Month: October 2012

Democrats shouldn’t clean up Republican fiscal messes

by David Atkins

Greg Sargent points out how full of shit Paul Ryan is:

But there’s another moment that deserves more attention. In it, Ryan finally did get a bit more specific about the middle class deductions the Romney plan would not target to pay for its enormous tax cuts.

This makes the Romney plan’s math even harder — and more likely to explode the deficit. Here’s the key bit (at around the 5:30 mark), in which Ryan is talking about taxes on the rich:

“If you subject more of their income to taxation — more of their income is taxed — and that allows us to lower revenues for everybody across the board. That means middle class taxpayers have lower tax rates, and there’s plenty of fiscal room to keep these important preferences for middle class taxpayers — you know, like charitable donations, or buying a home, or health care. Every time we’ve done this, we’ve created economic growth.”

Ryan seems to be saying the Romney plan won’t touch the charitable deduction, mortgage interest deduction, or exclusion for health insurance enjoyed by middle class Americans. He doesn’t take them off the table officially, but he articulates that as a specific goal.

But this will make it even harder for Romney and Ryan to keep their pledge to make their plan revenue neutral. Remember, the Romney plan would cut taxes across the board by 20 percent for everyone, and would supposedly pay for those tax cuts by targeting loopholes and deductions enjoyed by the rich. But the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that this is not mathematically possible — to maintain the plan’s deficit neutrality, you would have to target loopholes that benefit the middle class, too, hiking their tax burden. Yet here Ryan seems to be ruling some of them out as targets.

They’re just lying.

If they were telling the truth on one level, it would mean massive tax decreases on the rich, and massive tax increases on the poor and middle class. I think Republicans would like to do that. After all, they think students and seniors and the working poor are freeloaders who should pay more into the system that is already screwing them. Politically, however, they would never do it.

No, they’ll just do what Republicans always do: cut taxes, balloon the deficit, and then whine and scream about the deficit when a Democrat takes office so that the Democrat will make the “starve the beast” cuts for them.

There is no reason for Democrats to cooperate with this. Since Republicans or some version of them will inevitably win the White House about half the time in our binary system, let the Republicans take responsibility for cutting the popular stuff. They’re the ones who “starved the beast” in the first place. It’s not our job to clean up their mess. Let them embrace Simpson-Bowles and the rest of the lemmings, and we can do things the Keynesian way.

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Grand Bargain BS talk ‘o the day

by digby

I would probably be more worried about this latest Senate Gang of whatever, Simpson Bowles circle jerk if I thought it had the least chance of going anywhere.  This is basically the same stuff they’ve been saying for a while, but with a new mixture of details between triggers, downpayments and threats of new and different drop dead dates and cliffs to be hurtled over later:

First, senators would come to an agreement on a deficit reduction target — likely to be around $4 trillion over 10 years — to be reached through revenue raised by an overhaul of the tax code, savings from changes to social programs like Medicare and Social Security, and cuts to federal programs. Once the framework is approved, lawmakers would vote on expedited instructions to relevant Congressional committees to draft the details over six months to a year.

If those efforts failed, another plan would take effect, probably a close derivative of the proposal by President Obama’s fiscal commission led by Erskine B. Bowles, the Clinton White House chief of staff, and former Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, a Republican. Those recommendations included changes to Social Security, broad cuts in federal programs and actions that would lower tax rates over all but eliminate or pare enough deductions and credits to yield as much as $2 trillion in additional revenue.

If we don’t do what they say today, just wait until daddy Simpson and Bowles come home!

Whatever. This is far more salient to this discussion:

On Monday, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center released a new study estimating that if nothing is done, the expiration of all the Bush-era tax cuts would raise taxes by more than $500 billion next year alone, an average increase of $3,500 per household. Middle-income families, it said, would see taxes rise by an average of almost $2,000.

Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, said figures like those and forecasts anticipating a recession if nothing is done have prompted some consideration for postponing any tax increases or spending cuts for a year. But he said lawmakers want to lock in action on the deficit now.

What they “want” and what they will be able to get are two different things. Sure they want to “force” all kinds of action, but nobody agrees on what that action should be. And for my money, the only action that makes sense isn’t even being discussed, so I’m happy to have them put this off and perhaps eventually put it in the trashbin.

Considering the circumstances and political environment, the best result of all this deficit fulminating we can hope for would be to postpone the tax hikes and postpone the spending cuts. And that’s because the “fiscal house” is still on fire and if anyone has any sense at all they’ll stop this talking about how much it’s going to take to rebuild it and put the blaze out first. Or at the very least stop putting gasoline on the fire. That’s pretty weak considering what really needs to be done but at least there’s some basic Keynesian logic to it.

I don’t know if that’s what will happen. It all depends on whether the Democrats agree to take any kind of chump change the Republicans throw out there as a victory and whether the Republicans wise up and see how that would advance their own agenda. If they stay stuck, then postponing both tax hikes and spending cuts would be far better for the economy than anything else that’s on the menu. It’s not much, but I’d take it.

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Sniveling billionaires: Tales of the most epic whiners in American history, Part XXIII

by digby

If you’ve been wondering specifically what it is that the wealth coddling, Wall Street protecting Obama has done to offend these greedhead Billionaires, here it is:

Although he voted for McCain in 2008, Cooperman was not compelled to enter the political debate until June, 2011, when he saw the President appear on TV during the debt-ceiling battle. Obama urged America’s “millionaires and billionaires” to pay their fair share, pointing out that they were doing well at a time when both the American middle class and the American federal treasury were under pressure. “If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge-fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the nineteen-fifties,” the President said. “You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”

Cooperman regarded the comments as a declaration of class warfare…

Seriously, that’s it. (Whatever you do, don’t tell him about Roosevelt’s 1936 acceptance speech. He could expire on the spot.)

“It’s a question of tone,” Cooperman said. “The President makes it sound like the problems of the ninety-nine per cent are caused by the one per cent, and that’s not the case.”

Yet some of the harshest language of this election cycle has come from the super-rich. Comparing Hitler and Obama, as Cooperman did last year at the CNBC conference, is something of a meme. In 2010, the private-equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, of the Blackstone Group, compared the President’s as yet unsuccessful effort to eliminate some of the preferential tax treatment his sector receives to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. After Cooperman made his Hitler comment, he has said, his wife called him a “schmuck.” But he couldn’t resist repeating the analogy when we spoke in May of this year. “You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world put a forty-seven-year-old guy that never worked a day in his life and made him in charge of the free world,” Cooperman said. “Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied. Now, Obama’s not Hitler. I don’t even mean to say anything like that. But it is a question that the dissatisfaction of the populace was so great that they were willing to take a chance on an untested individual.”

That’s a pathological lack of self-awareness. These people need an intervention. They are obviously mainlining FoxNews.

Those quotes and observations come from this fantastic article by Christia Freeland in the New Yorker about the plutocrats and their delicate sensibilities. She lists many of the examples of billionaire’s alleged victimization we’ve chronicled here on the blog since the financial crisis began. And she shows how completely out of touch and entitled these ridiculously influential rich people really are:

It’s easy to see how even a resolutely unflashy billionaire like Cooperman can acquire a sense of entitlement. In a single hour at his desk one morning in April, the C.E.O.s of two well-known public companies were on the phone to Cooperman lobbying for his support. (He is a major investor in their firms.) Companies courting his investment dollars pick up Cooperman at Teterboro Airport in their private jets to give him a tour of their projects. The Coopermans have chosen an emphatically low-key life style, but when they went to visit a grandchild in Vermont one summer weekend they flew in a private plane.

Last July, before he had written the letter, Cooperman was invited to the White House for a reception to honor wealthy philanthropists who had signed Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least fifty per cent of their net worth to charity. At the event, Cooperman handed the President two copies of “Inspired: My Life (So Far) in Poems,” a self-published book written by Courtney Cooperman, his fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Cooperman was surprised that the President didn’t send him a thank-you note or that Malia and Sasha Obama, for whom the books were intended as a gift and to whom Courtney wrote a separate letter, didn’t write to Courtney. (After Cooperman grumbled to a few friends, including Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, Michelle Obama did write. Booker, who was also a recipient of Courtney’s book, promptly wrote her “a very nice note,” Cooperman said.)

When Cooperman told me the story of his lucky escape from dental school, he concluded, “I probably make more than a thousand dentists, summed up.” (A thousand dentists would need to work for a decade—and pay no taxes or living expenses—to collectively earn Cooperman’s net worth.) During another conversation, Cooperman mentioned that over the weekend an acquaintance had come by to get some friendly advice on managing his personal finances. He was a seventy-two-year-old world-renowned cardiologist; his wife was one of the country’s experts in women’s medicine. Together, they had a net worth of around ten million dollars. “It was shocking how tight he was going to be in retirement,” Cooperman said. “He needed four hundred thousand dollars a year to live on. He had a home in Florida, a home in New Jersey. He had certain habits he wanted to continue to pursue.

“I’m just saying that it’s not an impressive amount of capital for two people that were leading physicians for their entire work life,” Cooperman went on. “You know, I lost more today than they spent a lifetime accumulating.”

What was that story about some cake and the Bastille? I keep forgetting.

Many billionaires have come to view charity as privatized taxation, paid at a level they determine, and to organizations they choose. “All things being equal, you’d rather have control of the money than the government,” Cooperman said. “Even if you’re giving it away, you’d rather give it away the way you want to give it away rather than the way the government gives it away.” Cooperman and his wife focus their giving on Jewish issues, education, and their local community in New Jersey, and he is also setting up a foundation that will allow his children and grandchildren to support their own chosen causes after he dies.

Foster Friess, a retired mutual-fund investor from Wyoming who was the backer of the main Super pac supporting the Republican primary candidate Rick Santorum, expounded on this view in a video interview in February. “People don’t realize how wealthy people self-tax,” he said. “If you have a certain cause, an art museum or a symphony, and you want to support it, it would be nice if you had the choice.”

Of course those charitable donations for museums and symphonies are tax deductible, but that’s not good enough. They don’t want to spend any of their money on the “wrong people” which in Friess’ case is apparently anyone who doesn’t attend the symphony. What could be wrong with that?

And that attitude has certainly “trickled down” to the right wingers. I won’t post it again, but this sickening video spells it out. (“I choose [to throw a dollar in your face and lecture you like a child, Mr Parkinson’s victim who needs health care.] I choose!”)

Someone said to me the other day that Americans think their problem is that the system is broken and it’s not, it’s the culture that’s broken. I’m increasingly afraid that’s true. Certainly, the idea that these filthy rich, privileged elites feel victimized at a time when they are paying historically low taxes and making historically high sums of money is indicative of something very amiss at the heart of our social contract. I’m not sure if that can be fixed.

In any case, there’s only one thing to say to these whining 1% wimps who feel so victimized by President Obama’s painfully tepid suggestion that while they are truly heroes of epic magnitude perhaps they could just pay a teeensy weensy bit more:

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You might be a terrorist if … “you’re frustrated with mainstream ideologies”?

by digby

Uh, I think I know a lot of terrorists:

These are some warning signs that that you have turned into a terrorist who will soon kill your co-workers, according to the U.S. military. You’ve recently changed your “choices in entertainment.” You have “peculiar discussions.” You “complain about bias,” you’re “socially withdrawn” and you’re frustrated with “mainstream ideologies.” Your “Risk Factors for Radicalization” include “Social Networks” and “Youth.”

These are some other signs that one of your co-workers has become a terrorist, according to the U.S. military. He “shows a sudden shift from radical to ‘normal’ behavior to conceal radical behavior.” He “inquires about weapons of mass effects.” He “stores or collects mass weapons or hazardous materials.”

Of course, aside from the mass weapons and hazardous material, which should be a real tip-off, all the rest sounds like tens of millions of Americans and almost all adolescents at one time or another.

But hey, if you do believe that these are indicators of radicalism, I’d take a look at the Ayn Rand acolytes. They certainly fit the bill in nearly every particular.

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How a centerfold Senator plays for the meathead vote

by digby

This may play well with the meathead vote, but it will royally piss off their wives:

I don’t know if anyone’s told Brown that women really, really, really don’t like it when men do this sort of shutdown. But someone should. There are just too many of us.

But this was just downright stupid:

From Steve Benen:

For those who can’t watch clips online, the Republican senator, after a lengthy pause, first named far-right Justice Antonin Scalia. This was no small admission — for all of Scott Brown’s efforts to give the appearance of moderation, here he was, after pausing to reflect on his ideal justice, identifying one of the least moderate justices Americans have seen in a generation.

After months of trying to assure voters he’ll ignore his party’s right-wing inclinations on a host of key issues, Brown endorsed a partisan Supreme Court ideologue who’s eager to do exactly what Brown claims to oppose — including reject privacy and reproductive rights.

In context, it’s true that if you read the transcript, you’ll see that the Republican senator went on to mention Justices Kennedy, Roberts, and eventually Sotomayor. But as the clip makes clear, Brown only mentioned the other names when the audience booed his praise for Scalia, and the senator felt the need to scramble.

You say Scalia when you are from Mississippi, not when you are from Massachusetts. Even the meatheads aren’t that right wing. And there just aren’t enough of them.

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Birds of a feather

by David Atkins

It seems that wherever fundamentalist religion is strongest, women suffer the most. Often so much that they must be as literally invisible as possible. Case in point:

The Ikea catalog distributed in Saudi Arabia is the same as in other countries except for what it’s missing — women.

The Swedish publication Metro has posted a comparison of the Saudi Arabian mailer and the Swedish version, showing that women present in the latter were missing from the former.

In one instance, a pajama-clad woman — shown standing at a bathroom sink along with a man, young boy and toddler nearby — was erased from the catalog distributed in the Arab nation, leaving just the three other people in the picture.

Here’s one of the examples:

It’s not just Islamic fundamentalists. There’s also this:

A Hasidic newspaper said it was following Jewish modesty laws when it printed a Situation Room photo that was doctored to remove Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a second female White House staffer.

The Brooklyn-based Der Zeitung sparked Internet outcry after it published the now iconic photo Friday showing only men present to monitor the daring 40-minute Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

National Security team member Audrey Tomason was also scrubbed from the image.

The ultra-Orthodox Der Zeitung released a statement Monday apologizing if the edited image “was seen as offensive,” but said it was following Jewish modesty laws when it made the decision to delete Clinton and Tomason from historical record.

And while it usually doesn’t amount to pictorial erasure, Christian fundamentalists aren’t far behind with the Quiverfull movement.

Birds of a feather flock together. No women may apply for the glorious fundamentalist celestial kingdom.

Something tells me that if there is a divine presence in this world, She’s far, far, far away from these misogynist lunatics.

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Dreaming of the day when we can let the drones decide who lives or dies

by digby

What could go wrong?

While military forces, police/intelligence agencies and interior ministries have set their sights on drones for missions spanning the full spectrum from terrain mapping to targeted killings, today’s unmanned vehicles remain reliant on human controllers who are often based hundreds, and sometimes thousands of kilometers away from the theater of operations. Consequently, although the use of drones substantially increases operational effectiveness — and, in the case of targeted killings, adds to the emotional distance between perpetrator and target — they remain primarily an extension of, and are regulated by, human decision making.

All that could be about to change, with reports that the U.S. military (and presumably others) have been making steady progress developing drones that operate with little, if any, human oversight. For the time being, developers in the U.S. military insist that when it comes to lethal operations, the new generation of drones will remain under human supervision. Nevertheless, unmanned vehicles will no longer be the “dumb” drones in use today; instead, they will have the ability to “reason” and will be far more autonomous, with humans acting more as supervisors than controllers.

Scientists and military officers are already envisaging scenarios in which a manned combat platform is accompanied by a number of “sentient” drones conducting tasks ranging from radar jamming to target acquisition and damage assessment, with humans retaining the prerogative of launching bombs and missiles.

It’s only a matter of time, however, before the defense industry starts arguing that autonomous drones should be given the “right” to use deadly force without human intervention. In fact, Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech contends that such an evolution is inevitable. In his view, sentient drones could act more ethically and humanely, without their judgment being clouded by human emotion (though he concedes that unmanned systems will never be perfectly ethical). Arkin is not alone in thinking that “automated killing” has a future, if the guidelines established in the U.S. Air Force’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047 are any indication.

And to think people are worried right now about the “distancing effect” of drone warfare. Imagine how carefree we’ll all be when we don’t have to make any decisions about all this at all. “This is drone business. Move along citizen.”

I’m going to have a little drinkie winkie and watch 2001: A Space Odyssey now. Buh-bye.

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Blue collar women moving away from Romney and GOP

by David Atkins

An interesting tidbit from Ron Brownstein in the National Journal:

A National Journal analysis of recent polling results across 11 states considered battlegrounds shows that in most of them, Obama is running considerably better than he is nationally among white women without a college education. Obama’s gains with these so-called “waitress moms” are especially pronounced in heartland battlegrounds like Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

Combined with his continued support among other elements of his “coalition of the ascendant,” including young people, minorities, and college-educated women, these advances among blue-collar women have been enough to propel Obama to the lead over Republican Mitt Romney in the most recent public surveys in all 11 states (albeit in some cases within the polls’ margins of error).

Democrats say blue-collar women have been the principal, and most receptive, target for their extended ad barrage portraying Romney as a plutocrat who is blind, if not indifferent, to the struggles of average families.

Being a smirking, arrogant plutocrat is only an advantage with frat boys and codgers who see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. It doesn’t help with other constituencies. But it’s not just economics, of course.

Beyond the opposition’s portrayal of Romney as obtuse to the problems of working families, both sides agree that he has been hurt among blue-collar white women by the skirmishes over defunding Planned Parenthood and access to contraception in health insurance. Many of these women view such women’s-health matters not as moral issues but as practical pocketbook concerns. The combined effect of all this is measured in the most recent CBS News/New York Times/Quinnipiac survey in Ohio, which found that while about three-fifths of noncollege white women agreed that Obama “cares about the needs and problems of people like you,” roughly an equal number of them said Romney did not.

Both campaigns agree the Democratic ads have damaged Romney much more with blue-collar women than blue-collar men. But both sides also agree that these women are the least stable component of Obama’s emerging coalition. “I still say the noncollege white women are the moving piece of the electorate,” Garin said. “But Romney is an imperfect vessel for them to say the least.”

Romney has to win these votes. And his problem is that even if he were likeable enough to get it done, his actual base of good ol’ boys won’t really let him.

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A point to taking part

by digby

Alternet is featuring an interview by Matthew Filipowicz with the always fascinating Noam Chomsky. You can listen to it here.

It’s a long conversation about activism and tactics which many of you will find interesting, I’m sure. But I must take a moment to just point this one thing out:

We discussed many aspects of activism including how he felt activists and progressives should approach two party politics and specifically the 2012 election.

Chomsky stated, “I think they should spend five or ten minutes on it. Seeing if there’s a point in taking part in the carefully orchestrated electoral extravaganza. And my own judgment, for what it’s worth, is, yes, there’s a point to taking a part.”

Professor Chomsky said he will probably vote for Jill Stein for president in effort to push a genuine electoral alternative, but that if he lived in a swing state he would vote “against Romney-Ryan, which means voting for Obama.”

I took boatloads of heat (and still am) for quoting Chomsky on this from 2008, in which he said, “of course you can vote for the lesser of two evils. You get less evil.” I was told that it had no application to this cycle and have generally been vilified by lefties for my own view that our two party system means that we are often forced to weigh the options with an eye toward mitigating as much harm as we can rather than standing on principle.

I recognize that many of you don’t agree with me, that you believe as a matter of conscience that you cannot vote for a candidate who offends you sense of morality and I respect that. One of the great things about democracy is that you can express yourself by both voting and not voting. (Or voting with your feet, for that matter.)

On the other hand, if your view is that these leaders need to fail in order to learn a lesson, my reading of human nature is that they don’t necessarily learn the lesson you think they will. And people shouldn’t be used as pawns to make a point. So I disagree with that argument on the merits. Basically, I take a utilitarian approach to voting. I certainly see all the similarities in the candidates and wish there was a chance that someone different could win. I have no hope that any of them will deliver the kind of government I wish we had. But if, on the margins where the differences between the candidates do lie, the election of one of the candidates will result in less suffering for actual human beings, I will choose that candidate. (“You get less evil.”)

I’ve been told that I’m a hack and a sell-out for abandoning my principles in taking that position, especially since I have demonstrated a strong commitment to civil liberties in my writing. But since I don’t believe that civil liberties will be improved in any way by voting for Mitt Romney — indeed, I think it’s likely they will be much worse, since he’s advocated a return to torture — I see no value in electing him on that issue (or any other.) As for lessening the suffering of real humans, I believe that President Obama’s policies, while hardly the best he could do, will be on balance, kinder to more people.

I know that is unsatisfying. It’s not easy for me either. But given the system we have, I’ve made the choice to push as hard as I can for principles I believe in every single day and support politicians who believe as I do with my money and labor. But when it comes to election day, I take the position that I can only try to do as little harm as possible. And it would seem that old sell-out Noam Chomsky still agrees with me.

Update: Howie Klein wrote a post on this recently in which he agrees with Chomsky’s assessment. He puts it in his own inimitable way:

[T]here’s a threat that Pete Peterson and his minions’ nonstop lobbying for a toxic Grand Bargain that will destroy the Democratic Party brand is exactly what Obama intends to do after he’s reelected. Except reading what’s he’s been saying about his willingness– if no eagerness– to compromise with the adamantly Austerian Republicans, I’d say there’s a lot bigger chance of a horrid Grand Bargain after November 6 than there ever was that Hope and Change would lead to anything aside from the requisite election results last cycle.

So, yes, if you read DWT you know with which utter contempt I hold Republicans and conservatives and corporate whores and you know I agree with all that horrifying stuff Nick Kristof claimed about the Republican war against women in his NY Times column yesterday. Would it be catastrophic if Obama were to lose and Romney win in November? Yes. And if I lived in Ohio or Florida or Colorado or Wisconsin or any other swing state, I might even hold my nose and vote for Obama. But I live in California and I care barely wait to go to the polls and not vote for him.

Read on to find out what he really thinks.

Update II: My Bad for forgetting to credit Matthew Filipowicz for the interview with Chomsky. So, fixed.

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A word on the subject that must not be discussed

by digby

We may have just suffered two new major mass murders in the last six months but there’s no reason that a national political campaign should mention it. There’s nothing we can do. The NRA has spoken and we are not only not allowed to discuss gun control, we are not allowed to even acknowledge massive gun deaths and repeated mass murders as a social or political program.

I’ve said it before: if you want to see what a massively successful political issue campaign looks like, look at the the NRA. They’ve completely changed this country’s relationship to murder. That’s quite an achievement.

But that’s not saying you can’t ask.

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