Iran War Would Cost Trillions: Will the GOP Pay More Taxes For That?
While GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul is doing all he can in this election cycle to gin up a debate about US foreign policy and a measure of the costs and benefits, the debate about Iran, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel’s security has been taking place in a gravityless environment.
Mitt Romney’s opening foreign policy opus at the Citadel criticized Obama for defense cuts with promises to boost America’s defense commitments abroad, to boost military spending on hardware and ships in the Pacific — to do everything we have been doing but more.
Where are the dollars going to come from?
I am one who thinks that war with Iran is far off and in the near term unlikely — unless Israel makes a tremendous mistake by triggering and forcing a geostrategic move by the United States, a choice that could very well ultimately dismantle the close US-Israel relationship, or alternatively if forces inside Iran that would benefit from war actually cause an escalation of events that produce a potential nightmare in the Persian Gulf and region.
That said, fewer and fewer people agree with me — and various of the presidential candidates seem to be competing with each other to tell US citizens how quickly they would deploy US military and intelligence assets to undermine Iran’s Supreme Leader and his government.
That’s OK — in the Summer of 2007, both analysts and agitators in the political left believed Bush and Cheney would bomb Iran before year’s end. Neoconservatives and pugnacious nationalists like John Bolton also believed this. I did a survey of folks on the inside and argued in September 2007 in a widely read Salon article that they would not bomb Iran. They didn’t.
In the summer of 2010, some folks on the left were absolutely convinced that the US would bomb Iran before August. Again, that was not how things turned out — and was not the analysis I had from talking to people in the defense and intel establishments.
Today, things are fuzzier — but at the highest levels of the national security decision-making tree — there is palpable doubt that bombing Iran achieves any fundamental strategic objectives while at the same time ultimately undermining US, Israel, and regional security, undermining the global economy. One senior official I heard when asked about bombing Iran then said, “OK, and then what? Then what?! Seriously, then what???”
I’ll write more soon about what a much more level-headed and serious strategy with Iran would look like — particularly since so many are hyperventilating today and in some cases pounding the drums for a collision, one that they think can be done on the cheap.
It is ridiculous to think that a strike by Israel against Iran, that would in real terms tie the US to the conflict, would not be staggeringly expensive and consequential.
So, it would be interesting to hear from those who want to reside in the White House — and even the Obama administration which has some ‘kinetic action’ advocates on the inside — on what a more sensible financial management strategy for these proliferating conflicts, including an Iran War, would be.
George H.W. Bush got the Japanese citizens to write a check for $13.5 billion to the US to pay for the first Gulf War. He was perhaps the last fiscally responsible war time US President.
Wars cost lots and lots of money — and if a substantial chunk of the GOP crowd wants these wars and feels that it is in our national interest to have them, then by all means they should start lining up some of the wealthiest in the country who are helping to agitate for these conflicts to pay more in taxes for them.
By: Steve Clemons, The Atlantic, February 12, 2012
Mitt Romney: “A Remarkably Reactionary Extremist Candidate Camouflaged In Corporate Pinstripes”
Mitt Romney’s dead heat with Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucuses bolstered the media narrative that Mitt Romney may not be conservative enough for Republican primary voters. This characterization serves Romney well. His rivals carve up each other, hoping to emerge as the conservative “alternative” to Romney. And vast swaths of the media discount his reactionary views, anticipating his “pivot” to more moderate positions once the nomination is secured. In reality, Romney is a remarkably reactionary candidate, camouflaged in corporate pinstripes.
On social issues, Romney embraces all of the right’s litmus tests. He pledges to repeal President Obama’s health-care reform, even though it was modeled on the plan Romney signed as Massachusetts governor. He favors repealing Roe v. Wade, outlawing women’s right to choose. He supports an amendment to make same-sex marriage unconstitutional. He’s for building a fence on the U.S.-Mexican border, opposes any path to legal status for the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country and rails against the Texas policy to offer in-state college tuition for the children of undocumented workers. Advised on legal matters by the reactionary crank Robert Bork, he repeatedly calls for more judges in the activist right-wing tradition of the gang of four — Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito.
On national security, he is far more bellicose than former ambassador Jon Huntsman and somewhat to the right of Newt Gingrich. He says he’d add 100,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars to the military budget. He promises war with Iran if it proceeds toward a nuclear weapon. He joins George W. Bush in claiming that waterboarding is not torture.
But it is on economic policy where Romney’s extremism is most apparent — the extremism of the 1 percent, reflecting the zealotry of a former corporate raider at Bain Capital who made his fortune preying on U.S. companies.
Romney calls for returning to the same conservative policies — deregulation, financialization, corporate trade — that generated Gilded Age inequality and a declining middle class even before driving the economy over a cliff. He supports repealing Dodd-Frank, the Wall Street reform act. He favored the Republican effort to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board by blocking Obama’s nominations to those agencies. He wants a weaker Environmental Protection Agency, calling regulation “the invisible boot of the state.” Not surprisingly, he agrees with Rick Perry that anti-union “right-to-work legislation makes a lot of sense for New Hampshire and for the nation.”
Like Gingrich, Romney summons up a dark vision of the United States at an ominous crossroads. “This is a defining time for America,” he says, “We have on one side a president who wants to transform America into a European-style nation, and you have on the other hand someone like myself that wants to turn around America and keep America American.”
Romney would savage programs that serve the vulnerable. He’s been more specific about supporting various parts of the infamous Paul Ryan budget than his rivals. That’s the budget House Republicans passed that ended Medicare as we know it while cutting funds from education, food stamps and other programs. Romney proposes restructuring Medicaid and food stamps as block-grant programs while slashing overall spending. He’d cut funding for Pell grants, which provide (inadequate) scholarships to poor students. And he’d trim funding for Head Start, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and programs that support the disabled.
When Chris Wallace of Fox News, of all places, asked Romney whether, given his proposed cuts — $700 billion from Medicaid, $127 billion from food stamps, half of the funds for Pell grants — he was concerned that “some people are going to get hurt.” Romney replied without hesitation, saying he didn’t think we hurt the poor “by cutting welfare spending dramatically,” so these cuts wouldn’t hurt either.
These cuts would not be used to reduce deficits — despite the fact that Romney has signed the risible “cut, cap and balance” pledge — but to pay for tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest 1 percent. Romney would eliminate the estate tax, which applies only to multimillion dollar estates like his own, and he’d lower corporate tax rates, give multinationals a tax holiday to repatriate profits sheltered abroad and sustain the top- end Bush tax cuts. The result, according to a detailed analysis by the Tax Policy Center, would give those earning more than a million dollars a year an average annual tax cut of about $295,000 by 2015.
With Europe on the verge of a recession and the United States still struggling to recover from the Great Recession caused by the financial collapse, Romney’s trickle-down economic plan is exactly wrong for the United States. It would add to unemployment, increase poverty and accelerate the decline of the middle class.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Romney, as Mike Huckabee once famously noted, “looks like the guy who laid you off.” At Bain, he was the guy who fired you. In a review of 77 major deals that Bain capital did when Romney headed the firm, the Wall Street Journal found that “22% [of the businesses that Bain invested in] either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses.” Of course, Bain produced remarkable returns for its investors, including Romney.
Romney trumpets an agenda that would benefit the few at the expense of the many. This isn’t the plan of a moderate. The conservative garb isn’t something Romney has donned for the primaries. These policies are not popular with most Republicans, much less with most voters. They are consistent with Romney’s background as a corporate raider. And as his fundraising shows, they play well in the plush offices of big finance where Romney made his fortune. He is a champion for the 1 percent, peddling a program that will ensure that working Americans bear the cost for the mess left by Wall Street’s extremes while the buccaneer bankers, corporate raiders and private equity gamblers are free to go back to preying on America.
By: Katrina van Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 10, 2012
The Most Terrible Things Rick Santorum Has Ever Said
On the Catholic Church’s abuse scandals: “Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”
On same sex marriage and bestiality: “In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality…”
On the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision to approve same sex marriage: “This is an issue just like 9/11. We didn’t decide we wanted to fight the war on terrorism because we wanted to. It was brought to us. And if not now, when? When the supreme courts in all the other states have succumbed to the Massachusetts version of the law?”
On the link between same sex marriage and national security: “I would argue that the future of America hangs in the balance, because the future of the family hangs in the balance. Isn’t that the ultimate homeland security, standing up and defending marriage?”
On the war in Iraq: “As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It’s being drawn to Iraq. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the eye to come back to the United States.”
On contraception: “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
On the Affordable Care Act: “I would tell you that my first priority as a president of the United States is to repeal Barack Obama’s healthcare plan. I think it’s the most dangerous piece of legislation, well, in many generations. It is the reason that I’m running for office. Because I believe Obamacare is a game changer. I believe Obamacare will rob America, the best way I can put it is, rob America of its soul.”
On President Obama’s pro-choice stance: “I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say ‘now we are going to decide who are people and who are not people.’”
On global warming: “I believe the earth gets warmer, and I also believe the earth gets cooler, and I think history points out that it does that and that the idea that man through the production of CO2, which is a trace gas in the atmosphere and the man-made part of that trace gas is itself a trace gas, is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd when you consider all of the other factors, El Niño, La Niña, sunspots, you know, moisture in the air.”
By: TNR Staff, The New Republic, January 5, 2012
Corporations Can Show Their Patriotism By Hiring
Former President Bush was roundly derided a decade ago for urging Americans traumatized by the September 11 attacks to go shopping. He may, in fact, have been onto something.
Certainly, shopping on its own is a facile and inadequate response to a tragedy that required a new assessment of our national security procedures and how much of our revered American civil liberties we were willing to give up to achieve security—or perhaps, a sense of security. That conversation needs to continue, especially in the area of civil liberties retrenchment.
But Bush was right about something, and that is that ours is a consumer-driven economy. This is arguably a bad basis for a modern economy; there is only so much we can consume (the obesity epidemic is only one sign of our over-indulgence). And people were foolishly taking out home equity loans on wildly over-valued properties and then using the money not to improve the property (thus, theoretically, increasing its value), but to buy other things. This is not sensible. But the reality is, our economy runs on people buying things, and with the economy in the state it’s in, people aren’t shopping anymore. Since people aren’t buying, companies aren’t creating jobs. Many corporations are making record profits and holding huge amounts of cash, but they don’t want to take on more workers because the demand is not there.
So, here’s a 10-years-after tweak of Bush’s suggestion: if corporate America wants to shows its collective patriotism, its leaders should hire someone. Hire even a dozen people, if you run a large company, or even one employee, if you own a small business. Some public officials are worried about raising taxes on the wealthy, arguing that the well-off are job creators. Well, create some jobs, first, and that argument will have more merit. And remember: taking on another employee isn’t a cash loss, ultimately, because it creates a new customer (and a taxpayer who won’t be getting unemployment insurance anymore, either). If shopping was the answer a decade ago, hiring someone is the answer now. It’s the patriotic thing to do.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, September 12, 2011
Budgeting For Insecurity: GOP Soft On Terrorism
Has any political party in history been as hypocritical as the modern GOP in terms of paying lip service to principles they undercut with policies?
Republicans say they are all about supporting our troops, and then they slash veterans benefits. They loudly proclaim their religious devotion to gatherings of evangelicals, but their philosopher queen is the faith-hating atheist Ayn Rand (see video in Noteworthy box above). Turns out they have two faces even for matters of critical national security, as yesterday’s editorial in the New York Times, “Budgeting for Insecurity,” makes disturbingly clear. An excerpt:
House Republicans talk tough on terrorism. So we can find no explanation — other than irresponsibility — for their vote to slash financing for eight antiterrorist programs. Unless the Senate repairs the damage, New York City and other high-risk localities will find it far harder to protect mass transit, ports and other potential targets.The programs received $2.5 billion last year in separate allocations. The House has cut that back to a single block grant of $752 million, an extraordinary two-thirds reduction. The results for high-risk areas would be so damaging — with port and mass transit security financing likely cut by more than half — that the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King of New York, voted against the bill as “an invitation to an attack.”
The Times editorial goes on to explain that the “Republicans made clear that budget-cutting trumped all other concerns…One $270 million cut, voted separately, would eliminate 5,000 airport-screening jobs across the country, according to the Transportation Security Administration.” They also fought to cut more than half of funding for first responder training, but the Democrats were able to restore most of it.
As the Times editorial asks, “Are these really the programs to be cutting?” Not if we put national security before politics.
By: Democratic Strategist Staff, June 10, 2011
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