“The Forgotten Millions”: Spending More To Create Jobs Now Would Actually Improve Our Long-Run Fiscal Position
Let’s get one thing straight: America is not facing a fiscal crisis. It is, however, still very much experiencing a job crisis.
It’s easy to get confused about the fiscal thing, since everyone’s talking about the “fiscal cliff.” Indeed, one recent poll suggests that a large plurality of the public believes that the budget deficit will go up if we go off that cliff.
In fact, of course, it’s just the opposite: The danger is that the deficit will come down too much, too fast. And the reasons that might happen are purely political; we may be about to slash spending and raise taxes not because markets demand it, but because Republicans have been using blackmail as a bargaining strategy, and the president seems ready to call their bluff.
Moreover, despite years of warnings from the usual suspects about the dangers of deficits and debt, our government can borrow at incredibly low interest rates — interest rates on inflation-protected U.S. bonds are actually negative, so investors are paying our government to make use of their money. And don’t tell me that markets may suddenly turn on us. Remember, the U.S. government can’t run out of cash (it prints the stuff), so the worst that could happen would be a fall in the dollar, which wouldn’t be a terrible thing and might actually help the economy.
Yet there is a whole industry built around the promotion of deficit panic. Lavishly funded corporate groups keep hyping the danger of government debt and the urgency of deficit reduction now now now — except that these same groups are suddenly warning against too much deficit reduction. No wonder the public is confused.
Meanwhile, there is almost no organized pressure to deal with the terrible thing that is actually happening right now — namely, mass unemployment. Yes, we’ve made progress over the past year. But long-term unemployment remains at levels not seen since the Great Depression: as of October, 4.9 million Americans had been unemployed for more than six months, and 3.6 million had been out of work for more than a year.
When you see numbers like those, bear in mind that we’re looking at millions of human tragedies: at individuals and families whose lives are falling apart because they can’t find work, at savings consumed, homes lost and dreams destroyed. And the longer this goes on, the bigger the tragedy.
There are also huge dollars-and-cents costs to our unmet jobs crisis. When willing workers endure forced idleness society as a whole suffers from the waste of their efforts and talents. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that what we are actually producing falls short of what we could and should be producing by around 6 percent of G.D.P., or $900 billion a year.
Worse yet, there are good reasons to believe that high unemployment is undermining our future growth as well, as the long-term unemployed come to be considered unemployable, as investment falters in the face of inadequate sales.
So what can be done? The panic over the fiscal cliff has been revelatory. It shows that even the deficit scolds are closet Keynesians. That is, they believe that right now spending cuts and tax hikes would destroy jobs; it’s impossible to make that claim while denying that temporary spending increases and tax cuts would create jobs. Yes, our still-depressed economy needs more fiscal stimulus.
And, to his credit, President Obama did include a modest amount of stimulus in his initial budget offer; the White House, at least, hasn’t completely forgotten about the unemployed. Unfortunately, almost nobody expects those stimulus plans to be included in whatever deal is eventually reached.
So why aren’t we helping the unemployed? It’s not because we can’t afford it. Given those ultralow borrowing costs, plus the damage unemployment is doing to our economy and hence to the tax base, you can make a pretty good case that spending more to create jobs now would actually improve our long-run fiscal position.
Nor, I think, is it really ideology. Even Republicans, when opposing cuts in defense spending, immediately start talking about how such cuts would destroy jobs — and I’m sorry, but weaponized Keynesianism, the assertion that government spending creates jobs, but only if it goes to the military, doesn’t make sense.
No, in the end it’s hard to avoid concluding that it’s about class. Influential people in Washington aren’t worried about losing their jobs; by and large they don’t even know anyone who’s unemployed. The plight of the unemployed simply doesn’t loom large in their minds — and, of course, the unemployed don’t hire lobbyists or make big campaign contributions.
So the unemployment crisis goes on and on, even though we have both the knowledge and the means to solve it. It’s a vast tragedy — and it’s also an outrage.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 6, 2012
“Leading From Behind”: Could John Boehner Lose The House Speaker’s Gavel?
Think Congress is dysfunctional during these fiscal-cliff negotiations? What if John Boehner can’t even get enough House Republican votes next month to be reelected as speaker?
Far-fetched? Perhaps. But at least one conservative group says Boehner’s hold on the speaker’s gavel should not be viewed as a done deal. It is launching an all-out effort aimed at about 100 House Republicans to see if it can find at least 17 of them angry enough, and bold enough, to block Boehner’s reelection when the new Congress commences on Jan. 3.
“With Boehner basically out there promoting a tax hike and removing conservatives from key committees, these are not good precedents for the next two years,” Ned Ryun, whose father, Jim Ryun, was a representative for Kansas, complained to the National Journal on Thursday.
Ned Ryun is president and CEO of American Majority, a Virginia-based group that says it has trained thousands of conservative activists and also says that it embraces but predates the Tea Party movement. He is getting attention with a blog he posted on Wednesday — not so much because he says Boehner should be fired as speaker, but because he says the conservative movement could actually accomplish that goal under House rules and that it does not have to be a “fairy-tale” wish.
Boehner, whose last two years as speaker already have been mired in grousing from conservative groups, is again being hit this week from the far right over his counteroffer in fiscal-cliff negotiations with the White House to raise $800 billion in revenue by closing special-interest loopholes and tax deductions. Some groups are casting this as his seeming openness to breaking a promise not to raise taxes.
Adding to that anger has been other news this week that the speaker and his House GOP steering committee had purged four conservatives from their coveted committee seats, at least three of whom have been butting heads with party leaders over government spending and the federal deficit. This just weeks after Boehner had pleaded for unity in a private conference call to fellow House Republicans on the day after the Nov. 6 election.
For this anger to result in Boehner losing his speaker’s gavel, explained Ryun to National Journal on Thursday, enough conservative members need to show “some guts” and publicly rebel.
He says his group is looking at a list of about 100 conservatives whom they will try to persuade to step up, go public with their disappointment in Boehner, and show they are willing to take the risks and potential punishment Boehner has already shown he will dish out if such an effort fails.
In fact, there was already some murmuring within the House Republican conference itself about potential maneuvering in the upcoming speaker election as a way to express conservative discontent, say House GOP sources familiar with such talks.
But each of those who spoke — all on the condition they not be identified — also underscored that they’ve seen no concerted effort yet to organize anything beyond some conservatives saying they might simply vote “present” instead of specifically for Boehner. Even doing that would bring potential punishment from top leaders, because the votes are public.
Boehner spokesman Michael Steel responded on Thursday by pointing out that the Ohio Republican last month “was honored to be selected by the House Republican Conference to be its candidate for speaker.” In fact, there was only one other candidate nominated in that closed-door process. And the nomination by Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, of former Speaker Newt Gingrich did not even receive a seconding. But there was no actual roll-call vote, and Boehner was selected by acclamation.
For their part, House Democrats reelected Nancy Pelosi as their leader, and also their nominee to be speaker.
Under normal circumstances, Boehner’s reelection as speaker on Jan. 3 should be automatic. House Republicans are set to enter the new Congress holding 234 seats and the Democrats will have 200 seats (one of the House’s total 435 seats is to be vacant with the resignation last month of former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois). But the linchpin of the conservative “oust-Boehner” strategy being floated rests on the requirement that to be elected as speaker, a candidate must receive an “absolute majority” of all House member votes cast for individuals.
And as confirmed in the details contained in a Congressional Research Service analysis dated Jan. 6, 2011, titled, “Speakers of the House: Elections, 1913-2011,” a concerted effort by as few as 17 House conservatives could — in fact — throw this normally routine reelection process for Boehner into turmoil.
“Members normally vote for the (speaker) candidate of their own party conference, but may vote for any individual, whether nominated or not,” states the CRS report. “To be elected, a candidate must receive an absolute majority of all the votes cast for individuals. This number may be less than a majority (now 218) of the full membership of the House, because of vacancies, absentees, or members voting “present.”
In short, with Jackson having retired, as few as 17 House Republican members now can deny Boehner an “absolute majority” of the total 434 expected votes on Jan. 3, if all the Democrats back Pelosi.
The CRS report goes on to note that the elected speaker has always been a sitting member of the House, but the Constitution does not require that to be so. As a result, Republicans upset with Boehner aren’t limited to voting for Pelosi, or even another Republican, but almost anyone as a symbolic alternative.
“If no candidate receives the requisite majority, the roll call is repeated until a Speaker is elected.
Since 1913, this procedure has been necessary only in 1923, when nine ballots were required before a speaker was elected, states the report.
On Thursday, one House Republican member, who described himself during the interview as a conservative, said he has not been approached by any colleagues about such a maneuver but has heard discussion about it from other sources. He insisted he would not go along with such a ploy — but he also said that if Boehner were to not be elected on the first ballot, it would be tantamount to a “no confidence vote.” He said that would likely lead to some energetic closed-door conferences to iron out differences, “or even pick a new leader.”
This lawmaker said that in such a scenario, he did not believe either Majority Leader Eric Cantor nor Majority Whip Kevin Smith would be selected by the conference as its new nominee — “because they are all functioning as one team.”
Meanwhile, a senior House Democratic aide appeared to relish such talk, saying it indicates Boehner’s leadership team “is going to have to work their butts off and call in every chit to make sure he wins what should normally be just a boring vote.”
“If Speaker Boehner wants to purge independent, bold conservatives — I think it’s time he gets fired as speaker,” blogged Ryun. “Not only for the purge. He has failed to effectively win negotiations with President Obama and appointed moderate committee chairs. To the public, Boehner may appear radical, but in reality he proposes milquetoast policies, like the tax hikes he proposed this week.”
By: Billy House, The Atlantic, December 6, 2012
“A History Of Bad Ideas”: Bobby Jindal’s Shallow Rhetoric Re-Embraces Dumbed-Down Conservatism
The week after President Obama was re-elected, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) insisted Republicans need to “stop being the stupid party.” He added that he and his party have “had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”
The Louisianan added that his party should “stop reducing everything to mindless slogans, tag lines, 30-second ads that all begin to sound the same.”
It all sounded quite nice, actually. Even if Jindal made a poor messenger, the message had the potential to serve as a wake-up call for a party that badly needs one.
This week, we were reminded of just how shallow Jindal’s rhetoric really is, and why he’s not the Republican to lead the GOP away from “dumbed-down conservatism”; he’s the Republican who can’t let go of “dumbed-down conservatism.”
Many of us have argued that “fiscal cliff” is a wildly overwrought metaphor to describe the contractionary effects of fiscal tightening that will be phased in gradually. Bobby Jindal, in an op-ed today, seems to think the metaphor is not overwrought enough (“Today it’s the fiscal cliff, but that surely will not be the end of it; next year it will be the fiscal mountain, after that the fiscal black hole, and after that fiscal Armageddon”). But it also appears that Jindal lacks any understanding of what the fiscal cliff is or why economists think it’s bad.
Jindal’s op-ed is a truly sad display. The governor who seems eager to blaze a new intellectual trail for the Republican Party has an agenda that includes a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution (one of the worst ideas in the history of bad ideas); an 18 percent cap on federal spending (the other worst idea in the history of bad ideas); an arbitrary mechanism that would make it all but impossible for policymakers to raise taxes for any reason (which would make policymaking even more impossible); and just for the heck of it, term limits, as if having inexperienced policymakers would make our problems go away.
Taken together, Bobby Jindal, the guy who wants his party to “stop reducing everything to mindless slogans,” “stop being simplistic,” and start “trusting the intelligence of the American people,” is rolling out old, tired cliches that don’t work, crumble under scrutiny, and don’t even relate to the ongoing fiscal debate.
Indeed, Paul Krugman, lamenting the “fiscal ignoramus factor,” lamented, “You really have to wonder how someone who’s a major political figure could be this uninformed — but you have to wonder even more about the state of mind that induces you to write an op-ed about a subject you don’t comprehend at all.”
I realize Jindal has a reputation with the D.C. establishment as being a serious guy and intellectual heavyweight. It’s time for the establishment to reevaluate those assumptions.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 7, 2012
“America Is A Democracy, Not A Plutocracy”: It’s Time To Show The Rich And Powerful Who’s Boss
Who is in charge here, anyway? That, more than sequestered spending or how much we raise in new taxes, will be the most important question resolved by this “fiscal cliff” stand-off between President Obama and the GOP.
More than Republicans and Democrats forging an elusive consensus on shrinking the nation’s deficit, the real question before the country in these debates over debt is whether the American Republic has within it the will and the means to make its most powerful elites pay “just a little bit more,” as the President likes to say, at a time when those elites are determined to resist. And as we sit here today, the jury on that question is still out.
The power to tax may be the power to destroy, as the old saying goes. But as historian Francis Fukuyama reminds us, the reverse is also true: “Scandalous as it may sound to the ears of Republicans schooled in Reaganomics,” he says, “one critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites.”
Those who have ever been to places like Jamaica and seen ramshackle shacks side-by-side with mansions behind their high, stone walls and iron-barred windows know Fukuyama is right when he says the most dysfunctional societies are those in which elites are able to either legally exempt themselves from taxation or evade it and thus shift the burden of public expenditure onto the rest of society.
There is another old saying among students of American politics: “The President proposes and Congress disposes.” Well, the new rule, as Bill Maher might say, seems to be that in America today the Plutocracy proposes and Congress – or at least that part of Congress that is Republican – does as it is told.
Listening to the supposedly sensible Republican Senator Tom Coburn on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program earlier today dodge and weave every time the show’s hosts tried to pin him down on whether Republicans could agree to increasing income tax rates on the rich, it quickly became apparent that when Republicans say we shouldn’t raise taxes on the rich what they really mean is that Republicans can’t.
When Republicans say taxes on the rich cannot go up, that is not a bargaining position. It’s an admission of weakness that Republicans literally can’t make it happen — either because their rigid ideology won’t let them or because Republicans have lost control of their own party. Maybe both.
Republican heretic David Frum helps shine a light on why Republicans are so boxed in on tax rates and why they are reduced to vague talk about closing loopholes and deductions with no specifics or numbers attached.
According to Frum, it’s okay for Republican lawmakers to advocate raising “revenues” by closing unspecified loopholes because upper-income Republicans in red states, like Texas, don’t really have that many deductions to begin with.
Deductions for state and local taxes don’t interest wealthy Texans because Texas doesn’t have a state income tax at all, he says.
“Nor is the mortgage interest deduction a matter of life or death,” says Frum, since housing prices are comparatively cheap in the Lone Star State, unlike blue states like New York or California where housing is more expensive, as are taxes.
“What Texas does have, however, is a lot of very high incomes who care a great deal about tax rates,” says Frum. And so the GOP’s big donors are willing to throw loopholes over the side, says Frum, since in the battle between the “ordinary rich” and super-rich, deductions matter a lot more to people earning $400,000 than to people earning $4 million or $40 million.”
That is why the Republican Party’s billionaire backers have sent the word out that there will be hell to pay if Republicans let tax rates go up even a fraction of a point on those making more than $250,000.
Republicans do their best to disguise their emasculated feebleness by whining that raising tax rates 4% would only bring in about $50 billion a year – chump change, a drop in the bucket, they say – while promising to bring in lots more dough by closing unnamed loopholes or through that fog bank of imprecision known as “tax reform.”
But rates going up on the richest Americans is off the table as far as Republicans are concerned. It is a non-starter, with violators punished by no-nonsense warnings of a leadership coup or, even worse, an intra-party civil war as conservative secessionists carry out their threats to abandon the GOP, en masse, and form their own ultra-right party.
One manifestation of the dysfunction affecting American politics is that once the Republican Party has dug in its heels and decided not to do something, their obstruction sets the terms of debate and the starting assumptions for the rest of the Washington Establishment.
When Republican’s wealthy benefactors decide they will tolerate no compromise on rates – none – the rest of us are expected to accept that recalcitrance as a “given” and work around it.
To confront that presumption head-on and challenge it directly, as President Obama has done – to declare that America is a democracy not a plutocracy by insisting that no deficit-reduction package will be signed by him unless Republicans agree to increase tax rates on top income earners – that is what Republicans mean when they say the President is “politicizing” an issue or “failing to show leadership” by either capitulating to Republican demands or neutralizing the negative consequences of the Republican Party’s own intransigence.
“President Obama has an unbelievable opportunity to be a transformational president – that is, to bring the country together,” said Speaker Boehner lieutenant Pete Roskam of Illinois. “Or he can devolve into zero-sum-game politics, where he wins and other people lose.”
You can tell Charles Krauthammer understands the Republican’s inside game here because the master propagandist accuses President Obama of playing it.
The President’s insistence Republicans put their big donor’s money where their mouths and show they are serious about deficit reduction “has nothing to do with economics or real fiscal reform,” says Krauthammer. “It is entirely about politics.”
How true, about Republicans I mean. Likewise, in response to news the irreconcilable right intends to launch a leadership coup or third party challenge should Republican leaders go along with the 70% of Americans who say they want taxes raised on the top 2%, Krauthammer accuses the President of bargaining in bad faith by making offers “designed to break the Republican opposition and grant him political supremacy.”
This is why, for example, Krauthammer says Obama sent Treasury Secretary Geithner to Republicans “to convey not a negotiating offer but a demand for unconditional surrender.”
Accusing ones opponents of that which you are most guilty of yourself is a well-traveled tactic on the right. And what’s obviously got Krauthammer most incensed is the dawning realization from the President’s less conciliatory posture since election day that two can play at the Republican’s give-no-quarter game.
The seeds for America’s political dysfunction were sown 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party made the fateful decision to favor Wall Street over Main Street, finance over manufacturing, as America’s signature industry.
The inevitable concentration of wealth this favoritism produced empowered a narrow economic elite with the financial resources to capture a political party and then use that party to capture the nation’s government.
It was just as those early Jeffersonians foretold more than 200 years ago when they worried about those “Anglomen” who stood to profit from Alexander Hamilton’s scheming over the National Bank and a Commercial Republic far more entranced by pecuniary promises of profit than the public-spirited virtues of civic republicanism.
And since 1980 all of these ancient fears have come to pass as a greater share of the nation’s wealth has fallen into fewer and fewer hands – 25% of income and 40% of assets controlled by 1% of the population – with the predicable distortions this concentration of economic power has had on the American political system.
A GOP that is the wholly-owned subsidiary of that super elite “may no longer be a normal party,” wrote David Brooks at the height of the debt ceiling crisis 18 months ago.
Brooks was outraged when Republicans passed on what he called the “mother of no brainers” by turning down a perfectly good deal with Democrats to resolve the impasse because, in Brooks’ view, Republicans a.) have been “infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative;” b.) do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms; c.) do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities; d.) have no sense of moral decency if they can talk so “blandly of default” and their willingness to “stain their nation’s honor”; and finally e.) have no economic theory worthy of the name since tax levels are all that matter to them.
There are sound economic arguments for reducing debts and deficits – maybe not now while unemployment is still high and interests rates low, but over the long term. But there is none – none – for taking upper income tax rates off the table as part of the final deficit-reduction agreement. And the only reason we are hung up on taxes for the top 2% is that this powerful special interest thinks it can flex its muscles and vacate the verdict of a national election by getting its demands met regardless of majority public opinion.
“The conservative insurgents of today argue that their anti-tax cost cutting agenda is designed to revive the economy, boost the job market and get America on the move again,” writes Thomas Edsall in The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics.
“There is, however, another equally probable motivation,” he says, “that this cashiering of moral restraint on the Right reflects its belief, conscious or unconscious, that we have reached the end of the American Century.”
In that event, says Edsell, the “adamant anti-tax posture of the Right” can be seen as “an implicit abandonment of the state and of the larger American experiment — a decision that the enterprise is failing and that it is time to jump ship.”
The real news on the American right, agrees professor Mark Lilla “is the mainstreaming of political apocalypticism” led by people he calls “redemptive reactionaries” who think the only way forward “is to destroy what history has given us and wait for a new order to emerge out of the chaos.”
Once there was a conservative Golden Age, these reactionaries believe, where the world was ruled by the “Best and Brightest,” the “job creators,” Ayn Rand’s “makers,” and the top 2% who now threaten punitive action against Republican leaders or civil war within the party if their non-negotiable demands against tax hikes are not met.
But then came the New Deal, the Great Society and the civil rights movements of the 1960s that emancipated heretofore marginalized minorities of all kinds – in other words “an apocalypse” so horrible in its consequences that the only sane response was “to provoke another in hopes of starting over,” says Lizza.
And ever since, these reactionaries have been working toward a counterrevolution “that would destroy the present state of affairs and transport the nation, or the faith, or the entire human race to some new Golden Age that would redeem aspects of the past without returning there.”
Grover Norquist’s “no tax pledge” perfectly captures the Judgment Day spirit of this reactionary mentality. So does the Senate filibuster. So does the so-called “fiscal cliff,” which itself is the apocalyptic can Democrats were forced to kick down the road to escape the calamitous consequences of the first Doomsday can Republicans constructed 18 months ago by refusing to raise the debt ceiling and allow the government to pay its overdue bills, thus pushing the nation to the brink of insolvency for the first time in US history.
And so, when Republicans assail President Obama for trying to make a political “statement” when he insists that taxes on the wealthy must go up as part of this deficit-cutting deal that Republicans demanded in the first place, it’s good to remember that this is a valuable statement to make, since every once in a while it’s important to remind these rich and powerful “redemptive reactionaries” just who’s boss.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, December 7, 2012
“An Issue Of Fairness”: Suddenly America’s Top Corporate Leaders Are Shunning Tea Party Extremism
Leaders of the American business community, who have long indulged the Republican far right as an instrument toward their own ends, seem to be growing weary of its political excesses. Recognizing the public verdict of last month’s election, corporate officialdom is moving toward moderation on taxes and other issues, showing support for the Obama White House and edging away from congressional Republicans.
The latest top executive to endorse the president’s position on rescinding the Bush tax cuts for the top two percent is Fred Smith, CEO of Federal Express and a former economic advisor to Senator John McCain — who denounced as “mythology” the notion that raising the top rate would damage the U.S. economy.
Smith joined a lengthening queue of business leaders from all sectors who have stepped up over the past week to voice their acceptance of increased taxes as part of a budget agreement to break the stalemate on Capitol Hill — not only to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff on December 31, but because fairness requires the wealthy to pay their fair share. Randall Stephenson, chief executive of AT&T, the nation’s largest telecom company, told Business Week that higher taxes and more revenue must be part of any budget agreement. So did Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. And so did a group of defense industry executives from companies such as United Technologies, RTI International, TASC and Northrop Grumman.
Income tax rates “need to go up some,” said David Langstaff, the CEO of TASC, at a Washington press event organized by the Aerospace Industries Association, a defense lobby. “This is a fairness issue — there needs to be recognition that we’re not collecting enough revenue. In the last decade we’ve fought two wars without raising taxes. So I think it does need to go up.”
Indeed, the president was warmly received this week when he visited the Business Roundtable, a powerful Washington lobbying group that officially prefers Republican policy on maintaining the Bush tax cuts unchanged. “This room likes a winner,” said Roundtable chairman James McNerney, the CEO of Boeing, as his members applauded the president, who worked the room as if among old friends. They didn’t seem terribly upset when the president told them that tax rates — their tax rates — would have to go up, and in fact, they are reportedly supporting him on the need to avoid another destructive struggle with Congress over the debt ceiling. Evidently they won’t go along with the kind of blackmail game that congressional Republicans played with the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011, leading to a credit downgrade and slower growth for months afterward.
The suddenly sensible sounds emanating from the business community are astonishing when contrasted with the anger displayed toward the president by many of these corporate suits only weeks ago, when they berated Obama as “anti-business” and loudly yearned for a corporate-style Romney presidency. Resoundingly rebuked by the electorate, which overwhelmingly favors Obama’s positions on taxes and entitlements — and stands ready to blame the Republicans if no budget agreement is achieved — the business leaders are backing ever so subtly away from their traditional alliance with the GOP.
These brand-conscious executives suddenly have realized that the Republican brand, especially at the congressional level, is politically toxic. And they would rather not be too closely identified with it at this dangerous moment.
Remarkably, the Tea Party Republicans have now alienated their party’s most important constituency — the upper echelon of the business community. It is a profound irony that the issue raising friction between these politicians and their erstwhile backers is a fanatical partisan determination to defend the tax benefits enjoyed by those same wealthy executives.
The president’s opponents are backing themselves into a corner where even their own old friends cannot defend them. Meanwhile Obama may finally have learned that if he stands firm and refuses to negotiate with himself, he can win over public opinion and break the partisan obstructionism.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, December 7, 2012
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