By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 23, 2011
Mr. Nice Guys?: Will Republicans Practice What They Tweet?
It appeared, at first glance, as if Eric Cantor’s Twitter account had been hacked — by a really nice guy.
In recent days, the extravagantly combative GOP House majority leader has been tweeting a veritable sampler box of bipartisan bonbons.
Sept. 21: “People don’t expect Republicans and Democrats to agree on everything, but they do expect us to overcome our differences and work together.”
Sept. 16: “Good people can have honest disagreements without having their morals or commitment to country being called into question.”
Sept. 13: “We need to work together towards the solutions that will meet the challenges facing our country today.”
Sept. 12: “Let’s try and lower the volume of the rancor in Washington, and focus on what we can do together to grow this economy and create jobs.”
And that is just a taste.
But this was no case of malicious (or, in this instance, magnanimous) hacking. After one of the ugliest summers political Washington has ever seen, Republicans, looking at poll numbers showing voters are even angrier with them than they are with President Obama, have decided to try the Mr. Nice Guy approach, in word and (occasional) deed.
They agreed to pass legislation keeping the Federal Aviation Administration going, abandoning the contentious provisions that led to this summer’s partial shutdown of the agency. They avoided another confrontation by extending highway spending without repealing the federal gas tax, a Tea Party priority. On Thursday, Senate Republicans yielded to President Obama’s demands and passed a worker-assistance bill that clears the way for enacting new trade agreements.
None of this means we’ve entered some new era of harmony in the capital; Republicans remain unswervingly opposed to any new taxes to reduce debt. And GOP leaders can push their rank-and-file only so far.
After conservatives on Wednesday defeated their leaders’ legislation that would keep the government running for the next two months, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) attempted to negotiate with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in hopes of securing Democratic votes for the spending bill. But Boehner lost his nerve and decided instead to appease the recalcitrant conservatives.
Still, the shift in tone shows that Republicans have decided to pick their battles — a sensible response to the revulsion Americans felt watching this summer’s brinkmanship over the debt limit.
The Republicans seem to be heeding the advice of strategists such as Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster who, in a widely read memo earlier this month, warned that the debt standoff hurt consumer confidence much like the Iranian hostage crisis, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Hurricane Katrina.
“The perception of how Washington handled the debt ceiling negotiation led to an immediate collapse of confidence in government and all the major players, including President Obama and Republicans in Congress,” McInturff wrote. He added that “this sharp a drop in consumer confidence is a direct consequence of the lack of confidence in our political system and its leaders.”
Fearing that voters will probably punish all incumbents — not just Obama — Republicans have softened their style in September, even as Obama has hardened his. “There is a recognition on the Hill that people are frustrated with Washington and want some results,” acknowledged Cantor’s spokesman, Brad Dayspring.
The Republicans’ experiment in conciliation has been aided by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who has brought up issues — patents, trade and transportation — that had bipartisan support from the start. But Democrats also claim some vindication in the new approach. As one Democratic leadership aide put it: “They’re picking their shots better so they don’t come across as complete [expletives].”
The question is: How much substance comes with that recalibration? After Obama’s address to Congress on job creation, Boehner replied with the conciliatory message that “it is our desire to work with you to find common ground.”
On the morning after his House conservatives defeated the legislation to keep the government running, Boehner went to the microphones to assure Americans: “Listen, there’s no threat of government shutdown. Let’s just get this out there.”
Privately, Democrats believe that, too. And though Obama’s jobs bill has no chance of passage (even many Democrats object to its tax increases), chances are good that Republicans will agree to extend the payroll tax cut and a tax credit for hiring wounded veterans.
“We want to join with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, to find areas where we agree, to make sure the American economy succeeds,” Cantor announced via Twitter.
Well said. But how much will Republicans practice what they tweet?
The GOP’s Lies And ‘Monstrous’ Lies
In politics these days, there are lies, “monstrous lies,” and statistics. By lies I mean the mundane nonsense that dribbles out of politicians’ mouths when the facts don’t suit them or they just don’t know any better. By “monstrous lies,” if I can borrow the phrase of the moment, I refer to the grander deceptions swallowed by whole political movements, delusions and deceptions that infect larger issues of policy and worldview.
Statistics in this case, along with pesky facts, help expose and distinguish the two species of falsehood—both of which have been on dramatic display during the GOP presidential primary campaign.
Take, for example, Michele Bachmann, who is practically a walking, talking full-employment plan for journalistic fact-checkers. Appearing at last week’s Republican debate (sponsored by CNN and the Tea Party Express—does that mean that the Tea Party is now part of the lamestream media?), Bachmann repeated a favorite talking point, that the Constitution forbids states to mandate that their citizens buy health insurance, Romneycare-style. “If you believe that states can have it and that it’s constitutional, you’re not committed” to repealing the Affordable Care Act, she argued. But the conservative case against the healthcare law rests on the notion that because the Constitution does not explicitly authorize such a law, the federal government is barred from instituting one. Since the 10th Amendment reserves powers not delegated to the federal government back to the states, it is constitutional for, say, Massachusetts to require its citizens to purchase health insurance (or car insurance, for that matter). Bachmann’s stance, one blogger at the influential conservative blog Red State argued, is “either ignorance on display or dishonest pandering.”
Bachmann was even more egregious after the debate, when she went on Fox News Channel, and later the Today show, and asserted that Gardasil, the vaccine that Texas Gov. Rick Perry had tried to mandate for Texas schoolgirls, caused “mental retardation.” It’s such whole-cloth twaddle that even the likes of Rush Limbaugh (“she might have jumped the shark”) and the Weekly Standard (“Bachmann seemed to go off the deep end”) blasted her for it.
But Bachmann is literally and figuratively small potatoes, Perry’s arrival having returned her to the lower tier of GOP contenders. And she is minor league compared to Perry in the “monstrous lie” department.
The phrase of course comes from his memorable description of Social Security. “It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you’ve paid into a program that’s going to be there,” Perry said at his first presidential debate. “Anybody that’s for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a monstrous lie to our kids, and that’s not right.” Elsewhere he has called the program “by any measure … a failure” and cited it as “by far the best example” of an extra-constitutional program “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles.”
It’s a catchy turn of argument, but one monstrously divorced from reality. His “failure” kept nearly 14 million seniors and 1.1 million children out of poverty last year, according to Census Bureau data. Here are the facts about Social Security: Without any modification, it will pay out full benefits for the next 24 years. Starting in 2035, its trust fund will no longer be able to pay full benefits. Instead it will pay roughly three quarters benefits through 2084, which is as foreseeable a future as anyone can peer into in these matters—a problematic future, but hardly a monstrous one and certainly not an impossible one.
Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office has produced 30 policy recommendations, some combination of which could fix the Social Security shortfall. Here’s one: Remove the payroll tax cap so that more wages are subject to the payroll tax. That would make the program solvent for the 75-year window—again, hardly a monstrous situation. (To put it another way, the Social Security shortfall figures to be roughly 0.8 percent of GDP—roughly the same as the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts over the same period.)
Social Security wasn’t the only topic this week of Texas-size Perry misinformation. Obama “had $800 billion worth of stimulus in the first round of stimulus,” Perry said. “It created zero jobs.”
This gem—a staple of GOP talking points—earned a “Pants on Fire” rating from PolitiFact, which pointed to several independent analyses that came to quite different conclusions. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the first round of stimulus created or saved between 1.3 million and 3.6 million jobs; HIS/Global Insight put the number at 2.45 million, Macroeconomic Advisers at 2.3 million, and Moody’s Economy.com at 2.5 million. The GOP may disdain jobs that come from public spending (recall Speaker John Boehner’s “so be it” comment when asked about budget cuts leading to fewer jobs), but they cannot seriously argue that the economy would be better off if the ranks of the unemployed were 2.5 million persons more swollen. So instead forgo the inconvenient truth in favor of the monstrous lie.
These lies are monstrous because they are not one-offs, but are central to the GOP case—that Social Security (except, they are quick to add, for those currently on it) and the stimulus plan don’t work. So they have real-world policy consequences—see the emerging conservative line of attack against Obama’s American Jobs Act, that it is a stimulus retread. “Four hundred-plus billion dollars in this package,” Perry concluded at the debate. “And I can do the math on that one. Half of zero jobs is going to be zero jobs.”
He may be able to do math, but his grasp on the facts is tenuous at best.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 22, 2011
Obama’s Tax Plan Is Common Sense, Not Class warfare
“Class warfare!” scream the Republicans, in a voice usually reserved for phrases such as “Run for your lives!”
Spare us the histrionics. The GOP and its upper-crust patrons have been waging an undeclared but devastating war against middle-class, working-class and poor Americans for decades. Now they scream bloody murder at the notion that long-suffering victims might finally hit back.
President Obama’s proposal to boost taxes for the wealthy by $1.5 trillion over the next decade is a good first step toward reforming a system in which billionaire hedge-fund executives are taxed at a lower rate than are their chauffeurs and private chefs.
Republicans whine that, since they oppose raising taxes on the rich — and control the House of Representatives, which can block such legislation — Obama’s proposal should be seen as political, not substantive. This is just a campaign initiative, they say, not a “serious” plan to address the nation’s financial and economic woes.
But that’s pure solipsism: Whatever does not fit the GOP’s worldview is, by definition, illegitimate. By this standard, Obama could propose only measures that are in the Republican Party’s platform — which obviously would defeat the purpose of being elected president as a progressive Democrat in the first place.
Outside of the Republican echo chamber, polls consistently show the American people consider unemployment to be the nation’s most urgent problem, not deficits and debt. Obama was on target with the American Jobs Act he proposed this month; the only question was what took him so long.
Americans do have long-term concerns about debt, however, and by large margins they see an obvious solution: a balanced combination of spending cuts and tax increases. In other words, they want precisely the kind of approach that House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) rejected during the debt-ceiling fight — and that he vows to reject again.
Why did Republicans begin squawking about class warfare even before Obama had a chance to announce his proposals? Because by calling on the rich to pay “their fair share” of taxes, the president has hit upon a clear and simple way to illustrate how unequal and unfair our society has become.
Since the beginning of the Reagan years, the share of total income captured by the top 1 percent of earners has doubled while the share taken by the bottom 80 percent has fallen. The rich are getting richer at the expense not only of the poor but of the middle class as well.
Studies demonstrating this trend tend to be dry and, let’s face it, sleep-inducing. But the perverse disparity in tax rates between the super-rich and the rest of us is enough to grab anyone’s attention.
The very wealthy earn much of their income through dividends and capital gains, which are taxed at 15 percent. This low rate would apply specifically to a wildly successful hedge-fund manager who made, say, $50 million last year. By contrast, an insurance company executive who made $500,000 — just 1 percent of what the hedge-fund manager took home — would pay a top marginal income tax rate of 35 percent. Even a teacher who made just $50,000 — 0.1 percent of the hedge-fund haul — would pay a top marginal rate of 25 percent.
Obama proposes tax legislation that would erase this disparity. He also vows that, unless Congress enacts comprehensive — and fair — tax reform, he will allow the Bush tax cuts for households earning more than $250,000 a year to expire at the end of 2012.
The overall plan that Obama announced Monday would cut deficits by about $4 trillion over the next 10 years — without gutting programs that bolster the middle class and aid the poor. New tax revenue and money saved from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan make up most of the total.
Obama’s proposed savings in Medicare and Medicaid are modest and tailored so that their impact is progressive. The president correctly decided that ensuring Social Security’s long-term solvency should proceed on a separate track. All this should be heartening to those who really want to preserve these vital programs.
The headline from Obama’s plan, though, is the call for wealthy Americans to pay taxes like everybody else. If Republicans believe the current system is fine, Obama said, “they should be called out. They should have to defend that unfairness. . . . They ought to have to answer for it.”
We’ve already heard their answer.
And we’ve heard Obama’s retort: “This is not class warfare. It’s math.”
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 19, 2011
It’s Not About Job Creation Stupid!: I Am A Job Creator Who Creates No Jobs
I am a job creator.
I am not a job creator in the sense that I actually create jobs. I have never knowingly created a job, and my long-term business plan, approved unanimously by my board of directors, does not call for the creation of a single one.
But I am a job creator in the sense Republicans mean when they say “don’t tax our job creators more” (House budget committee Chairman Paul Ryan) or “we cannot increase taxes on the job creators” (House Speaker John A. Boehner). This is because, in the eyes of the government, I am a small business — and, as the House Republicans liketosay, “small businesses are the job creators.”
Like the overwhelming majority of small businesses, I am a one-man operation. And, like most small businesses, I would not hire anybody even if the government dropped my tax rate to zero.
According to Small Business Administration statistics, based on 2009 Census data, 21.1 million of the 27 million small businesses in the United States are “non-employer firms,” which have no workers other than the owner. Of those, 18.7 million are “sole proprietors,” 950,000 are partnerships and 1.4 million are corporations, like me.
When lawmakers talk about small businesses as the engine of growth, they bring to mind entrepreneurs building start-ups from their garages. But when officials talk about protecting the “job creators” from tax hikes, they are mostly protecting a bunch of doctors, lawyers, freelancers, contractors and the like.
On the advice of my accountants, I formed a “C corporation,” which means that, as a legal entity, I am pretty much the same as General Motors and Google. But I run a lean operation. While my business, Ink-Stained Inc., produces the occasional book, TV appearance and speech, it is probably not going to win any best-practices awards.
Disagreement is rare during board meetings at Ink-Stained Inc. world headquarters (my house), because I am the chairman, chief executive, president, treasurer, secretary, chief technology officer and mail-room clerk. Occasionally board members complain about environmental regulations, not because these regulations affect us but because that is what we have heard corporations are supposed to do.
We administer a modest pension plan for our sole employee, and we reimburse a few health-care expenses. We have big, professional-looking checks, and we attempt to keep our accounts balanced, although our chief financial officer (also me) is a lagging performer. We once considered hiring our wife as a consultant to help us organize our finances, but the HR department was unable to come to terms with her. We have so far repelled all attempts at unionization.
I should add that I am in no danger of being caught in the net of President Obama’s proposed millionaires’ tax. I pay the accountants a few thousand dollars, and they make sure I am not paying more in taxes than I should be. (Note to the IRS: They do this in ways that are conservative, entirely above-board and so innocuous that they should not attract your interest in the slightest.)
While there is something absurd about being a one-man corporation, it’s a rational response to an irrational tax code. If lawmakers got serious about tax reform that removed loopholes, the money spent on accountants and actuaries (valuable though they are) could instead be used to grow the economy or to pay the federal debt. But that’s a matter for another day.
At the moment, the Ink-Stained Inc. case study, should the Harvard Business School wish to study it, is a reminder to be skeptical of the “job creator” argument in the tax debate. “It’s a good example of the murkiness of what we mean by small business and the connection to jobs,” William Gale, co-director of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution’s Tax Policy Center, told me. “There’s sort of this notion of small-business innovation and job creation that just doesn’t necessarily hold.”
That’s even more so with Obama’s “Buffett Rule,” under which millionaires would have to pay a higher tax rate than a typical middle-class worker. As a practical matter, most already do. Gale said the rule would raise the taxes on only a few thousand people, perhaps as few as 1,000.
In a nation of more than 300 million, that’s not going to make a dent in job creation. Even the data analysts at Ink-Stained Inc. could figure out that one — that is, if we had any data analysts.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 21, 2011
If Republicans Love States’ Rights So Much, Why Do They Want to Be President?
Whatever their differences, the leading Republican candidates all swear that they love states’ rights. If elected president, Rick Perry vows to “try to make Washington as inconsequential as I can.” Mitt Romney declares his faith in the Constitution, which, he says, declares that the government “that would deal primarily with citizens at the local level would be local and state government, not the federal government.” Michele Bachmann “respect[s] the rights of states to come up with their own answers and their own solutions to compete with one another.” With lots of help from the Tea Party, the Tenth Amendment which, not so long ago was familiar mainly to constitutional lawyers and scholars, may now be as popular as the First or the Second. But, what this resurgence of federalism overlooks is not just the historical consolidation of federal power but also the inanity of attempts to reverse it.
For most of U.S. history, the primacy of federalism was taken for granted. Except during major wars, states exerted far more power over the daily lives of their residents than did any of the three branches of a national government located in a swampy river city on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard that most Americans had never visited. In the nineteenth century, as the historian Gary Gerstle explains, states funded canals, highways, and railroads. They decided which groups could vote and which could not. Some tried to regulate working hours. Others outlawed a variety of private acts—interracial marriage, drinking, and theater-going. In 1837, Illinois even forbade “playing at ball or flying of kites” as public nuisances.
All these policies fell under the legal sanction of “the police power,” which one influential Massachusetts judge in 1851 defined broadly as insuring the “good and welfare of the Commonwealth.” For its part, the Supreme Court, until after World War I, rather consistently ruled that the celebrated protections of the Bill of Rights—from the freedom of speech and the press to the right to a speedy trial—applied only to acts by the federal government and not to those of the states.
But, by the middle of the twentieth century, this arrangement no longer served the needs or desires of most Americans. During the Great Depression, state revenues, based mainly on property taxes, plummeted. The federal government stepped in to provide relief, and citizens everywhere began to count on Washington to keep the economy afloat and their Social Security checks arriving promptly. Then World War II and the cold war bound Americans to a national-security state that financed education for veterans and interstate highways as well as aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. In the 1960s and ’70s, Congress passed laws to safeguard the civil and voting rights of every citizen, regardless of where he or she might live. Policies to protect the environment and regulate hazards at the workplace further diminished the sway of state governments. The Supreme Court, even with a conservative majority, has done little to reverse these changes.
Yet, states’ rights never lost its appeal to that minority of Americans who are ideologically committed to lambasting the federal state as both overweening and ineffective. (It should come as no surprise that these conservatives were so alarmed at the emergency measures taken by the Bush and Obama administrations to address the financial meltdown of 2008: the formation and rapid growth of the Tea Party was the predictable result.) However, any Republican elected to the White House in 2012 will find it impossible to lead a headlong charge back to the past, and not just because of the difficulty of undoing a half-century of tradition and Supreme Court precedent.
Voters unhappy with the inability of the federal government to restore prosperity may like the sound of “states’ rights.” But how many would trust their governors and state legislators to pay their Medicare and Social Security checks on time and at current or higher levels? How many really want 50 separate immigration policies or 50 different standards for what constitutes clean air and clean water? Or the possibility that state, seeking to lure business away from its neighbors, could cut the minimum wage in half and not requiring employers to pay for overtime?
When you look more broadly at their promises, the GOP hopefuls reveal the emptiness of their own rhetoric. Bachmann, never a paragon of consistency, supports a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, as well as the right of individual states to legalize it. In 2007, before Romney got in trouble for his Massachusetts health care law, he predicted, “that all these states … who follow the path that we pursued will find it’s the best path, and we’ll end up with a nation that’s taken a mandate approach.” Rick Perry favors federal action to stop gay marriage and restrict abortion—and, last month, asked President Obama to speed up aid to stop wildfires from burning up whole sections of his vast state. Like a lot of other Americans, these ambitious conservatives like to rail against Washington in the abstract but cannot imagine how the nation would operate without a strong central government. And the specifics of their smaller hypocrisies are underscored by one giant irony: They’re all running for president.
The U.S. has long ceased to be a country in which most people look to their state instead of to the national government to address and solve their most vital problems. State pride is pretty rare these days, except for residents and alumni who dress in the old-school colors and root hard for a college football or basketball team from a major public university.
Of course, state governments still perform a vital role in education and economic development and can still be “laboratories of democracy,” sites for testing out new policies that aren’t yet ready for national consumption. Progressives who cheered when New York legalized gay marriage and look forward to the day when Vermont begins operating the single-payer health care system it passed this spring can hardly object, at least in principle, when red states pass laws they abhor. But, as an alternative philosophy of governance in a modern nation, states’ rights is very wrong. In fact, it’s ridiculous.
By: Michael Kazin, The New Republic, September 20, 2011
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