Month: September 2011

Groundhogs love Grand Bargains

by digby

Here’s a shocker. The Super Committee Dems are negotiating like morons:

The key dilemma facing President Obama and Congressional Democrats is that Republicans are wholly unwilling to support any new job-creating spending projects — even projects with bipartisan support — unless they’re offset with spending cuts or savings elsewhere in the budget.

Thus, Democrats on the new joint deficit Super Committee will seek more than the $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction they’ve been tasked with finding, in order to help offset some of those costs.

“All of us would like to set as a target for ourselves even more than $1.5 trillion,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), who’s also the top House Democrat on the Budget Committee, told reporters at a Tuesday Capitol press conference.

He and other Democrats point out that economic growth will reduce deficits simply by reducing unemployment rolls and increasing tax revenues. But when taken on their own, Democrats’ favored jobs proposals (infrastructure spending, or temporary tax cuts) add to the deficit, and will thus make it harder, mathematically for Democrats to reach the Committee’s goal of $1.5 trillion in budget savings.

Committee member Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) agrees with Van Hollen, and says he’d be willing to put key progressive programs on the table if it gives Congress more running room to shore up the economy now.

“It’s incumbent upon the Congress and the government not to make things worse,” Becerra said. “I’m looking at the last six months and I’m not seeing how job growth has come from some of this cutting of services, but again I’ll be open to it so long as…there’s proof that the proposal will lead to job growth and deficit reduction.”

This is obviously coordinated with the White House which has been leaking this silly idea for the last week. I wrote about it here back on the 4th, based on this Politico report:

The drama surrounding Obama’s new jobs plan has eclipsed the other major item on the White House’s September agenda: to offer his most specific proposal yet for reshaping Medicare, Medicaid and the tax code.

In the speech Thursday, Obama will challenge the 12-member congressional supercommittee to exceed its $1.5 trillion goal for budget savings — setting a higher target that would allow the additional money to fund tax breaks and other stimulus spending. But the “very specific” deficit recommendations that Obama promised last month won’t come until after the speech, although the exact timing is unclear, White House officials said.

But then there’s nothing new about it at all, is there?

January 2009:

To listen to Obama and his budget director Peter Orszag is to hear a tale of long-term fiscal woe. The government may have to spend and cut taxes in a big way now, but in the long run, the federal budget is unsustainable.

That’s where sacrifice kicks in. There will be signs of it in Obama’s first budget, in his efforts to contain health-care costs and, down the road, in his call for entitlement reform and limits on carbon emissions. His camp is selling the idea that if he wants authority for new initiatives and new spending, Obama will have to prove his willingness to cut some programs and reform others.

The “grand bargain” they are talking about is a mix and match of boldness and prudence. It involves expansive government where necessary, balanced by tough management, unpopular cuts — and, yes, eventually some tax increases. Everyone, they say, will have to give up something.

Only such a balance, they argue, will win broad support for what Obama wants to do, and thus make his reforms “sustainable,” the other magic word — meaning that even Republicans, when they eventually get back to power, will choose not to reverse them.

It’s Groundhog Day.

Aside from the absurdity of the idea that this “balance” will win broad support and thus make his proposals “sustainable”, the politics at this point are literally insane.

The president and his Democratic robots are going to propose to cut Medicare by raising the eligibility age and cut Social security by making the oldest and most vulnerable (mostly women) lose benefits just when they need them the most. They are going to do this in order to get the Republicans to agree to extend the payroll tax cuts for another year or two (which only counts as stimulus if you define it as something that would be contractionary to take away.) And the really good news is — huzzah — that will weaken Social Security even more. It’s a twofer. if we’re lucky maybe they can get the Democrats to agree to slash the corporate tax rates to zero and completely eliminate the FAA and call it stimulus too.

Politically it’s even better. Here’s the Mittster just a couple of days ago:

ROMNEY: We didn’t raise taxes, Mr. President. You raised taxed $500 billion dollars. We didn’t cut Medicare — one President in modern history cut Medicare, this President.

David Atkins wrote a whole post recently about the latest “independent expenditure” attacks on Democrats for cutting Medicare. Maybe the president thinks he might as well propose to cut it for real since they’re already blaming him for doing it. The difference, of course, is that Democrats who don’t usually believe GOP propaganda like that will be forced to admit that it’s true. Why do that?

I am given to understand that the DCCC is telling all their candidates to run on the Pelosi slogan “we have a plan, it’s called Medicare.” I like that slogan very much. But I have a sneaking suspicion it isn’t going to play very well if the Democratic president is cutting the hell out of the program. And raising the eligibility age is a very, very big cut, one that people will immediately grasp, especially those that are in the program or close to it. The politicians can assure these elders all they want that they will be ok, but polls repeatedly show that it doesn’t help sell the cuts to say “don’t worry, you’re safe — only your kids and grandkids will be screwed.” For some reason, older people who like these programs often care about their families and want them to have them too. Who knew?

I’m sure they’ll make the case that the Affordable Care Act will pick up the slack, which will sound to the average American as if they’re speaking in tongues. Nobody understands or trusts that the ACA is even real at this point — that argument will get them nowhere in 2012.

I don’t believe any of these Democrats are stupid enough at this point to think they will get a “deal.” The Republicans have shown their cards on that one too many times for even these guys to believe otherwise. But the Republicans are thrilled for the Dems to tee up Medicare and Social Security for them again.

Here’s a little reminder of the 2010 campaign:

This is becoming surreal. It’s almost impossible to sort out what these people really want anymore or what they think they will accomplish. It’s clear to everyone except Mark Halperin that there will be no bipartisan agreement, even if Barack Obama were to simply take Rick Perry’s agenda and adopt it as his own. So it’s all a bizarre suicidal kabuki dance.

Wasting the last year on this deficit nonsense has been very, very costly for the American people. The congress is hunkered down, the Fed and the executive branch are still wedded to austerity. All that’s left of politics is the election campaign. This isn’t going to help.

Update:

Dday writes on the same subject:

The President has all the tools he needs right now to force deficit reduction far beyond what he will probably even announce. It’s called the veto pen. Doing nothing and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, along with other expiring tax breaks, will more than achieve primary balance in the medium term. That’s the consensus of the Congressional Budget Office from a couple weeks back. The President could simply say he will not sign any extension of these plans without offsets, leave it to Congress to figure out the details, and be done with deficit reduction, while demanding his jobs plan get enacted. He could say the same thing on jobs, saying he will veto Catfood Commission recommendations unless they contain his jobs plan, with the trigger on defense and discretionary cuts backing him up.

But that’s not this President’s agenda. He thinks the Clinton tax rates were too high. He things that raising the Medicare eligibility age, one of the worst policy ideas imaginable, is a “modest adjustment” to “strengthen” the program. So all these ideas for how to deal with an age of political hostage-taking is a wish and a hope.

By putting Medicare eligibility on the table, and I’m sure Medicaid blended rate and chained CPI aren’t too far behind, the focus becomes about cuts rather than jobs, against the explicit wishes of the public. In the end, Republicans can pick and choose, taking tax cuts and entitlement cuts and tossing out the public investment and overall tax hikes. This didn’t work out during the debt limit deal, but with the trigger supposedly forcing action in the Catfood Commission, the urgency for a Democratic capitulation will be great, especially if the party leader puts out a plan of this stripe.

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“Pain will be inflicted”

by digby

I write a lot about the Villagers’ endless preening about “shared sacrifice”, as if forcing old ladies to live on even less than they do now is somehow equal to asking corporations to depreciate their corporate jets over a longer period. It drives me crazy. But this, for some reason, made me see so red that I had to step away from the computer and take a little walk.

You’ve undoubtedly encountered the Brad Friedman scoop by this time featuring a clandestine recording of the Koch Brothers retreat in Colorado. Mother Jones published the first part yesterday. Part II is all about the lovely “everyman” Chris Christie. You know, the guy all the allegedly sensible conservatives are begging to run because he has so much working man appeal. Evidently, he was the keynote speaker at this little confab and he had a lot of really entertaining things to say (entertaining, that is, if you are the type of person who laughs at disabled people and starving animals.)

Here’s good old Governor Chris getting down to business with his audience of filthy rich fascists:

During the Q&A, one of the questioners wondered what Christie had learned in New Jersey that might be applied to the nation. His answer was direct: “This is not hard. We spend too much. We borrow too much. We tax too much. It is time to turn those three things around.”

“Now, pain will be inflicted when we change that,” he went on. “People are going to do with less. People who are used to having entitlement at a certain level will not have them at that level anymore. That’s the story.” Christie cited Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s “courageous” and “thoughtful plan” to “fix those systems” by replacing Medicare with a voucher program.

Just before the Kochs’ guests retired to sip complimentary after-dinner cordials and plot Obama’s downfall at the resort’s Buffalo Bar, Christie delivered this closer: “Please, if you leave with just one message from me, if only one message sticks: This is a huge moment of crisis and opportunity for our country. All of you are the people who are going to lead us back to American greatness. If you care enough to do it.”

Our heroes. No wonder they love him so much. He knows exactly what these assholes want to hear — “pain will be inflicted.” And that’s what this is all about.

The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans on entitlements comes down to this: Democratic elites want to pretend that they are asking for equal sacrifice from rich, middle class and poor alike so that they can assuage their consciences for inflicting pain on the more vulnerable members of society. Republican elites have no such need — they enjoy inflicting pain on the more vulnerable members of society.

It all adds up to the same thing I guess. But hearing the sadistic pleasure in that disgusting piece of work Christie’s voice sent a chill down my spine. It can happen here.

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I thought he was from Vegas

by digby

Harry Reid just came to the Senate floor and laid out a jobs plan that he says Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree to. Evidently we’re still going with the “look how reasonable we are” gambit:

Payroll tax cuts, extension of unemployment insurance, FAA authorization (which expires Sept 16th) & federal spending for national highways

There you have it. Basically the only thing that is any different from what we are already doing is the highways. But I think we’ll have to privatize them first.

If that’s the “jobs” program, it’s not much. And by announcing these ideas as the opening bid, they’re making it even more unlikely that the Republicans will agree to them. Well, maybe they’ll get the tax cuts. They usually like those.

Here’s hoping that the President doesn’t do that and comes in with a big jobs program. He won’t pass it — they’re nuts and everybody knows it. But somebody ought to make the case for what needs to be done, just so that people understand that something could be done. It won’t make any difference in people’s lives — that ship has sailed — but at least some tiny piece of liberalism might have a slight chance of surviving this.

Update: What I said about liberalism? Probably not:

Obama will call on Congress to offset the cost of the short-term jobs measures by raising tax revenue in later years. This would be part of a long-term deficit reduction package, including spending and entitlement cuts as well as revenue increases, that he will present next week to the congressional panel charged with finding ways to reduce the nation’s debt.

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I guess the deal will be ineffectual, phony stimulus now in exchange for cuts in “entitlements” and tax hikes that will never take effect. (I’m sure the economy will never, ever be strong enough for such a drastic measure.)

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What Mitt Romney has in store for us
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Complaints among progressives with the decisions of President Obama and many high-level Democrats are numerous and well justified. On everything from financial regulation to the environment, the Administration has been disappointing on a number of levels. To call the modern Democratic Party the heir to the party of FDR would be a misnomer. It has long since ceased to be that. Returning the party to its former stature of a true mover of liberal ideals should be the goal of progressives nationwide.

But the idea that we have two similar corporatist parties in America is simply insane. Case in point: Mitt Romney. You see, Mitt Romney has a plan for America posted on his website, which he expects America to fall in love with. Remember that this isn’t stuff they’re hashing out in backrooms while laughing maniacally and smoking cigars. This is stuff they’re putting right out in the open:

FIVE BILLS FOR DAY ONE

• The American Competitiveness Act: Reduces the corporate income tax rate to 25 percent
• The Open Markets Act: Implements the Colombia, Panama, and South Korea Free Trade Agreements
• The Domestic Energy Act: Directs the Department of the Interior to undertake a comprehensive survey of American energy reserves in partnership with exploration companies and initiates leasing in all areas currently approved for exploration
• The Retraining Reform Act: Consolidates the sprawl of federal retraining programs and returns funding and responsibility for these programs to the states
• The Down Payment on Fiscal Sanity Act: Immediately cuts non-security discretionary spending by 5 percent, reducing the annual federal budget by $20 billion

More jobs-killing trade bills. Even lower corporate tax rates at a time of record corporate and no jobs. Drill baby drill. Pushes responsibility for jobs training programs back to states like Texas and Alabama. Even more cuts from an already stripped-to-the-bone discretionary spending budget.

But that’s not all. With just 4 yearly installments, you also give five Executive Orders for free:

FIVE EXECUTIVE ORDERS FOR DAY ONE

• An Order to Pave the Way to End Obamacare: Directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services and all relevant federal officials to return the maximum possible authority to the states to innovate and design health care solutions that work best for them
• An Order to Cut Red Tape: Directs all agencies to immediately initiate the elimination of Obama-era regulations that unduly burden the economy or job creation, and then caps annual increases in regulatory costs at zero dollars
• An Order to Boost Domestic Energy Production: Directs the Department of the Interior to implement a process for rapid issuance of drilling permits to developers with established safety records seeking to use pre-approved techniques in pre-approved areas
• An Order to Sanction China for Unfair Trade Practices: Directs the Department of the Treasury to list China as a currency manipulator in its biannual report and directs the Department of Commerce to assess countervailing duties on Chinese imports if China does not quickly move to float its currency
• An Order to Empower American Businesses and Workers: Reverses the executive orders issued by President Obama that tilt the playing field in favor of organized labor, including the one encouraging the use of union labor on major government construction projects

Reinstating the legality of pre-existing condition denials, and letting the states of Texas and Alabama decide “what works best for them.” Defunding of regulatory agencies like environmental protection. Permits for drilling and fracking essentially anywhere. Scott Walker’s plan for organized labor, nationwide. The only thing that stands out in this set of insane promises is the one to increase tariffs on Chinese goods. Does anyone expect that any Republican will actually raise a tariff on China as a trading partner? No, of course not.

But Mitt’s not done here. He wants to keep taxes on the rich as low as possible:

While the entire tax code is in dire need of a fundamental overhaul, Mitt
Romney believes in holding the line against increases in marginal tax rates. The goals that President Bush pursued in bringing rates down to their current level— to spur economic growth, encourage savings and investment, and help struggling Americans make ends meet—are just as important today as they were a decade ago. Letting them lapse, as President Obama promises to do in 2012, is a step in precisely the wrong direction. If anything, the lower rates established by President Bush should be regarded as a directional marker on the road to more fundamental reform.

He wants to kill the Paris Hilton tax:

As president, Mitt Romney will work to eliminate the tax permanently. All told, the negative effects on savings, investment, and job creation show how pernicious an estate tax can be. For those reasons, it should be stricken from the books as soon as possible.

He wants to raise taxes on those who can least afford it:

In the long run, Mitt Romney will pursue a conservative overhaul of the tax
system that includes lower and flatter rates on a broader tax base. The approach taken by the Bowles-Simpson Commission is a good starting point for the discussion. The goal should be a simpler, more efficient, user-friendly, and less onerous tax system.

Oh, and he definitely think corporations are people just like you and me, and that it doesn’t matter whether a dollar goes into the hands of a wage earner or a corporate investor:

Worries that a lower corporate tax rate are unfair or unaffordable are fundamentally misplaced. The truth is, as Mitt Romney likes to say, “corporations are people.” They represent human beings acting cooperatively to be economically productive. Each dollar earned by a corporation is a dollar that ultimately flows, in one form or another, to employees or to shareholders. And those shareholders include the millions of Americans who own shares in mutual funds or who have pensions that invest in the American economy.

But that’s not all. Mitt Romney has many more policies as well on subjects ranging from the environment to labor. Pages 154 and 155 of his grand plan contain no less 59 policy targets, each more destructive than the last. They include a balanced budget amendment, capping federal spending at 20% of GDP, the creation of “Personal ReEmployment Accounts” (yes, that’s just like health savings accounts, but for unemployment!), the national implementation of the union-killing initiative they’re trying to put on the ballot in California by stopping any organization that collects deductions from payroll from political spending, cutting the federal workforce by 10% while cutting the wages of the federal employees who survive layoffs, and restructuring Medicaid as a “block grant” to states.

Now try to remember that Mitt Romney is the supposedly sane GOP candidate. The one that GOP voters are currently rejecting for being insufficiently conservative. However bad a Romney presidency would be, a Perry or Bachmann presidency would be far worse, both on economics and especially on social issues.

It doesn’t really matter how disappointed with President Obama many of us may be. We every right to be angry and disappointed, and we have every obligation to make doubly sure that our presidential candidates are vetted for progressive values in 2016.

But anyone who sits out 2012 from a sense of disappointment in the current Democratic standard-bearer will deserve every last second of the Brave New America that Romney and friends have in store for us. Republicans are openly telegraphing their intention to remake America as an undisguised corporatocracy. It’s up to us to do decide just what we intend to do about it.

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Tammy Baldwin for US Senate

by digby

Good News! Stalwart progressive Tammy Baldwin has announced her candidacy for the Wisconsin Senate seat vacated by Herb Kohl:

Blue America’s announcement:

Tammy already has the boots on the ground – now she needs capital. Will you join us in endorsing Tammy Baldwin by giving something to her campaign today?

Because of her outstanding record in the House, Blue America immediately endorsed her Senate campaign– just minutes after her announcement. And this isn’t just a matter of a terrible alternative– a whole gang of conservatives vying for the seat. Tammy is a proven progressive leader who doesn’t hesitate to take the right stands, whether that means opposing Bush when he’s wrong… or opposing Obama when he’s wrong. She has been a consistent leader in ending the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and she’s been a consistent leader in standing up for working families against the excesses of Big Business.

Because she’s the first woman to have ever won a congressional seat from Wisconsin and the first openly gay person to campaign and win a House seat, Tammy is an historic figure. I imagine her presence in the Senate could be especially discomforting to right-wing hypocrites Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell, while she serves as a model for progressives across the country. If Wisconsin Democrats need an inspiring figure near the top of their ticket, they couldn’t hope for a better one than Tammy Baldwin!

Wisconsin is the epicenter of the progressive grassroots movement, with organizing on the ground ready and able to take on the machine. Tammy is a known leader among them and they will work their hearts out for her. But they will need our help — the Koch Brothers aren’t going to abandon their stake in the state and the Republicans who serve them will do everything they can to prevent a Democrat seizing the seat.

Over 400 Blue America donors have contributed to each of the Senate campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Please consider giving that kind of enthusiastic support to Tammy Baldwin as well. It would be hard to imagine that there will be any other candidates on this page this year.

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Courting Disaster

by digby

Mark Halperin is a dick . ..or a fool anyway. Here he is vomiting up the latest beltway CW on the jobs speech on Hardball today:

Matthews: Should Obama offer up something in the middle that the Republicans will at least nibble at or should he offer up something so broad and “New Deal” that they’ll obviously reject it but the American people on the Democrats’ side will love it. What should he do?

Halperin: Chris, I think he should do whatever ismost likely to create jobs. And my sense is, which has been true all year, is the thing that is most likely to create jobs is finding common ground between John Boehner and Barack Obama.

I think the way the speech has been led up to, the things that are likely to be in the speech, the Republicans’ pre-reaction to what’s going to be in the speech all suggest that this speech, even if it’s brilliantly delivered is not going to produce the kind of bipartisanship that is required to get something approved by John Boehner, Harry Reid and Barack Obama.

Just what does Mark Halperin think that John Boehner wants to do to create jobs? I know! Let’s eliminate all corporate income taxes. Would that do it? No, probably not. We’ll need something more than that. How about completely disbanding the EPA and firing all public employees? No? Right, Republicans are going to need a little bit more than that. The president literally falling on Ulysses S Grant’s sword in the oval office in a prime time speech would certainly be a dramatic capitulation. Would that help? I didn’t think so.

Have you ever heard anything more vacuous? Did he take a trip to mars during his MSNBC suspension and miss the whole debt ceiling debacle? Good lord. Barack Obama has been more than willing to give the Republicans everything they want no matter how much it hurts the economy or his own Party. It would be impossible for any President to be more accommodating to the opposition without actually joining them. And they still won’t take yes for an answer.

But Halperin doesn’t see it that way. When Matthews said that he was proposing that Obama set forth a bipartisan jobs plan that would be rejected, Halperin robotically replied:

I think they should have been consulting with the Republicans all along and I don’t think it’s too late. But to go in and give the speech that it seems he’s going to give, offering up new spending, massive spending proposals with nothing on the other side that the Republicans could say was a trade off that would be worth taking for them, again is going to lead to the kind of gridlock and partisan bickering that isn’t going to solve the problem.

If the president is more concerned with creating jobs than his reelection, and he should be, the way he’s approached this and the way he’s headed is not going to produce anything that will be approved by John Boehner and Harry Reid and by Barack Obama. And if the federal government is going to create jobs those guys all have to be on board.

I think the question is, “is Mark Halperin a human or a robot, programmed to say exactly the same thing no matter what the circumstances?” Inquiring minds and all that.

Matthews was intrigued, wondering if the president should go up to the Hill and begin a “courtship.” (“Please baby, I’m so sorry I made you hit me. I promise I won’t do it again.”) Luckily, Jonathan Alter pointed out that it was a fools’ errand and encouraged the president to lay out a case for an activist federal government and cited Roosevelt’s pledge to put 250,000 young people to work in the national parks by the following summer (and he did it!)

Halperin replied that such a speech could be given next September and admitted that these proposals were probably the best way to put Americans back to work. However, none of this was going to pass so Obama should instead seek some mushy bullshit compromise that the Republicans will also reject because … it’s wrong for the President to be playing politics in the middle of this crisis.

Matthews suggested that perhaps the president could use the populist tone but just lay out some “small potatoes” with a date certain to get it done — like the payroll tax extension, extending unemployment benefits and maybe some small infrastructure projects. Halperin replied that this sort of tone just won’t work with the Republicans, although he did admit that he hadn’t a clue about what would.

Then they just babbled on about how the whole thing was hopeless and Matthews ended with a good point about the idea of setting down some specific dates for the Republicans to meet on jobs:

It beats spending the next three months watching this Super Committee decide what to cut. Boy what a loser.

No kidding.

Meanwhile it looks like Matthews will get his potatoes:

People familiar with the White House deliberations on a jobs package say President Barack Obama is considering a plan totaling about $300 billion in tax cuts and spending for 2012.

Two of the biggest measures are expected to be a one-year extension of a payroll tax cut for workers and a continuation of unemployment benefits. Those items would total about $170 billion.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan was still being finalized and some proposals could be changed before Obama introduces his plan Thursday night in his address to Congress.

The White House is considering tax incentives for businesses that hire as well as spending for public works projects.

The package is designed to increase consumer demand, speed up infrastructure construction and spur hiring.

The sad thing is that these Republicans are getting ever loonier so it’s not unlikely that they can’t even pass any piece of that package — UI will run out and payroll taxes will go up.

It’s hard not to despair right now. This lunacy is overtaking the whole world. The UK’s doubling down on austerity:

George Osborne has signalled that the government would stick to its hardline deficit reduction strategy despite being forced to revise down his growth forecasts for the economy following the slowdown of recent months.

The chancellor said the coalition’s tax increases and spending restraint had been designed to allow interest rates to remain low — a clear hint that he would back a second round of money creation from the Bank of England through the quantitative easing process.

Speaking at Lloyd’s of London, the chancellor said: “We warned repeatedly that the recovery would be choppy. And we set in train a plan that was comprehensive and clear in its vision, but also flexible enough to withstand shocks along the way.

“A plan for fiscal responsibility to bring unsustainable government borrowing under control, so that monetary activism can allow interest rates to stay lower for longer. The plan we have set out is designed in tough times for tough times. It is the rock of stability upon which any sustainable recovery depends and we will hold to it.”

Right oh.

It’s been determined that the riots were caused by hooligans and twitter users so no need to worry about the social ramifications of these policies. I’m quite sure everything will be just fine. Tough love, tough times, tough shit, and all that rot.

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Bipartisan consensus
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Barack Obama:

“I think putting money back in the pockets of working families is the best way to get demand rising, because that then means business is hiring, and that means the economy is growing. So I’m going to propose ways to get America back to work that both parties can agree to.

In all likelihood, these will include small-scale infrastructure investments the GOP will reject (unless they’re in GOP districts), wage-killing job-outsourcing “free trade” agreements, and payroll tax cuts that, while legitimately beneficial for the middle class, represent an only weakly stimulative revenue-killing “solution” that promises to hasten the demise of Social Security.

President Obama will propose these things under the presumption that the GOP would be ashamed to reject them–and then he will act shocked when they do. Then the President will do the whole “only adult in the room” thing, at which point he’ll give the GOP what they want while excising anything remotely progressive. The GOP will lose a few points in the polls, and the President and his advisers will think they “won” the battle and chalk it up as a victory.

One of those “bipartisan consensus” ideas that will likely be included in whatever jobs bill comes out of the legislative mess, is targeted tax holidays. Andrew Ross Sorkin has a few words to say about that:

As President Obama confronts the nation’s dismal unemployment problem — stubbornly stuck at 9.1 percent with, shockingly, zero net jobs created in August — Wall Street and corporate America are working behind the scenes in Washington to push for a series of temporary tax breaks, which they insist will help create jobs.

Of course, businesses want an overhaul of the corporate tax code that would reduce rates for the long term. But for now they are seeking a series of tax holidays, including a payroll tax break for employers, not just employees, and a tax break to let companies repatriate about $1 trillion that is sitting overseas. In turn, they say, they will spend it on new recruits, perhaps as many as 2.9 million of them, according to a letter the United States Chamber of Commerce sent to the president on Monday.

Consider it a form of horse trading — tax cuts for jobs. There is only one small problem with this strategy: temporary tax cuts rarely result in new jobs and always result in less tax revenue.

Which is exactly why they’ll be included in the final jobs bill. If there even is one.

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Keeping an eye on things for their friends

by digby

Well, well, well…

A top investigator for the Senate Finance Committee, working under Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), may have had smoking gun evidence of News Corp’s hacking activity. While News Corp’s British subsidiaries have received the most media attention for systematically hacking the cell phone and personal records of private citizens, the public still has heard little of allegations relating to similar conduct perpetrated by News Corp against its American competitors. ThinkProgress has learned that not only did a sensitive tip come to Grassley’s office about News Corp’s cyber attacks against other American companies, but authorities may have failed to look into the matter partially because a staffer named Nick Podsiadly allegedly never followed through on his promise to the whistleblower.

Read on for the details.

I’m still quite skeptical that the government itself didn’t know and enable this. After all, we were in the midst of an unprecedented spree of government surveillance of American citizens in the aftermath of 9/11. Did they miss this?

What do you suppose will happen if News Corp’s competitors find out that more than just a lone Senate staffer was aware that Rupert Murdoch was spying on them. Like the NSA, for instance. You remember them, the guys who were spying on everybody during that period?

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Gipper logic and deficit fever

by digby

Politico ran this piece last Friday which I think is worth a little contemplation:

This March, I wrote a story with the now-ludicrous headline, “Barack Obama’s dilemma: When to declare recovery.”In it, Paul Begala reflected on something that was really on the Administration’s mind:

“The hard part is now — you have nascent recovery, the economists say it’s headed in the right direction, but the country doesn’t feel it at all,” said former Clinton White House aide Paul Begala. “It’s a tough line, because you want to be a cheerleader but you don’t want to look like you’re out of touch.”

This reflected a real, bipartisan consensus — though one that had begun to wane by Spring. Last September, none other than Mitt Romney boiled it down:

But he will do everything he can to get the economy going back again, and most likely — at least in my view — the economy will be coming back.He will, you know, you can expect Vice President Biden to come out and say it was the President’s great economic accomplishment that the economy has turned around, and of course, most of the people in this room will recognize it was in spite of much that was done in Washington that the economy has turned around. Recessions do end. The economy recovers. It always has. It always will.That being said, however, they will take credit for the fact that things are getting better. That will help the President’s reelection effort.

This isn’t the campaign either Obama or most Republicans expected to run, and if they seem caught off guard, it’s because they were.

Does anyone know why in the world everyone was so confident at that point? It seemed to me at the time to be wholly faith-based, as if recessions were on a schedule ordained by God. It led to the catastrophic political error of taking a sharp turn to deficit reduction. Here’s Glen Thrush in Politico from a couple of days ago on that subject:

Obviously, Obama’s reasons for reluctantly embracing the deficit crusade last fall weren’t strictly political – the debt/deficit is huge and snowballing. But the shift in the political wind played a major role, as the president himself seemed to acknowledge in his Nov. 3, 2010 morning-after press conference:

“I’m sympathetic to folks who looked at it and said this is looking like potential overreach,” he told reporters, who wanted to know if he viewed the tea party’s electoral backlash as a repudiation of his stimulus spending.

“[T]here were a bunch of price tags that went with that,” said Obama, who struck a bipartisan tone weeks before he hit the House GOP buzz saw. “And so, even though these were emergency situations, people rightly said, gosh, we already have all this debt, we already have these big deficits; this is potentially going to compound it, and at what point are we going to get back to a situation where we’re doing what families all around the country do, which is make sure that if you spend something you know how to pay for it — as opposed to racking up the credit card for the next generation.”

Being in the center seemed like a good idea at the time. It seems like a good idea ALL the time. In fairness, his West Wing advisers thought he simply had no other options if he wanted to have any leverage at all — and they still dismiss suggestions that his decision to go deficit-first is at the root of their current woes.

But all this shifting around makes for less-than-coherent policy and messaging. Moreover, by accepting the whip-debt-now mantra of his GOP opponents, Obama may have fallen into the same trap that ensnared FDR in 1936, with few of the political advantages enjoyed by Roosevelt who was riding the greatest wave of popular progressive in the 20th century, which allowed him to overcome a 17 percent unemployment rate that year.

I don’t happen to think the president “reluctantly” adopted deficit reduction— he’d been planning to do it back when he was riding the wave of a huge mandate for change. And the reason they refuse to accept that it was the single worst decision of the term is simple rationalizing of what’s turned out to be a major mistake.

But beyond that strategic cock-up was the apparent bipartisan belief that Obama’s first term was following a sort of Gipper logic, by which it was assumed that there would be Morning in America, despite the fact that the actual economic details differed greatly from that time and they were facing rabid Republican extremists rather than fat and lethargic Democrats as Reagan had. Where that came from I still don’t know.

In any case, there can be no doubt that those two strategic decisions — assuming the economy was recovering on its own and emphasizing deficit reduction even in the face of evidence that it wasn’t — were huge error. But then the austerity error is in vogue all over the industrialized west, so perhaps someone just put something in the water at Aspen and Davos.

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On Fire

by digby

I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but Texas is burning up. And it’s burning in an unprecedented way — these are the worst fires on record. Their global warming denier Governor Perry wants people to pray for rain, and I sure hope it works.

Matt Yglesias puts it well:

The whole situation sort of reminds me of Trotsky’s quip about the dialect. Neither Governor Perry nor the bulk of Texas’ citizens may be interested in climate change, but climate change is interested in them.

Very interested apparently.

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