Winning Progressive

(By NCrissie B)

This week I’ve been considering the curious conservative belief that the solution to many problems is more of the same problem. First, I looked at their view on mass shootings. Yesterday I examined the Wall Street crisis and financial regulation. Today I conclude with deficits and tax cuts.

Yelling about the debt …

If you watched the London Olympics Opening Ceremony last night, you may have learned a few things: Mary Poppins can chase Voldemort out of childrens’ dreams, Rowan Atkinson may get bored if asked to play music, and Queen Elizabeth II has enough spunk and good humor to join Daniel Craig in a James Bond-themed royal entry.

If you watched the ads, you also learned that the ‘New Majority Agenda’ are concerned about our national debt….

“Why isn’t the economy stronger? In the seconds it takes to watch this, our national debt will increase $1.4 million,” the narrator ominously intones. “He’s adding $4 billion in debt every day.”

Note: I’m not certain this is the same ad that ran last night, but it’s by the same group, looks the same, and is the most recent such ad about which I could find information.

Who are the ‘New Majority Agenda?’ That’s at the end of the ad, in the small print: Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS Super-PAC. Who are they? Apart from the usual “grassroots” claims, Karl Rove won’t say. He says the group should be exempt from FEC rules that require disclosure of political donations, claiming the Super-PAC is a “social welfare organization” that talks about issues rather than candidates. That claim is as laughable as the argument in the ad itself, which Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave two Pinocchios last month:

As with a previous Crossroad GPS ad, this ad exaggerates Obama’s impact on the rise of the debt, as it was not just spending, but a decline in revenue that is responsible for the sharp rise in federal budget deficits. Obama has proposed policies to help reduce the deficit – which Crossroads opposes. That’s their right, but it seems strange to suggest he has done nothing about it.

… and whispering about race.

Why claim President Obama has done nothing to reduce the deficit, when he offered a comprehensive deficit-reduction package that Republicans rejected last summer? Perhaps because the truth wouldn’t fit the emerging Republican narrative of President Obama working to undermine the U.S. as claimed in Dinesh D’Souza’s new ‘documentary’ film:

The film argues that this explains all of the actions of the current administration, from the frosty relations with Israel and outreach to Muslim world, to the refusal to intervene in Syria, to the resistance to offshore drilling and the running up of the national debt. Obama wants to knock America down a peg or two to put it in parity with the Third World. Indeed, the film concludes by arguing that Obama is running up the national debt in a deliberate effort to bankrupt the nation in the name of anti-colonialism.

As D’Souza told ABC News: “Obama wants to shrink America’s footprint in the world because he thinks we’ve been stepping on the world. And that is directly related to the ideology espoused by his father.”

Linking race and the federal budget is hardly new, as Sanford Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard Fording explained in their book Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform. Ronald Reagan’s mythical ‘welfare queen’ reinforced rather than created a conservative meme that we could easily balance our federal budget if we stopped giving money to Those People. D’Souza takes it to the next level, claiming that President Obama is intentionally running up the debt to weaken the United States … because his father was a black man from Kenya who hated the West.

More tax cuts … for some

President Obama’s ‘Grand Bargain’ proposal collapsed on the issue of tax increases for the wealthiest Americans, and D’Souza’s distorted racial lens helps clarify the two very different tax cut proposals considered by the Senate this week. Senate Democrats pushed and ultimately passed their plan to extend the 2001 tax cuts for incomes up to $250,000, as well as 2009 tax cuts that targeted working families. Senate Republicans had proposed a plan to extend all of the 2001 tax cuts – including tax cuts for incomes over $250,000 – but to eliminate most of the 2009 tax cuts for working families.

As polls show most Americans support tax increases for the wealthy, how did Republicans hope to sell their plan of more tax cuts for the rich and while raising taxes for working families? It helps if, like House Majority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), you argue that it’s unfair for half of Americans to pay no income taxes. Never mind the fact that the working poor pay state sales taxes and other taxes and fees, or that the federal tax code is set up to exclude the working poor with programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit … a program that was created in the 1970s to subsidize low-income jobs.

It’s still unfair for those “lucky duckies” to skate by without paying taxes. Republicans are trying to paint the working poor as the new welfare queens … driving up the debt by soaking up entitlement programs while paying no taxes, protected by a president who wants to undermine America because his father was Kenyan. You don’t need canine hearing to translate that Republicans hope to sell tax increases for the working poor by telling white working class voters those tax increases will stop Those People from busting the budget … and sell tax cuts for the rich by talking about “job creators.”

When it comes to tax cuts, Republicans always want more, more, more … but only for some.

(Crossposted from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute (BPICampus.com))

(By Fay Paxton, cross-posted at The Pragmatic Pundit)

I hear the Republican narrative and wonder how patriots could be so manipulative, but then I hear the American people respond and wonder how so many people could be so easily misguided.  But then again, to be perfectly honest, even President Obama’s explanation is not on point either.

If you listen to media reports and the Republican mantra, you believe that President Obama is proposing a tax increase on wealthy Americans; that he is waging “class warfare”.  The truth is, he is proposing to continue the Bush tax cuts for everyone who earns up to $250,000.  That includes millionaires, multi-millionaires and billionaires as well.

It’s really quite simple; all income over $250,000 will be taxed at the rates that existed before the Bush Tax cuts were enacted.  In other words:

* if you earn $250,000, your tax rate will continue at the present rate.

* if you earn $251,000, you will pay the existing rate on $250,000; the increased rate on $1,000.

* That same formula applies to a millionaire, who would pay the existing tax rate on $250,000, but would be taxed on the remaining $750,000 at the 39.6% rate.

Where is the class warfare?  The rates apply to everyone.  More importantly, the only ones who would pay more taxes are those who earn in excess of $250,000 and those ARE NOT what we call small businesses, despite what you’re being told, or I should say sold.   So when Republicans claim that this is an attack on the wealthy and job creators, they are again flat-out lying.  The tax cuts,  that everyone calls “middle class” tax relief extend to every income-earning American.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of hearing about the elusive job-creators, who’ve had tax cuts for ten years and haven’t created jobs. Small businesses are entitled to plenty of tax write-offs, including auto expenses, health-insurance premiums, equipment costs, retirement plan contributions, and other business-related expenditures.  Have you looked at the unemployment rate?  Clearly tax-cuts make no difference.  So I’m baffled at how Republicans can even continue to make this argument.  What’s wrong with people that they even buy it?

It’s about demand.  The corner Dairy Queen doesn’t close in the winter because of uncertainty or tax cuts; it closes because there is so little demand for ice cream in the wintertime.  The same is true of any other business.  There is little demand because people have no money.  They have no money because they don’t have jobs.  They don’t have jobs because businesses, despite all their tax cuts and massive profits, have not created any.  They whine about uncertainty, taxes and regulations, but the truth is corporations are enjoying lower taxes than in decades and their profits have soared under Obama.

Something’s rotten in America

So what is the real reason corporations refuse to hire?  You can’t say it’s ObamaCare because, in fact, they didn’t create jobs under Bush either.  Clearly, it isn’t taxes because the rates haven’t changed in a decade.  Perhaps a clue lies in mass layoffs, outsourcing, Citizens United, union-busting, minimum wages debates, right to work legislation, depressing the rights of women, children, gays, immigrants, voter suppression and a Congress that refuses to pass jobs legislation.  All of which should tell you that “something’s rotten in America.”

“All we have to do is replace Obama. …  We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go…. We just need a president to sign this stuff….

Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States…. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.”

(By Bruce Schmiechen, cross-posted at The Titanic Sails at Dawn)

One of the fundamental things that any responsible parent teaches their children is that if they create a mess, they should clean it up.  Unfortunately, many of today’s Republican politicians appear to have instead been taught to deny that they had any role in creating the mess to begin with.

A case in point was this galling remark at last week’s budget meeting at the White House:

“We didn’t create this mess,” a Republican Congressman reportedly told Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner

But the reality is that of course they did create this mess.  The Republicans advocated for the policies and/or oversaw the calamities generating the red ink that’s scaring voters.

“We didn’t create this mess – blame Obama!” (or Medicare) are the Big Lies of the GOP’s phony deficit hysteria and a shameless evasion of responsibility.

The entirety of budget deficits over the coming decade are the result of ideologically-driven policies – or policy failures – that can be traced to the Bush years, as shown in the chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities below:

In crucial aspects these policies were the centerpiece of the Bush/GOP agenda.  Yet, as James Kwak at Baseline Scenario explained in reaction to the Republican’s “we didn’t create this mess” statement:

The frightening thing is, he probably believes it. When people hold certain ideological beliefs strongly enough, no amount of facts will get in their way. If you believe that the current deficit is the result of excessive government spending (passed by Democrats, even though they only controlled Congress and the White House for four out of the past thirty years*), no pile of charts will be big enough to convince you otherwise — just like if you believe that tax cuts increase tax revenues, that the deficit has produced high interest rates, or that Barack Obama was born on Mars, no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise.

This is just fine if you are my daughter, who is four years old — although, actually, she admits it when she makes a mess (and helps clean it up). But if you are a legislator in the most powerful country in the world –and the one whose debt is the definitionally risk-free asset against which the yield of every other financial asset in the entire world is measured — it’s not good enough.

Not only are Republicans denying their culpability in creating the deficits we face, but they are using those deficits that they created to achieve ideological and political goals that have nothing to do with those deficits.  In particular, current deficits and deficits projected for the next decade have nothing to do with either Medicare or Social Security, as the opportunistic deficit hysterics – even among some conservative Democrats – would have the citizenry believe. The attacks on Social Security and Medicare are not about deficit reduction. They are the result of deep-seated resentments on the Right toward social insurance that date back to the programs’ inceptions and before.

Current deficits are a cover – and a deeply dishonest one – for the radicalized and demagogic GOP to attack popular social insurance programs under guise of “fiscal conservatism.”  But there are no fiscal conservatives on that side of the debate.  GOP fiscal profligacy and policy failures are the root of the deficits. They created this mess.

Henry Aaron, a fellow at the centrist Brookings Institute, notes:

(A) debate over the size and role of social insurance is entirely appropriate… It is necessary, as well, for the nation to debate how best to rein in the growth of health care spending. Whether or not measures to slow the growth of spending on (Medicare and Social Security) prove eventually to be necessary, they can not materially affect the fiscal balance within the next decade.

Right now…the U.S. budget deficit equals 10 percent of gross domestic product, and one can explain the entirety of it without mentioning Medicare or Social Security. All of the current deficit and all of the deficits projected for the next decade can be explained—fully explained—by tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration, the costs of two wars, the economic downturn and measures to counter it, and the costs of servicing the resulting debt.   Were it not for these factors, the budget today would be fully in balance.

It’s maddening to hear nonsense like “We didn’t create this mess” coming from the corner where the mess was, indeed, largely cooked up.  To repeat Aaron’s words “all of the deficits projected for the next decade can be explained—fully explained—” by deliberate policies, policy failures and crises of the Bush presidency.

It’s also disturbing that these GOP radicals are so infantilized and/or dishonestly opportunistic that they can’t take responsiblity for their own policy advocacy and outcomes, but feel the need to publicly push the blame  on Obama.

If the GOP wants to run on a platform of ending Medicare and cutting Social Security, fine.  But do it because that represents a core belief – not under cover of “bringing down deficits” that we’re currently experiencing which have absolutely nothing to do with the programs under attack.