Correcting a Well-Placed Comment About Public Investment in Infrastructure

The New York Times reported on President Obama’s Miami speech yesterday where he proposed a program of public and private investment to pay for national infrastructure improvements.  The article quotes Ken Orski, the editory of Innovation Briefs and a transportatoin official for Richard Nicon and Gerald Ford.

Ken Orski tells us that back in the 19th century, canals and roads were financed with private money and suggests that public spending did not occur until Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This is not correct.

As far back as the 18th century government — federal, state, and local — invested in transportation.  None other than small government president Thomas Jefferson advocated for federal surpluses to be applied to infrastructure including canals and other “great objects” underway in the nation.  In fact, the Jefferson administration preferred government investment to private for the purposes of enabling free commerce.

Preceding the Civil War, federal investment — those pursued by Jefferson — did decline, but that did not mean private enterprise picked up the slack.  For the most part it shifted to the state level.  States spent nearly 10 times federal investment, but both were large sums for the era, nearly half a billion dollars preceding the Civil War.

The New York Times article also uses the railroad industry as an example of privately funded infrastructure investment.  This also is not entirely true, especially when you take into account the enormous grants of land.  During the 19th century tens of millions of acres were given to railroad interests which could then be sold or leased for profit to support rail investment.

The only large scale privately funded rail system in the United States was James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway lines out of St. Paul, Minnesota, but even here there were gifts of land in place.

The point is, since the founding of the United States, government as invested in infrastructure.  The investments increased in the New Deal era and throughout the strong post-World War decades of the second half of the 20th century, but public investment did not begin with the New Deal as Mr. Orski implies and as reported by the New York Times.

Misrepresenting facts makes sensible public policy decisions more difficult as some people are likely to think that we somehow did things differently and better in the past.  It paints the wrong picture because we did, in fact, do things differently and better in the past, but that was not a past reliant more on private investment, it was a past when shared public investment built and sustained a strong America.

Related articles

• In Miami, Obama pushes for infrastructure plan (latimes.com)
• What You Need to Know About President Obama’s Plan to Improve American Infrastructure (whitehouse.gov)
• Obama unveils plans to pump billions into US infrastructure in Miami speech (guardian.co.uk)

We Do Not HAVE to Cut Entitlements

I am listening to Virginia Republican governor Bob McDonnell make the argument this morning on NPR that we have to cut entitlements to balance the budget.  No we don’t.  We don’t have to do anything of the sort.  It is a political decision.  What we choose to cut and what we choose to fund is a matter of priorities.  The GOP puts priorities behind corporate subsidies, “job creator” tax cuts, and tax loopholes before the investments we have made in social programs like Medicare and Social Security, neither of which is bankrupt nor insolvent.  These programs simply need proper management — which includes proper funding — and they will be fine.  The choice to do otherwise is a political one.

Moreover, McDonald repeats the GOP lie pinning the blame for our deficit on Obama’s reckless spending.  This, he says, only makes cuts to entitlements even more urgent.  The argument implies that we are spending ourselves more into a deeper hole because spending increases are out of control.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal‘s radical left-wing rag Market Watch attempted to debunk this myth long ago.  As have others.  And others.  And still others…

But the myth persists, and it persists in large part because GOP politicians cannot be straight with the facts.  Without any qualms whatsoever, the GOP repeats the same tired rhetoric.  On the one hand, insisting that we must cut entitlements is only true if you want to cut entitlements in the first place, which is exactly the advertised goal of conservative politics.  And then on the other is a blatant lie, one among many, attempting to both deflect responsibility and sabotage the efforts of a president for whom they have visceral dislike.

These positions are nothing less than petty politics.

Related articles

• Obama’s Right-Hand-Man Offers Social Insurance Program Cuts, Again. (my.firedoglake.com)
• Chris Weigant: Blue Fairy Godmother Budget Cuts (huffingtonpost.com)
• Can the Party of No Ever Say Yes? (politicalirony.com)
• Thank Republicans for the Sequester Showdown (readersupportednews.org)

It is Anti-Intellectual

Conservatism Manifesto. (Photo credit: mmoneib)

Following up on an editorial about guns and politics published last week in the Star Tribune, I need to point out the absurdity of trying to be bipartisan about the strengths and weaknesses of today’s political arguments.  The editorial unnecessarily goes out of its way to call out liberals for criticizing conservatives as anti-intellectual.  Well, if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, some times it is a duck.

(I’d compare today’s conservative talking heads with ducks, but that wouldn’t be fair to ducks.)

It simply isn’t true that left and right share equally in failure of intellect and doesn’t serve people seeking truthful guidance any good to foster inappropriate myths about intellectual parity in political arguments.  Sometimes and idiot is simply an idiot and today we have a lot of those idiots steering political discourse with disasterous results.  Very simply, not all ideas are equal before the facts

Republicans do not like facts and logic because facts and logic do not support their beliefs.  When, for example, a non-partisan agency like the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) backs up the benefits of government economic stimulus, conservatives disregard that assessment and appeal to emotion instead, drawing false analogies with family experience and business budgets.

Government is not a family and it is not a business.  Government, especially the United States government, can serve the people better.  In fact, the United States is uniquely positioned to use monetary policy like no other nation to manipulate economic trends in its favor.  Republicans oppose this because they the economy is secondary to their priorities.  Republicans strive to dismantle government as we have known it for generations.  Crisis serves that goal well.   Therefore economics is not a priority for the GOP, it is a tool.  And it only works if it is broken.

Even when the CBO seems to align with conservative policy, they cannot get the facts right.  A year ago, for example, the CBO released a report showing that Obama‘s 2013 budget proposal would hurt the economy in the long run.  Conservatives, even in an election year, remained surprisingly quiet about this.  Why?  Well, a large part of the problem relied on too little stimulus and too little revenue.  It was a milquetoast budget.  By proposing to maintain policy like the Bush tax cuts, for example, the Obama budget maintained a struggling status quo.  In essence, Obama was conceding policy to conservatives.  Still, the inherited economic crisis was and is Obama’s fault, not at all — and I mean not at all — the fault of anything any conservative has done.  They take no responsibility for mistakes at all.  None.

It isn’t paranoia to point out the weakness of an opposing argument, especially when the opposing arguments are easily dismantled by reason and fact.  On the contrary, one should take responsibility and call out the faults of misleading rhetoric.  What is the benefit of giving credit where credit is not due, especially in situations so dangerous to our future?

Liberals lose because they go out of their way to seek balance and compromise.  That is an approach to politics that doesn’t fit the current era, unfortunately.

Related articles

• The National Review Complains That Obama Was Too Hard On Nazis (addictinginfo.org)
• Maybe We Should Ask Republicans What They Mean When They Talk About Economic Growth (alittletourinyellow.wordpress.com)
• Hasn’t Paul Krugman Heard about the Magic of Tax Cuts and Supply-Side Economics? No, and for Good Reason… (economistsview.typepad.com)
• Republican Reveals Party Secretly Wants To Duck Entitlement Reform (huffingtonpost.com)
• Anti-intellectualism and Wine (fermentation.typepad.com)
• Breaking: David Brooks doesn’t know what he’s talking about (digbysblog.blogspot.com)
• Spending Cuts Signal Austere Future for Domestic Programs – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
• GOP clears field for Steve King’s Senate run. Good luck with that. (dailykos.com)

Stop Voting for Republicans

My parents were good people, but they might have let sleep with used dry cleaning bags and eat lead paint.  I can’t say for sure.  But even a guy dropped on his head a few too many times can see that voting for Republicans is a bad idea.

Never mind that the GOP openly declares a war on America, pitting “makers” against “takers.”  (That’s you, Grandma, you miserable leech. And thanks for the cookies.)

I won’t name names, but I  hope no one has forgotten the GOP presidential debates already or the goofy things some people say about race, Muslims, pregnancy, and such.  Shut it down!

We are not shutting down this ignorance.  Just the opposite.  We are supporting it.  Tell me, since when is it a good idea to ignore fact and history to the point of wanting to restore a more desperate era 100 years in our past?

Give me a good reason — just one! — why we should follow Boehner, Cantor, McConnell et al down that rabbit hole.  Just one!  Please post it in the comments below.  (I am still waiting for a list of cool Republicans, too…chirp, chirp.)

Let’s look at the most recent GOP scandal:  The Sequester.

Here you have a situation forced upon the president by an entirely uncooperative GOP-controlled congress and they put the blame on the president.  This happens in school yards.  It shouldn’t happen among adults.  What’s worse about this is they get away with it!  Americans have to stop being so plainly stupid.

Republican leaders cannot be as stupid as the American voter.  They see that their policies are destroying opportunity in America, breaking down the American economy, and destroying generations of progress because that is precisely what they want to do.  They want to destroy the America that has done so much for so many and rework it into an “objectivist” utopia where men stand opposing each other at gun point from their tar paper compounds.

Where’s Bachmann’s Thought Police When You Need Them?

Read a newspaper, talk to your friends, go walk down the street…are things better or worse?  More than 30 years of less is more has not worked.  When you strive for less, you get less.  You don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room to see this.  More than smarts it takes courage, a person needs the guts to trust his own experience in the world.

Until someone can present intelligent conservative arguments — ideas organized around reason and facts — I have no more time for backwardness of the GOP.  Our decline is not a bi-partisan issue.

Let’s start by seeing how GOP policy has contributed anything positive in recent decades.  Anything?  Should be a simple enough assignment, but the answer is lost in the emptiness of GOP rhetoric.  There is none.

 

Related articles

• Senate GOP expected to filibuster Democratic plan to avoid sequester as House GOP twiddles thumbs (dailykos.com)
• Mitch McConnell Openly Filibusters Sequestration Replacement Bill (tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com)
• Americans hate Republicans as much as Daily Kos readers do (dailykos.com)
• No one hates Republicans more than we do. Except for other Republicans (dailykos.com)
• GOP rebranding effort hitting a few snags (dailykos.com)
• New Poll Shows Majority Of Americans Think The GOP Is ‘Out Of Touch’ And ‘Extreme’ (addictinginfo.org)
• Why do more and more Americans despise the GOP? It’s the hypocrisy (eclectablog.com)

Maybe We Should Ask Republicans What They Mean When They Talk About Economic Growth

Marco Rubio is the latest “rising star” in a dying party to espouse the empty and pointless rhetoric of American conservativism.  The text of his response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech is here.

Marco Rubio

Understanding what conservatives have in mind when they talk about America’s future and economic growth requires holding their rhetoric accountable to the facts.

The simple fact is we have lower taxes, fewer regulations, and more wealth in the hands of job creators than at any other time in recent history.  If GOP rhetoric were anywhere near the truth, we should be awash in new jobs and prosperity.  But we are not.

Rubio claims that large government and taxes that promise to help the middle class has “failed every time it has been tried.” Well, that is true if you forget mid-century America or turn a blind eye to the strength of European countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Germany.

Republicans like to say President Obama is anti-private sector, but the Obama administration overall accommodates the private sector quite well.  Obama went out of his way to remind us that the private sector is the key to prosperity.  In today’s political wars, however, the messenger is more important than the message.  Again, perhaps it is time to look at facts, not rhetoric.

We currently have the tax cuts, less government, and fewer regulations.  The wealthiest — the job creators — have seen their wealth increase by over 60% in the last decade.  So…keep asking…where are the jobs?  Where is the prosperity?  Where is the answer to these questions?

A classic worth repeating…because it is so true.

Rubio also says our financial problems begin with a country that spends too much, spends a trillion more than it takes in.  While that certainly is a problem, it is hard to see why this isn’t a funding problem.  We cut taxes with the idea that wealth would trickle down.  The increased overall prosperity would bring in increased revenues, the argument went, and that would cover the lower tax rates.  But as we see, that does not happen.

Moreover, Republicans — by giving even more cuts and subsidies, adding Medicare prescriptions benefits, and a few ill-advised wars — added to our financial unmet financial burdens.  Let’s not forget doing absolutely nothing to address the core issues behind the banking crisis that put us here in the first place and thus added even more to our deficits.

Yes…it is all the fault of government too big, isn’t it?  Hardly.  It is a mismanaged government finance policy that erroneously puts the blame on government generally.  Simply put, if you manage government to fail, it will likely fail.  It can’t be any more plain than that.

However, when Rubio argued that annual GDP growth at 4% would be a big part of helping balancing our books…he was right!  That’s why notable experts like Paul Krugman make the case for government stimulus to push economic growth.  It will be much easier to pay down the cost of this stimulus — and more — if we have ten years of growth versus doing nothing, as we are doing now, and let things remain stagnate.

(But Krugman, and others like him, is an expert.  He’s intelligent and informed.  He has spent his career understanding economics.  So he must be wrong.)

Anyway…this is all so tiresome.  What is it that Republicans want that we don’t have right now?  Are they really concerned about jobs or just growth?  And who are they anyway?  Millions of people vote GOP in this country as if those votes serve their interests.  Why?

I ask this because we should ask what exactly do conservatives have in mind when they talk about growth and prosperity.  The rank and file Republican voter certainly doesn’t understand this question.  If it simply is growth, especially for the wealthiest, Republicans have that and lots of it.  If they are talking about middle class growth and prosperity then things are not so clear.

Rubio served up a rambling list of tired complaints and clichéd promises that simply do not fit the facts of conservative principles.  They are intentionally misleading the public and misrepresenting their true objectives.  It is hard to understand how an informed and intelligent person could see things otherwise.  Show us some progress on the conservative agenda first, then may you have an argument that the less-is-more approach is a winning one.

If Rubio is a rising star representing the future of the Republican Party, there isn’t much to excite people expecting a more moderate and sensible GOP.  We have heard all of this before.  (We haven’t forgotten the 2012 elections already, have we?)

Alas, this is looking more and more like class warfare to me.  The conservative elite are pushing for more by demanding that the rest live with less…and pay for the privilege.  Conservatives have focused on dismantling government for nearly 30 years now.  It is the “Starve the Beast” argument and, unfortunately, it is winning and most Americans are losing.

How do conservatives address this fact?  How does their rhetoric square with reality?  It is time to ask more about what does a prospering America really look like in the ideal GOP world.

Related articles

• Translating Obama’s State of the Union and Rubio’s Response (usnews.com)
• What Marco Rubio Doesn’t Understand About Debt And The Economy (thinkprogress.org)
• Rubio’s economic remedy: More austerity! (tv.msnbc.com)

Case Study: Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal (R)

What’s wrong with conservative politics in the United States?  Don’t strain yourself looking. and don’t busy yourself with a list.  Time is precious and examples abound!  Conservatives, after all, make celebrities of their fools and bad ideas.  But even under a small rock you can find little ones with big bad ideas.

Let’s look at Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal, for an example.

Really, I have to admit, the point of this post is to promote a June 2012  Think Progress post from Marie Diamond.  I was simply going to plagiarize the thing.  Or tweet it.  It is particularly germane post today as the country struggles with the insanity of violence in our society.  And I am sure every day I could find another…and another…and another…

The post I want to promote speaks for itself and begs for criticism, much needed criticism.  We see this often enough, and yet ideas like these seem to fester with increasing toxicity.  Plus, of course, we’re exposed to more political bile through the service of the internet.

That is bad news, especially if you hope to restore credibility to conservative politics.  These off-the-rails comments expose the devolving, ignorant tenor of conservative political speech in the United States, and, as I suggest, it is speech that speaks with loud, self-evident clarity.

So why does the GOP trend farther and farther to the extreme fringes of the right?  Who stands up and opposes this?  My complaints mean little.  It has to start from within the party, especially from the ground up.

Take note, Mike O’Neal is a leader within the Republican Party, a party and ideology that enjoys support from tens of millions of Americans.  Aligning with leaders like this, with this sort of rhetoric and these values, creates a complicity with those values that need some accountability.  If you vote for these people, you have some explaining to do.

So, Republicans, explain yourself.  Defend your associations with people who take positions like those of Mike O’Neal.  Or maybe you agree?

Voters hold responsibility for giving these ideas a voice.  From conservatives making millions exploiting hatred as Rush Limbaugh does mocking school children to people pasting cheap hate-filled bumper stickers on cars, the message is equally dismal and dangerous and overwhelming garbage from the right.

Prove otherwise.  Or better yet, vote otherwise.

 

Debt Ceiling and Fiscal Hostage Crisis: A better analogy

During his press conference yesterday, President Barak Obama explained that Republican demands requiring a match in future spending cuts to cover an increase in the federal debt ceiling is like finishing a meal a restaurant and leave without paying.  This is an imperfect analogy.

“If we don’t cut the cookies next time, I’m not paying today.”

While it is true that people and businesses do indeed negotiate debts and payments after the fact — something many Republicans certainly would be familiar with, perhaps routinely in business for some — the United States government does not, or at least historically has not.  The Republican caucus — again making the mistake of thinking about government as if it were a big private business enterprise — seem to be willing to extend this practice to our fiscal policy.

Republicans are willing to do this not because it is smart practice, but because it helps them achieve their broader goal of cutting government.  Plain and simple.   That simply compounds the disaster the GOP is set on creating for the United States, indeed the world economy as a whole.

There is a somewhat better way to make the restaurant bill payment analogy, nonetheless.

What Republicans are doing is demanding lower future costs in consideration of current payments.  It is even more nuanced than that, however.  Republicans are not saying reduce the current bill or we are leaving and not paying, they are saying sell me less next time I dine at your restaurant or we are not paying.

Imagine you’re the restaurant owner.  You’d think:  Well, ok, order less next when you’re here next time and I’ll gladly serve and charge you less, but pay me now for what you just ordered.

In my previous post I explain why it makes sense for the GOP anti-government strategy to order big and then play games with paying.  It all has to do with tricks to cut government, a failing strategy that ultimately damages our immediate economic recovery.  (NB:  The economy is not the GOP concern nor is the deficit.  Less government is their goal.  Running up debts and deficits actually serves that goal.)

But, in essence, Barak Obama is absolutely correct.  Republicans want to renege on contracts and promises already made unless future contracts conform to their wishes.  Ok, fine…the GOP wants the future to be different, but rather than demand lower prices for what they already have ordered they can simply order something less expensive in the future.  If you look at the restaurant analogy, one has nothing to do with the other.

 

Related articles

• Starving the Beast or Foie Gras? The GOP Deficit Hostage Strategy (mbcalyn.com)
• Republican Senator: GOP Should Hold Debt Ceiling Hostage As Leverage For Medicare Cuts (thinkprogress.org)
• Krugman: Republicans Are Engaging In ‘Hostage Taking’ (huffingtonpost.com)

Fiscal Battle: More of a truce than peace

I watched enough Saturday morning cartoons to know that it could be done.  Time and time again some hapless cartoon character finds himself running off the edge of a cliff only to start back peddling midair and return again to terra firma and wipe the sweat from his brow.  ”Whew.”

That describes where we are today, does it not?  You can draw your own conclusions, but cartoon reality is as sophisticated as anything going on in Washington today and, hey! trust what you just witnessed!

I believe an opportunity for real tax reform — or at least a practical discussion of it — might have been missed, however.  It seems to me that the White House had an opportunity to propose a tax reform plan as a part of the Fiscal Cliff negotiations.  Tell the GOP congress, for example, that they can either consider at reform now as a part of a long-term solution or let the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule.  Let the chips fall where they may.  There might have been some power in that position.

Most Americans would have placed the blame exactly where it belongs:  Squarely on the shoulders of the GOP.  And until we get out of cycles driven by failed conservative principles, we cannot expect to enact the larger reforms necessary to restore vitality to the American economy.

In time, it would seem that we need to restore taxes to levels more in line with the Clinton years anyway, but the problem is we really cannot afford to implement tax increases on middle-income earners now.  These are the people who spend the majority of their earnings out of necessity.  That spending is crucial to economic recovery.  Reducing that spending power is a mistake in the current economic situation.

Prior to the Bush tax cuts, funding was adequate.  The Bush tax cuts were part of an overall “starve the beast” strategy implemented in an era when the beast was allowed to grow on healthy diet of deficits.  The so-called spending problem was matched by a funding problem, especially as it involved unfunded programs like a few poorly conceived wars, expansion of the national security, and those tax cuts.

Eventually the formerly robust state of macroeconomic and fiscal harmony should be the ultimate goal of government policy makers, but it is hard to see how we will get there with a country so dismally misinformed and divided about tax policy and economics.  Rather than return to the pre-1930s America, we should be looking to restore the more principled policies of the 1990s.

The White House had an opportunity to roll that out.  Of course it would have to have been a long term plan — which is all but impossible in politically divided and impatient America today — but it would have been nice to see ideas reach beyond a time horizon measured in weeks for a change.

Unfortunately, those of use nostalgic for the civil pragmatism of the past, might have to settle for cartoon antics over political ones.

Related articles

• Fiscal cliff reveals how dysfunctional Republican nihilism makes US politics | Michael Cohen (guardian.co.uk)
• Part 1 of the Fiscal Cliff is Over. Now Gird Yourself for Part 2. (motherjones.com)
• The Long Game, Revisited (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• The Bush Era Tax Cuts Didn’t Create The Wealth They Were Supposed To (businessinsider.com)

Raise the Taxes

Two reasons why we should raise taxes.  First, there is little evidence that keeping taxes low will lead to faster economic growth.  Second, we NEED to raise the taxes.

Let’s start with the need.  Over recent decades this country — largely under conservative principles — has managed to under-fund government even as it raised costs (wars, medicare benefits, tax cuts).

Grover Norquist is the news quite a bit recently for his simple-minded anti-tax pledge.  We need to be aware of this.  In the church of small government, Norquist is pope and too many conservatives bend down to kiss his papal ring.

All these so-called independent and intelligent conservatives cower before Norquist.  Impressive.  And it is important to be aware of the pledge, but the goal of the pledge is the real concern.

Lower taxes are not necessarily bad, in fact everyone would agree that lower taxes would be a good thing, if the tax rate were fiscally responsible.  However Grover Norquist’s goal is smaller government for the sake of smaller government.   Conservatives don’t cut government programs because it is a necessary and unfortunate evil, they cut government because less government is their long term goal.

Not Relevant

Why, for example, do Republicans propose raising the age of Medicare benefits qualification?  Because they want less Medicare, if they must have it at all.  (Curious coming from a party that ran against Obama just two months ago warning that Obama would eliminate Medicare!  Truth and facts mean nothing to the misleading political right.   It’s disgraceful.)

So why reduce the taxes?  The argument goes that it will create jobs and growth.  Republicans will tell you that jobs and growth are their long term goal.  If we have growth, tax revenues will increase, and we will be able to pay down our deficit and maintain our government programs.

Republicans are funny.  The anti-intellectual party claims to rely on common sense.  Even here they seem unable to set things straight, however.  Common sense would tell you that the anti-tax, less-is-more approach to economic growth hasn’t worked all that well.

We have the tax cuts which the GOP is fighting to save — we have them RIGHT NOW — and we have had them for years.  Nevertheless we managed to fall into our recession, have struggled to recover from the recession, and job growth remains sluggish.  Ask your favorite GOPer:  If these tax cuts work ,  if more money for “job creators” creates jobs…well, where the hell are the jobs?

Not Relevant

Republicans either know nothing about market demand, the labor market, and the global economy or they are dismal liars.  Sadly, I think the party of the right is both.  They are misleading the public, and in doing so leading us right over the cliff to achieve their anti-government goals.

If you are, in fact, worried about the future for your children and grand children — a politician’s favorite trope — don’t vote for anti-future Republicans.

Let’s apply common sense to the tax cut argument.  First, we see that the tax cuts don’t work, not for the fiscal and economic problem we have now.  Look at what we have with cuts.  Second, look at what higher tax rates did to economic growth in the past.  It didn’t seem to hurt it.  Our most robust years coincide with higher tax rates.  How does that square with GOP rhetoric?

We need to close loopholes, raise some taxes, and find some savings, but all of this alone will not erase our deficit and eliminate our debt.  It won’t alone save the economy.  The numbers don’t add up.  We need growth.  If the economy regains its once-upon-a-time growth, the deficit and debt problems we face will go away rather easily.

Currently the private sector is not supporting the economic growth we need.  Demand for what the private sector can supply is low.  Money needs to circulate again in the consumer markets.

We do, however, need investments in infrastructure, research, education, and other public sector projects that will support future economic growth.  This is government’s role — i.e., our role as the people — to invest in these projects.  It is the derided Keynsian approach to economic stewardship and most economists argue it will have long-term benefit.

Relevant…to the GOP.

So why don’t we do it?  Well, once you get through the misinformation from conservative politicians, it all comes down to what you want government to be.  The right wants less of a government that serves the people.  Government for them is the problem, remember?  It is a problem because they don’t like it.  God, knows why, but I have ideas on this…it is an ideological one, primarily a bastardized theological one, leading with SBC corruption, but that’s another story.  The lemmings are about to go over the cliff, regardless of the ideological influences steer them.

Raise some taxes, but focus on stimulus spending, and we’ll save the future and can even save the misguided.

Related articles

• Conservative Leaders Urge Tough Line on Fiscal Cliff (cnsnews.com)
• Do Tax Cuts Lead to Economic Growth? (nytimes.com)
• Starve The Beast:  Fiscal calamity is the GOP’s plan to shrink government (post-gazette.com)
• Grover Norquist Makes a Fool Out of Himself By Demanding Reagan Era Tax Rates (politicususa.com)
• The Top 4 Whoppers Norquist Tells To Keep Republicans From Defecting (kaystreet.wordpress.com)
• Republicans speak loudly about standing up to Grover Norquist’s pledge, but carry a little stick (dailykos.com)
• Grover Norquist: Beware of a second tea party wave (washingtonpost.com)

Politicians and the Fiscal Cliff

A story in today’s Star Tribune about looming “fiscal cliff” says it all about where the blame lies.  If Republicans — not Congress, but Republicans — fail to reach a budget deal we are in big trouble.

It is time to stop being bi-partisan when explaining our nation’s woes.  Unless Republicans show some sincere effort to recognize that they do not represent 100% of the ideas and people in this county and begin to work on an overall solution that involves compromise, they are to blame.  Period.

Look at the positions.  Obama is cited saying “I refuse to accept any approach which isn’t balanced.”  Senator Amy Klobuchar says “This is a time for grownups to get things done.”

Meanwhile the paper cites Michele Bachman who claims “I pledge to continue to work everyday to create jobs.”  Speaker John Boehner warns that “raising the top [tax] rates would destroy nearly 700,000 jobs in our country.”

Do you see a difference?  The difference is stubborn delusion from the right.  Obama simply states a condition, not a firm, single position, such as a rigid no new taxes pledge.  He taking a position that sounds open to negotiation and option, but wants it to be balanced, i.e., fair.

Bachmann, on the other hand, claims she is working every day to create jobs.  For much of the last two years the only job she seemed focused on was her own.  And if she were indeed working  for creating jobs for all Americans, then based on her own assessment of today’s American job market, she hasn’t much to show for her efforts.

Boehner, on the other hand, is crying about losing 700,000 jobs if taxes on the very wealthiest are raised to help recover from decades of underfunding government.  If these magical tax cuts and unbalanced tax rates really were going to create jobs, where are they now?

Meanwhile, real experts at the Congressional Budget Office, not partisan hacks, warn that failing to avoid the “fiscal cliff” will cost 2 million jobs and result in as much as a four percent drop in GDP which equals another recession.

So let’s say Boehner knows what he is talking about.  Just pretend for a minute.  Isn’t it better to lose 700,000 jobs and avoid a recession while cleaning up our fiscal mess or is it best to lose 2 million jobs and make our situation worse?  Seems like an easy question to answer, even if half of the question isn’t based in fact. If we can trust people like Boehner to have their facts right, which is the better option?

Sadly, as we saw last Tuesday, tens of millions of Americans buy the irrational arguments of the conservative right.  Paying attention to simple arguments should sort out the choices we face, but people seem unable — or unwilling — to figure it out.  It is an absurdity.  As we see here, even if Republicans have the facts, they still don’t have the winning argument.

So why do they keep pushing?

Conservatives don’t like government.  They want to dismantle as much of it that they can.  They all believe, rich and poor alike, that they are wealthy landowners living in colonial Virginia centuries removed from reality.  I have no idea.  But the stupidity on the right, not on the left (sorry), owns the overwhelming burden of our current failures.

Prove otherwise.  Explain how we got to where we are today.  We have the job-creating tax cuts, we’ve privatized more and more of our government, we are fighting wars for freedom, we have cut government investments…where is the prosperity?

Related articles

• How the Fiscal Cliff Would Hit the Economy (vpr.net)
• Fiscal cliff: Compromise or hope for the best (upi.com)
• Are We About to Fall Off the Fiscal Cliff? – Patch.com (santacruz.patch.com)
• Boehner Tells House G.O.P. to Fall in Line (nytimes.com)
• ‘Fiscal cliff’ showdown begins as Obama and Boehner claim mandates on tax issue (guardian.co.uk)
• RPT-US Congress created this cliff and may now plunge off it – Reuters (reuters.com)
• John Boehner Goes After Bachmann’s Clinton Aide/Muslom Brotherhood Remarks:  ”Pretty Dangerous”  (mediate.com)