republicans

Once again, I am blown away by Leon Wieseltier on the back page of The New Republic. I hadn't read TNR in awhile because they charge so much for the subscription I had let it lapse - but they brought me back with a short term deal.

Good timing - Rick Perry seems to want to turn the US into some form of supposedly Christian Nation - not in the sense of taking care of our neighbors (one of many positive Christian values rarely embraced by those most loudly proclaiming their Christianity) but in the sense of parading faith and using it to beat on anyone who doesn't share it.

Wieseltier has a stunning repudiation of Rick Perry's public pronouncements but it is buried behind a pay wall. Pity. A couple of powerful snippets:

There is a man half-running for president in the United States who has adopted Joel’s plan. He is Rick Perry, the suave and shallow governor of Texas. He has issued “a call to prayer for a nation in crisis,” which he calls The Response. He proposes to fill a stadium in Houston—Reliant Stadium, it is charmingly called—with contrite Americans, and thereby change the course of our country.

...

"There is hope for America,” Perry preaches. “It lies in heaven, and we will find it on our knees.” He likes the sentence so much that he gives it twice. I dislike it hugely. This country was not built by people on their knees. It was built by people on their feet, with their hands as they were guided by their minds. They acted as if hope for America lay in themselves. There was nothing insolent about this. They were not godless people, except for some in our recent history; but their religion was compatible with, or even inclined them to, the modern concept of historical agency. The United States of America is a monument to that concept. It represents a revolution in human affairs not least because of its faith in the power of human action.

Rather than trying to deal with economic problems or solving the budget gap... or hell, even figuring out how to get taxpayers to foot the bill for a new Vikings stadium, Minnesota's Republicans have decided to push an amendment for Minnesotans to vote on whether gays should be considered real people or just get 3/5 the rights of couples like Michelle and I.

Awesome. At least some are talking sense in Saint Paul:

When you vote for Republicans, you are voting for a hate-filled party of anti-science bigots.

Some people voting for Republicans may sometimes pretend they are only interested in the economic conservatism (though they have always talked one way and legislated another) rather than social bigotry commonly advanced, but the reality is that they are married. If you want to vote for Republicans, you cannot deny that you are endorsing essentially a 14th century view of how we should structure society.

I was reminded of this after reading a good article in The Atlantic detailing how Republicans bow to some Iowa jerk-off obsessed with how adults act behind closed doors.

This is why Tim Pawlenty gets runner-up [winner is FCC Chairman Genachowski (and Obama appointee)] for jellyfish invertebrate of the year for shamelessly taking the path of least resistance and losing any conviction he might once have had.

Jacob Weisberg's recent piece on slate.com asked, "Are Republicans Serious About Fixing Health Care?" The answer, unsurprisingly, is "no." What is more important about the article is that it reminds us who created the massive deficits and debt that the Republican cannot stop talking about (and blaming Dems for it, of course).

Jacob discusses the last time the Republicans tinkered with health care - changing the prescription-drug coverage under Medicare when Republicans controlled the Executive and Legislative branches. Republicans used so many low-down dirty tricks in getting that legislation through that they have absolutely no credibility when it comes to accusing the Dems of abusing their power currently.

Remember that they were also greatly cutting taxes on the rich at this point - so not only were the Republicans reducing revenue to the government, they were greatly increasing its expenditures while also still not providing quality health care reform! Weisberg sums it up nicely:

Thanks to something called the "doughnut hole," drug coverage disappears when out-of-pocket costs reach $2,400, returning only when they hit $3,850. Simply stated, the bill cost a fortune, wasn't paid for, is complicated as hell, and doesn't do all that much—though it does include coverage for end-of life-counseling, or what Grassley now calls "pulling the plug on grandma."

Read the rest of the article for more helpful context on just how much damage the Republican health care reform has done to the federal fiscal future.

In my lifetime, the vast majority of federal debt comes from Republican Administrations whereas Democratic Administrations are more responsible and tend to legislate within their means. As my friend James wrote awhile back, the Republicans are like arsonists that bitch about the fire department wasting water.

Left unmentioned, but worth bringing up is that Republicans have always hated Medicare and would prefer to let old people fend for themselves in the market to a functioning government program that has greatly reduced poverty amongst the elderly as well as reducing the load on people my age who might otherwise be saddled with the massively greater debt if my parents became ill after retiring (I hope they get to retire!)

If there is something that Americans love to do, it is bitch about taxes. I have to wonder if Republicans would have the support of any non-evangelical Christians were it not for them positioning themselves as the party of reducing taxes (irregardless of their reckless fiscal record, they certainly act like they are the party of reducing taxes).

In Minnesota, Pawlenty cites his record of not increasing taxes (which is bullshit, he renamed some taxes to fees and raised them and he avoided raising taxes by cutting funds to cities who then had to raise taxes to avoid laying off cops and firefighters) as his greatest accomplishment. Of course, he didn't really reduce spending, that might have been unpopular. He just refused to finance the spending bills he signed, compounding problems for the future.

Let's address this problem head-on ... are we overtaxed? Do tax increases kill businesses and hurt the economy? In MinnPost, Dane Smith smartly asks, "If taxes are bad for us, then how did we get so healthy, wealthy and wise?"

Since 1909, and with big spurts in the 1930s and 1970s, the federal-state-local government's share (anti-tax types like to call it "take") of income in Minnesota and the United States grew steadily and sharply, from about 5 percent to 35 percent.

A seven-fold increase in taxes should have left us a howling wasteland, if one subscribes to the anti-government theory of anti-tax zealots. We should have less wealth, no creativity, diminished entrepreneurialism, little technological innovation, and no incentives to do anything but seek or wait for the next government check.

The exact opposite happened as government grew.

I have to assume that the whole less-government-is-good-government approach is only possible in a culture that does not know its history. Our government grew in reaction to the "excesses" of the unregulated capitalism.

The EPA was not a liberal conspiracy to limit corporate profits, it was a reaction to the poison that many businesses spewed into the environment. And, despite what I believe to be overly lax enforcement, it has greatly improved the environment. From air pollution to previously dead lakes, the environment around us (and therefore us as well) is healthier than it was before government forced businesses to stop poisoning us (because it really is more profitable to poison us that to mitigate pollution - we even have a name for it: negative externality).

I was fortunate enough to go to college when I was 18 in part because I was not working in mines when I was 8. My parents were not bankrupted taking care of my grandparents in part because of social security.

Things certainly could be better. Health insurance providers should not be allowed to just drop people or refuse to fund necessary medical treatments because they want to maximize their shareholders' dividend.

I can just imagine that if anyone still reading this disagrees with me, they are fuming that I would choose to encourage policies that will just drive all the rich people out of the state or country or whatever. Fortunately, Daniel Gross just tackled this at Slate with "Who is Killing America's Millionaires?"

In May, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page argued that millionaires fled Maryland after the state legislature boosted the top marginal state income tax rate to 6.25 percent on the top 0.3 percent of filers. "In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April," the Journal notes. "This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller's office concedes is a 'substantial decline.' " The Journal uses this small sample to warn the federal government and states with progressive tax structures and lots of rich people—New York, New Jersey, California—to heed the lesson. Tax the wealthy too much, and they'll leave.

Such logic makes sense to the Journal's op-ed page staffers, who inhabit an alternative universe in which people wake up in the morning and decide whether to go to work, innovate, or buy a bagel based on marginal tax rates. But if people were motivated to choose residences based solely on high state income taxes, then California and New York wouldn't have any wealthy entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, or investment bankers—and the several states that have no state income tax, which include South Dakota, Alaska, and Wyoming, would be really crowded with rich people.

He tackles the question from multiple angles, explaining how this particular argument (rich people move from tax increases) is based entirely on specious data and an extremely lazy approach to causality. Having debunked some right-wing stinktank reports myself, I am shocked at just how lazy they are. It is a truism that you can pretty much convince some journalists of any argument and once it is in print in a supposedly neutral source, it becomes fact.

However, if there is evidence that rich people move to avoid taxes, I have yet to see it. Moving takes a lot of effort and there are many variables to consider. I think it more likely that rich people will move to areas with rich cultural life and a high quality of living because they will want to enjoy their wealth rather than say, living in a state like Mississippi where they will have to ship their kids across the country to give them a decent education.

None of this is to suggest that taxes should be constantly increased - there is a point when increased government is not worth it. In the U.S., probably most of us that support a strong role for government in regulating things like pollution and providing health care are less supportive of continuing to spend more of the discretionary budget on the military than any other program. So we recognize tradeoffs. We would rather use our tax dollars to protect our citizens from Medica and Enron than protecting Exxon's business interests abroad.

Further, I believe in some deregulation. For instance, I believe that government deregulation of the airlines and trains (since the 1970's) has been positive on the whole. Again, there are clearly tradeoffs, but I prefer making it cheaper to fly than getting a meal on the flight. That said, there needs to be some regulation - ticket prices to many destinations are again approaching those high prices from the era of massive government regulation because of increasing concentration among the airlines (it is competition that keeps prices low, and competition flourishes from the right policies, not an absence of them).

However, we should be clear about who caused the problems we are currently attempting to resolve. Daniel Gross addressed this in "War on the Rich?.

The Bush team and congressional supporters had seven years to manage fiscal affairs in such a way that they would be able to extend the tax cuts in 2010. But they screwed it up. Instead of controlling spending and aligning tax revenues with outlays, the Bush administration and its congressional allies ramped up spending massively—on two wars, on a prescription drug benefit for Medicare, on earmarks, etc. Oh, and along the way, they so miserably mismanaged oversight of Wall Street and the financial sector that it required the passage of a hugely expensive bailout. Even before the passage of the TARP, the prospect of extending all the Bush tax cuts was a nonstarter. Once Bush signed the $700 billion bailout measure into law, extending tax cuts was really a nonstarter. The national debt nearly doubled during the Bush years. So if you want to blame someone for raising taxes back to where they were in 2001, don't blame Obama. Blame Bush, his feckless Office of Management and Budget directors, his economic advisers, and congressional appropriators like Trent Lott and Tom DeLay.

The Republicans (with some help from the Democrats, but clearly the R's deserve most of the responsibility) pushed the policies that have bankrupted the country.

The Dow is back up over 9300. So much for the Republican line of reasoning that we know it was wasn't working because of the stock market. I don't see many of them making the case that the stimulus worked because of the stock market. They argued that the Obama policies were too close too socialism and the low Dow (on a downtrend since the Bush Administration) showed America's rejection of those policies.

This was obviously bullshit. By their reasoning, they should recognize that Wall Street has embraced Obama policies.

To be consistent, I don't believe the Dow Jones is a proxy for the economy or for how most people are doing. The Dow offers a sense of how much a few companies are expected to profit. Many of us have very little invested in the Dow via things like 401Ks but we are told that it is important to us when it really just is not. Most of the wealth there belongs to the superrich, not us.

I think the high Dow shows that Obama has chosen to fix the economy for rich people first and maybe he'll get around to most folks later (the far greater than 10% that are unemployed or underemployed and fear constantly of getting ill when the insurance company will take years of premiums with a shout of "See ya later, sucka!"). Historically, if the rich people aren't happy, we all suffer, so maybe this is the best approach. But we should not be fooled - least of all by the Republicans who have abandoned every measure of consistency to attack a President who captured a serious mandate from the people.