House GOP Scoffs At The Fact That Taxes Are Lower Under Obama Than Under Reagan
President Obama met with House Republicans today at the White House to discuss ways to move forward on negotiations regarding the nation’s debt ceiling and the budget. During the discussion, talk evidently turned to taxes, and when Obama noted that taxes today are lower than they were under President Reagan, the GOP, according to The Hill, “engaged in a lot of ‘eye-rolling’“:
Republicans attending a White House meeting on Wednesday didn’t take kindly to President Obama telling them tax rates were higher during the Reagan administration. GOP members engaged in a lot of “eye-rolling,” according to a member who was on hand to hear Obama, who invited House Republicans to the White House for discussions on the debt ceiling. […]
“[The President] made a comment like the tax rate is the lightest, even more than (under former President) Reagan,” Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) told The Hill following the meeting. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) joked that during the meeting, “We learned we had the lowest tax rates in history … lower than Reagan!”
That House Republicans find this preposterous is symptomatic of the hold Reagan mythology has over them. After all, for seven of Regan’s eight years in office, the top tax rate was higher than the current 35 percent. In six of those years, it was 50 percent or more. And every year that Regan was in office, the bottom tax bracket was higher than the current ten percent.
For a family of four, the “average income tax rate under Reagan in 1983 was 11.06 percent. Under Clinton in 1992, it was 9.18 percent. And under Obama in 2010, it was 4.68 percent.” During Reagan’s time, income tax revenue ranged from 7.8 to 9.4 percent of GDP. Last year, it was 6.2 percent and is not projected to climb back to 9 percent until 2016. In fact, in 2009, Americans paid their lowest taxes in 60 years.
Republicans are very fond of saying that the U.S. has “a spending problem, not a revenue problem.” But the truth is that revenue has plunged due to the recession and to continued misguided tax cuts, and revenue needs to be raised to eventually bring the budget into balance. And Reagan knew that taxes were an important part of the budget equation. After all, he “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, June 1, 2011
GOP Supported Individual Mandate To Prevent ‘Government Takeover’ Of Health Care
The Los Angeles Times’ Noam Levey looks at the history of the individual health insurance mandate and discovers that not only was the provision designed by Republicans as an alternative to President Bill Clinton’s health care reform plan in the 1990s, but it was specifically seen as a way to prevent a “government takeover” of health care:
“We were thinking, if you wanted to achieve universal coverage, what was the way to do it if you didn’t do single payer?” said Paul Feldstein, a health economist at UC Irvine, who co-wrote the 1991 plan with Pauly.
Feldstein and Pauly compared mandatory health insurance to requirements to pay for Social Security, auto insurance, or workers’ compensation.
So too did the Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler, who in 1989 wrote a health plan that also included an insurance requirement.
“If a young man wrecks his Porsche and has not had the foresight to obtain insurance, we may commiserate, but society feels no obligation to repair his car,” Butler told a Tennessee health conference that year.
“But healthcare is different. If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street, Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance.… A mandate on individuals recognizes this implicit contract,” said Butler, who was the foundation’s director of domestic policy studies.
Levey notes that fully a third of Republicans supported a bill that included a national individual requirement, introduced by then-Senator and current Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee. Sens. Bob Dole (R-KS), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Richard Lugar (R-IN) all backed that measure. The National Federation of Independent Business, a conservative small-business group, even “praised the bill ‘for its emphasis on individual responsibility.’”
And this wasn’t some fluke of the ’90s either. As recently as 2007, “[t]en Republican senators — including Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, now a GOP leader — signed on to a bill that year by Bennett and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to achieve universal health coverage.” The legislation penalized individuals who did not purchase insurance coverage.
Listing all of the GOP presidential candidates who have previously supported the mandate (Romney, Gingrich, Huntsman, Pawlenty) would only belabor the point, which is that the GOP’s new-found religion on the mandate and its constitutionality is driven by the political need to unravel the Democrats’ crowning social achievement, not any great concerns about policy, constitutionality, or freedom.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, May 31, 2011
GOD To The GOP: “I Don’t Endorse”
Dear Politicians,
Permit me to explain my reluctance to endorse. As the All-Powerful, Benevolent Deity I have a certain responsibility to non-partisanship among my constituents. Of course, I do prefer those among you who are moral, kind, compassionate, good and gracious. I have, however, noticed a certain tendency for these qualities to be diminished upon entering office. Next time around I intend to tinker a bit with the mix, and see if I can make My creation a bit more consistent. The first batter is always lumpy.
The problem is that in times past I did intervene in elections. When Moses and Korach were, in a sense, running against each other, I took clear sides. So certain was I of the proper outcome that I resorted to the simple expedient of having the ground swallow Korach and his cohorts. That severely cut into their base. Some people thought this an extreme form of censorship, but I believed it was unworthy of the Ruler of the Universe to simply stuff ballots. If I am going to endorse, it will be in biblical measure. I don’t do leaflets. I do pronouncements. (For those of you who have not read My book in a while, check the 16th chapter of Numbers.)
There were times when I was sorely tempted to raise My right hand for a candidate for office. A parade of villainy has passed before My all seeing eye, but I left the choice up to you. Some of the people whom I most favored – dear old honest Abe comes to mind – had to win on their own. I could have delivered a key county or two. But Korach’s indignant plea as he caromed off the canyon wall reminded me that I tend to push a bit too hard. Moses had some electoral deficits – a speech impediment, a certain impatience, and an alien upbringing – but he probably could have carried the pivotal Sinai districts even without My help.
So please, I ask you in My Name – don’t use My Name. You haven’t any idea whom I endorse. I don’t tote up church attendance like a celestial accountant and award the election to the one with the best record. I see inside hearts, remember? Watch out. While I am very, very patient, sometimes I snap. When I do decide to turn My countenance to you, if you have been tossing My name around like a cheap ticket to the Oval Office, I could be very put out. You don’t want that, trust Me. Just ask Korach.
Blessings,
God
By: David Wolpe, Rabbi of Sinai Temple, Los Angeles; The Washington Post, June 6, 2011
The GOP’s Hezbollah Wing Is Now Fully In Control
I have a guest column at the Daily Beast about the Republican Party’s self-destructive decision to support the Paul Ryan budget and, faced with the disastrous consequences, to dig in deeper. For an example of digging in deeper, check out Marc Thiessen’s column today. In the face of clear evidence to the contrary, he asserts that Kathy Hochul won in New York only because a third party spoiler split the Republican vote.
Having assigned to the Republican 100% of Jack Davis’s third party vote, Thiessen proceeds to argue, “Democrat Kathy Hochul won only a 47 percent plurality — just one point more than Barack Obama got when he lost the district back in 2008. As national referendums go, that is not terribly convincing.” It’s not? If House Democrats beat Obama’s 2008 vote by one percentage point in the next election, who does Thiessen think will control the House? You could argue that Hochul is just one data point and probably an outlier, and I’d agree. But it is a data point with clear negative implications for Republicans.
After asserting that the race proved almost nothing about Medicare, Thiessen then, arguing in the alternative, suggests a solution for Republicans to fight back anyway:
[T]he lesson of the New York special election is that if Republicans want to win in 2012, they need to stop playing defense and go on the offensive.
Why on earth have Republicans allowed Democrats to define the Ryan proposal as a plan to “end Medicare” when it is the Democrats who risk ending Medicare though a policy of neglect? Even the New York Times editorial page warned after the New York vote, “Sooner or later, Democrats will have to admit that Medicare cannot keep running as it is — its medical costs are out of control, and a recent report showed its trust fund running out of money in 2024, five years earlier than expected.”
Democrats have put forward no plan to deal with this fiscal crisis. Quite the opposite, they made it worse by taking $500 billion out of Medicare to help fund the president’s health-care law — robbing Medicare to pay for Obamacare. The time has come for the GOP to take the gloves off. When liberal groups put up an ad showing Ryan pushing Grandma off of a cliff, Republicans need to counter with an ad showing Obama, Pelosi and Reid pushing Grandma off the cliff — because that is where Medicare is headed if we follow their policy of inaction. The message should be: If we do nothing, Medicare will collapse — and millions of retirees will be left without health coverage. Democratic neglect will kill Medicare; Republicans are trying to save it.
Next, Republicans need to expand the debate. The Medicare proposal is just one element of a broader GOP plan to reduce our ballooning debt — which, in turn, is one element of a larger plan to restore economic growth and create jobs.
So, accuse democrats of letting Medicare go bankrupt, promise that you just want to save it, and then try to persuade voters that preserving the Bush tax cuts that have been in place for a decade will stimulate growth. Wow, why haven’t Republicans thought of this plan before?
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, May 31, 2011
No Brains In The Head: Truly The Dumbest `American Exceptionalism’ Attack Yet
I didn’t think the right’s “American exceptionalism” attack on Obama could get any dumber, but Sarah Palin has now outdone them all. She’s now faulting Obama for insufficient praise for our armed forces:
She also made a slight dig at President Obama for saying Monday at Arlington National Cemetery that his “most solemn responsibility as president [is] to serve as commander in chief of one of the finest fighting forces in the world.” Answering a question about Memorial Day, Palin said, “This is the greatest fighting force in the world, the U.S. military. It’s not just one of the greatest fighting forces. And I sure hope our president recognizes that. We’re not just one of many. We are the best.”
As it happens, the reporter got Obama’s quote a bit wrong. This is what Obama actually said: “It is my most solemn responsibility as President, to serve as Commander-in-Chief of one of the finest fighting forces the world has ever known.” But this isn’t good enough for Palin: If Obama doesn’t say that our armed forces are the bestest, baddest, most ass kicking-ist fighting forces in all of human history, he’s subtly denigrating the troops.
This is a reminder, if you needed one, that the charge that Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism — which has taken literally dozens of forms now — will be central to the 2012 campaign. It’s also a reminder, though, of what this attack line is really about. It’s impossible to imagine that a significant number of voters could hear Palin’s latest attack and come away thinking there’s something to it; her claim is just too dumb for people to take seriously. But these sorts of attacks aren’t about the actual claims themselves.
Rather, they are part of a much broader effort to insinuate that you should find Obama’s character, story, motives, identity, cultural instincts and intentions towards our country to be alien and fundamentally suspect. The idea is to keep piling various versions of this charge — no matter how ludicrous — on top of one another, like snow piling up on a roof.
Mitt Romney has already made it completely plain that various versions of this insinuation will be a major feature of the 2012 GOP nominee’s argument against Obama. Donald Trump’s experiment in birther hucksterism — even though it crashed and burned — confirmed this beyond any doubt. Now Palin is at it, too.
Hearing this kind of thing from Palin actually makes me want her to run. Who better than her to reveal how vacuous, childish, jingoistic and unbecoming of the presidency this sort of nonsense really is?
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, May 31, 2011
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