else to vote for and so many of them feel there’s little point in participating at all under these circumstances.

I don’t think Serwer was endorsing that view, but rather using it as an example. However, there are people hectoring Democrats for failing to be properly enthusiastic and I think it’s worthwhile to remind them that Democrats have lives and jobs and futures that are affected by this economy too and they are scared stiff about what’s happening. As Serwer says, it’s not irrational. After 20 months in office, if this is the best they can hope for and the Republican freakshow on the right is the worst, you can’t really blame them for feeling despair.

I might just add that there are a couple of ways the Democrats could get their troops fired up. The first — making the Reaganesque “stay the course, our policies haven’t yet kicked in” argument, while picking some dramatic cultural/ideological issues to show principled allegiance to the base — is probably too late. They foolishly took premature victory laps at various points that didn’t work out. (Hello, Recovery Summer?) The other is to pick a big fight and engage in a full scale confrontation. They could bring something up in congress or Obama could pick a fight with them on a matter of executive power. Might fire up the troops a little to know that the Democrats are still breathing.

But it doesn’t look like we’re going to see a confrontation. By all accounts we are actually going to see capitulation on the Bush tax cuts and an austerity program going into 2012. It’s pretty hard to get excited about that. But it will probably cure us all of our spoiled attitudes once and for all, so that’s something.

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Now You’re Talkin’!

by tristero

Even though he doesn’t quite grok what he’s doing, Matt’s starting to catch on, at least at some level:

So, yes, the Taliban is misogynistic and so are most religious traditionalists. And, yes, the Taliban is nationalistic and so are right-wing political parties in most democracies. And, yes, the Taliban is enthusiastic about war-fighting as a way to achieve policy aims and so is Bill Kristol. This is all true…

‘Nuff said!

And reasonable Matt Yglesias- not the shrill Kos – has said it. There are eerie similarities between the Taliban and the American right wing.

Did I take what Matt said out of context? I did indeed. Isn’t his point the exact opposite – that there are important differences between the Taliban and the American right? Yep.

So? I’m not talking about the substance of the post, but rather its use of rhetoric. Matt can go ahead and hedge all he wants – and he does – but rhetorically, it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Why? Because Matt has described a dismaying number of ways in which the right wing sounds terribly Taliban-ish. Rhetorically speaking, simply by engaging the notion that radical Islamists can be compared to the right wing GOP, the creepy similarities between their worldviews and values simply can’t be avoided. Not reason, not logic, but the rhetorical structure of the argument creates a deep association which lingers on even after Matt goes through the exercise of explaining it away.

To repeat what I’ve said a zillion times: The problem the United States is having with its right wing is only partly amenable to reasoned discourse – a playing field upon which liberals will always win. But we also require, among other things, a sophisticated contemporary liberal rhetoric of persuasion – which neither mainstream Democrats nor many liberals possess with any coherence, crispness, wit, or consistency.

What Matt inadvertently did here gives me hope that things could change. Matt can claim as often as he likes that he is not in any real sense equating the Taliban and William Kristol and be quite sincere about it. But simply because Kos – secondhand – got him to talk about it, that is exactly what he is doing.

And that is exactly what we want the right to do as well. We want them to defend their extremism by debunking the comparison with Taliban. Talk about it in detail, please! Tell us all about the important differences between al Qaeda’s homophobia and Focus on the Family’s. Explain all the nuances so we understand.

And the more they explain how different they are, the more the two are rhetorically associated. And invariably, the more plausible the comparison becomes.

Special note for those of you who care about the actual point of Matt’s post, as opposed to its rhetoric: I think he’s wrong.

The Corners Of His Mind

by digby

Rachel did a nice job of slicing up Haley Barbour’s ridiculous assertion that the Southern Strategy was all about racial reconciliation:

[T]he people who led the change of parties in the South, just as I mentioned earlier, was my generation. My generation who went to integrated schools — I went to integrated college, um, never thought twice about it. And it was the old Democrats who had fought for segregation so hard. By my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn’t gonna be that way any more. So the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It really is a sign of progress that the right is busy rewriting history to portray themselves as the liberators of the African Americans. If they could do it without also falsely claiming they are victims of reverse racism and religious persecution people might even allow them to pretend it’s true. Unfortunately, their new routine is just the 21st century version of the the same old nonsense wrapped up in victimization instead of superiority. And it’s no less noxious since it casts still relatively powerless African Americans in an oppressor role, which is sickening.

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Yum!

by tristero

In case you haven’t heard, factory-produced eggs – of the kind that led to the recent recall of half a billion of them – are not only tasteless, they are produced under horrifying, gross, disgusting conditions. What does “horrifying, gross, disgusting conditions” mean?

Chicken manure located in the manure pits below the egg laying operation was observed to be approximately 4 feet high to 8 feet high at the following locations: Layer 1 – House 1; Layer 3 – Houses 2, 7, 17, and 18. The outside access doors to the manure pits at these locations had been pushed out by the weight of the manure, leaving open access to wildlife or domesticated animals.

…

Un-baited, unsealed holes appearing to be rodent burrows located along the second floor baseboards were observed inside Layer 1 – Houses 1 – 9 and 11 – 13; Layer 2 – Houses 7 and 11; Layer 3 – Houses 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6; Layer 4 – House 3.

Dark liquid which appeared to be manure was observed seeping through the concrete foundation to the outside of the laying houses at the following locations: Layer 1 – Houses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, and 14; and Layer 3 – Houses 1, 8, 13 and 17.

Standing water approximately 3 inches deep was observed in the southeast corner of the manure pit located inside Layer 1 – House 13.

Employees workng within the houses did not wear or change protective clothing wben moving from house to house. An employee at Layer 6 – House 3 was observed walking out of House 3 with a metal scraper and into House 2 without changing protective clothing and without cleaning/sanitizing equipment between the houses.

Un-caged birds (chickens having escaped) were observed in the egg laying operation in contact with the egg lay;ng birds at Layer 3 – Houses 9 and 16. The un~caged birds were using the manure, which was approximately 8 feet high, to access the egg laying area.

On NPR a few days ago, I heard a professor claim that after he read the reports (available here), he found very little out of the ordinary about the conditions at Hillandale and Wright County Egg. No doubt this is true and I suppose I should feel reassured that 8 foot high stacks of chicken shit are simply business as usual. But I’ll just continue to buy organic eggs or better yet, local eggs from the Greenmarket. If that means I can’t afford to eat eggs every day, that’s ok. Besides, I certainly can’t afford salmonella poisoning.

And if those are the factory conditions for eggs, imagine what it looks like at beef factories, such as Cargill’s:

For the first time in this country, public health officials have linked ground beef to illnesses from a rare strain of E. coli, adding fuel to an already fierce debate over expanding federal rules meant to keep the toxic bacteria out of the meat supply.

Cargill Meat Solutions recalled 8,500 pounds of hamburger on Saturday after investigators determined that it was the likely source of a bacterial strain known as E. coli O26, which had sickened three people in Maine and New York.

Under federal rules, it is illegal to sell ground beef containing a more common strain of the bacteria, E. coli O157:H7, which has been responsible for thousands of illnesses, many deaths and the recall of millions of pounds of beef over the years. But federal regulators are now considering whether to give the same illegal status to at least six other E. coli strains, including O26, which can also make people violently sick.

The meat industry has opposed such a change, saying it is not needed. Among the arguments the industry has used was one stubborn fact: no outbreak in this country from the rarer strains of E. coli had ever been definitively tied to ground beef.

The industry can no longer make that argument.

Hyvää ruokahalua!

Message: They Care

by digby

This NY Times story says that the youth vote for Democrats is dwindling because of the economy. I think this quote is very telling:

“There’s a vibe,” he said on a recent afternoon, while pumping weights at the gym. “Right now it seems like Republicans just care a lot more than Democrats.”

I get that. They do seem like they care more.

Those who are paying close attention realize that they either care more about destroying the socialist/Muslim menace or they care more about taking back the power they so recently lost. But either way, they do appear to give a damn. The Democrats, on the other hand, rather than coming out with their guns blazing at those who have made it impossible for them to fix these problems seem content with trying to convince people that it isn’t as bad as they think it is.

You know — like when your friend tries to convince you that you shouldn’t be upset about something you are upset about. It’s annoying. And you realize very quickly that they just don’t want to hear about it anymore. That’s how the Democrats seem right now — that they are sick of hearing about it.

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