Michele Bachmann’s Views, Not Her Headaches, Make Her Unfit
There is no doubt that Michele Bachmann gives many of us a headache. But to attack her, as Tim Pawlenty has done in such a sexist way, as unfit to be president because of migraines is absurd.
Many of our presidents have had health problems much more serious than headaches—Roosevelt, Kennedy, Taft, to name a few.
The problem with Michele Bachmann is not her migraines, it’s what is in her head. It’s her ideas that matter.
Just as Republicans who pay attention to politics were terrified of a possible Sarah Palin nomination, they are equally petrified that Bachmann might catch on in Iowa, South Carolina, and among the Tea Party wing. Could she, in fact, squeak by and actually win the nomination? Most think not, but they are nevertheless nervous when they watch her poll numbers rise, her bank account fatten, and the attention she is getting from the “lame stream media” increase.
There is no question about her misstatements and problems with facts (John Wayne’s birthplace, associating Jimmy Carter with swine flu, Founding Fathers working “tirelessly” to end slavery, maintaining that Obama issued “one oil drilling permit” when he issued 200, etc., etc.). Check out the Pulitzer Prize winning website Politifact for a disturbing list.
The real problems we should be focusing on are her outlandish and dangerous views on the issues.
Some are becoming very well known. Her views on gay and lesbian rights, for example. She believes gays and lesbians are “part of Satan.” She and her husband have mounted campaigns against gays and lesbians, beginning in Minnesota and now on the campaign trail.
She was against TARP and proudly proclaimed her opposition in the New Hampshire debate. Most economists believe that this saved the American economy from complete meltdown and a severe depression. Plus, most of the money is being paid back, and we have a strong American auto industry because of the actions of President Bush and President Obama.
She believes we should not only abolish the entire tax code, but we should abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce. (Politico 4/18/2011, among numerous other sites) This is irresponsible, shortsighted, and destructive to the United States.
I find it extraordinary that Michele Bachmann should be even considered for the office of the presidency. Her views, her lack of competence and experience, and her minimal leadership skills all are much more worrisome than her headaches. Actually, just watching her out there makes my head spin.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, July 25, 2011
GOP’s Debt Ceiling Fight Is About Bringing Down Obama
Impeach him.
Not the president. Barack Obama is holding a huge global and domestic crisis in his hand. To use a Washington metaphor, he’s dangerously close to being left “holding the bag” on the Treasury debt ceiling limit. He keeps talking sweet reason about the art of compromise to Republicans in Congress—not a language they speak. Obama played golf with the House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican who drones on about “small business” every chance he gets. Obama is not getting traction or making friends with Boehner because he does not grasp the conversation about the debt limit is not about the debt limit. It’s about taking his presidency down—this week—even if it hurts the United States of America, which it will. A small price to pay for this tea-drinking crowd of 87 GOP House freshmen which turned the chamber upside down six months ago.
“This is no way to run the greatest country on earth,” Obama declared in a belated speech, sounding a call to arms around the country, last night. That in itself says so much—he’s right, but he’s the man who’s elected by the people—not John Boehner who was elected by a small-town slice of Ohio—to run the country! Everything was calculated to leave Obama in the lurch—by Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of the old Confederate capital, Richmond, Va. and at least one other mastermind. The conspiracy has succeeded flawlessly so far. They separated Obama from his own party in Congress; in his dealings with only Republicans he went way beyond Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy. Obama made allies feel like they were shut out of the deal-making room when he offered concessions that cut at the heart of the Democratic Party‘s proud history on social programs dating to the New Deal.
The GOP—and I mean the George W. Bush years and the current crop of Senate Republicans, too—has a new deal for you, too. It’s called the New Steal. It goes like this: we’ll take all the peace and prosperity of the Clinton tax code years up until 2000 and then squander it on a couple unwinnable wars of choice—and by the way, make rich people pay less into the Treasury than they did during those golden years. They might start one of those illusory “small businesses.”
The reason President Clinton was acquitted at his impeachment trial in the Senate for a fling with Monica Lewinsky was because he built bonds of loyalty, teamwork and camaraderie with Democrats in both houses of Congress. Not one of them came forward on the floor to speak against him, except pious Sen. Joe Lieberman, who suggested a censure. He was utterly alone in his opportunistic little ploy. Clinton’s true friends all stood by him in the Senate—because he was their president.
Obama, a bit of a loner, needs more bosom buddies among lawmakers. In a crisis, you find out who your friends are. The one who could have steered him straight, sailing into the wind, was the late great senator, Edward M. Kennedy. When Kennedy got his Irish up and roared on the floor, he scared the forest. Obama does not scare the Republican jungle.
Let’s impeach Rush Limbaugh as the master of public dis-coarse. He’s the real reason we have so many angry white men in office who are plotting against the president. He’s writing the back-story of this debt drama, consulting closely with House Republican leaders step by step. I believe it even if I can’t see it because he did the same thing in 1994, in cahoots with Newt Gingrich, who recruited a new House Republican freshman class to take over the House. Yes, I saw Rush with my own eyes getting all the glory as class mascot at a fancy dinner at Camden Yards in Baltimore for the new Republican victors that enabled Gingrich to become speaker. The government shutdowns and showdowns against President Clinton resulted—remember?
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, July 26, 2011
Is Harry Reid Caving Or Calling The GOP Bluff?
If you can still remember the GOP position when the curtain first rose on Debt Ceiling Theater, you will recall that the Congressional Republicans had put forth two goals.
First, an agreement whereby every dollar permitted to be borrowed by a raise in the debt ceiling would be matched by a dollar of cuts in the federal budget; and Second, there could be no tax increases as a result of the process.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is now offering up a plan that ostensibly meets the GOP demands by proposing a $2.7 trillion cut in federal spending to be matched by a like increase in the debt ceiling – with no tax increases or revenue boosts required.
That certainly sounds like a win for the GOP, doesn’t it?
Maybe it is – maybe it isn’t.
If the Republicans take the deal, they will accomplish a few important things.
For starters, in a country where few people read beyond the headlines and often believe what they are told by Fox News, a GOP declaration of victory would likely hold up – even if that victory proves to be little more than a cosmetic win.
Such a deal would also leave many on the left dispirited, believing that the President and the Democrats – by allowing the GOP to wriggle off the hook on revenue increases – will have, once again, caved to the opposition. This would threaten to split the Democrats at the worst possible time as we head into an election year.
But the devil is always in the details – and the details very much skew to the Democratic Party perspective.
Much of the cuts in the Reid plan are tied to reductions in spending on our two wars along with discretionary spending cuts. By structuring the cuts in this way, Reid is creating an incentive for the war supporters in Congress, and the President, to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan once and for all.
Accomplishing this would likely be perceived as a ‘win’ by many American voters who think it is time to bring these wars to a conclusion. Of course, those who are focused on achieving true and well defined cuts to our federal budget would likely see this maneuver as an example of budget trickery intended to create the appearance of a cut where no cut is really is going to take place if we continue our battles overseas.
More importantly from a political perspective, none of the budget reductions in the Reid proposal touch the entitlement programs that are sacrosanct to both the left and the rank-and-file members of Democratic Party, not to mention – if the polls are to be believed- Independents and many Republicans.
Finally, the Reid proposal provides a large enough raise in the debt ceiling to take us beyond the 2012 elections.
While the failure to get any revenue increases would, no doubt, be a black mark against the Democrats and the President, the Reid proposal would permit the Senate Democrats to argue that they succeeded in solving the debt ceiling crisis without impacting on entitlements – something the President was clearly ready to do in trade for revenue increases.
Preserving entitlements will make a lot of people happy and very possibly balance the anger of those who want the Democrats to hang in there until they accomplish some revenue increases by cutting corporate subsidies from the tax code and raising the rates on the wealthiest Americans.
The deal would also preserve to the Democrats the substantial political advantage they gained through the public revulsion to the Ryan budget plan and its dramatic impact on Medicare and Medicaid.
All of this puts the Republicans in a tricky spot.
If they accept Reid’s deal, they can claim a victory and go home.
But they will know that they really have won very little beyond the appearance of a win and some continued protection for the wealthy by holding off any tax increases – for now. Remember that the Bush tax cuts once again expire at the end of 2012. Should Obama win the election – and bring along some Congressional Democrats with him -the story could be very different than it was when Obama was forced to leave the Bush cuts intact in 2010 in order to protect the unemployment insurance payments so badly needed by the millions of out-of-work Americans.
Because of the questionable value of such a deal to those in the Tea Party Caucus, the group that very much appears to be in the driver’s seat these days, the Reid proposal could be a non-starter, forcing Boehner to, once again, pass up a compromise opportunity.
If Boehner is forced to say no, it would seem impossible for the Republicans to avoid blame after having passed up yet another effort on the part of the Democrats to compromise – this time by offering the GOP what they say they wanted in the first place.
You can also expect Democrats to be quick to point out that the war savings Reid is offering in his deal also show up as a budget cut in the Ryan budget – making it look all the worse for the GOP who would appear willing to claim war savings as budget cuts in their own budget but refuse to consider them valid when offered as part of a deal in this instance.
Harry Reid may be showing us that there is more to his strategy skills than what has previously met the nation’s eye.
Stay tuned. There is a long way to go.
By: Rick Ungar, The Policy Page, Forbes, July 25, 2011
Republican Paradox: The Party That Can’t Say Yes
For days, the White House has infuriated its Democratic allies in Congress by offering House Republicans more and more in exchange for a deal to raise the debt ceiling and prevent default. But it was never enough, and, on Friday evening, it became clear that it may never be enough. Speaker John Boehner again walked away from the “grand bargain” he had been negotiating with President Obama, leaving the country teetering on the brink of another economic collapse.
At the White House podium a few minutes later, the president radiated a righteous fury he rarely displays in public, finally placing the blame for this wholly unnecessary crisis squarely where it belongs: on Republicans who will do anything to upend his presidency and dismantle every social program they can find. “Can they say yes to anything?” he asked, noting the paradox of Republicans, who claim that financial responsibility and debt reduction are their biggest priorities, rejecting yet another deal that would have cut that debt by at least $3 trillion.
Mr. Obama, in fact, had already gone much too far in trying to make his deal palatable to House Republicans, offering to cut spending even further than the deficit plan proposed this week by the bipartisan “Gang of Six,” which includes some of the Senate’s most conservative members. The White House was willing to cut $1 trillion in domestic and defense spending and another $650 billion from Medicare, Medicaid and even Social Security.
Much of that savings would have come from raising the eligibility age for Medicare benefits and reducing the cost-of-living increases that elderly people depend on when receiving their health and pension benefits. It could have caused significant damage to some of the nation’s most vulnerable people.
The “bargain” would require that alongside these cuts, tax revenues would go up by $1.2 trillion, largely through a rewrite of the tax code to eliminate many deductions and loopholes. That’s substantially less in revenue than the $2 trillion in the “Gang of Six” plan. The problem is that while much of the cutting would start right away, most of the revenue increases would be put off, in part because a tax-code revision would take months, and in part to allow House Republicans to say they did not agree to any specific tax revenue increases.
Democratic lawmakers were rightly furious when they heard about these details this week, calling the plan wholly unbalanced. But, in the end, it was Mr. Boehner who torpedoed the talks. He said Friday evening that he and the president had come close to agreeing on $800 billion of the revenue increases (the equivalent of letting the upper-income Bush tax cuts expire as scheduled next year — not much of a heavy lift) but could not stomach another $400 billion the White House wanted to raise through ending tax loopholes and deductions.
So, on the eve of economic calamity, the Republicans killed an overly generous deal largely over a paltry $400 billion in deductions. Mr. Obama was willing to take considerable heat from his liberal critics over the deal, and the Republicans were not willing to do a thing to anger their Tea Party base. As the president forcefully said, there is no evidence that House Republicans are capable of making those tough decisions. If last-ditch talks beginning Saturday fail, they will have to take responsibility if the unimaginable — a government default — happens in 10 days and the checks stop going out.
By: The New York Times, Editorial, July 22, 2011
To Fix The Budget Deficit, Raise Corporate Taxes
Washington is a town currently gripped by deficit hysteria. Various commissions and congressional “gangs” have formed (and broken up) with the goal of crafting a plan to bring the nation’s budget into balance. Even the media has been sucked into this vortex, dedicating far more of its time to covering the deficit than other economic issues, such as unemployment.
At the same time, both parties seem to agree that the nation’s corporate tax code needs to be reformed. President Obama and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan each dedicated a portion of their respective budget plans to overhauling the federal corporate income tax, which is high on paper, but so riddled with loopholes, deductions, and outright giveaways that few corporations pay the full statutory rate (and several corporations pay no corporate income tax at all).
This, then, should be an excellent opportunity to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone: cleaning up the corporate tax code, lowering the corporate tax rate, and still raising more revenue that can be put towards deficit reduction.
But no.
Despite all the hyperventilating over the deficit, both Republicans and Democrats have said that they want corporate tax reform to be revenue neutral, meaning no more or less revenue will be raised by the new system than was raised by the old. President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have each extolled the virtues of deficit-neutral corporate tax reform. But if this is actually the road that’s taken, it will constitute a colossal missed opportunity.
At the moment, corporate tax revenue has plunged to historic lows. In 1960, the corporate income tax provided more than 23 percent of federal revenue; the Office of Management and Budget estimates that it will provide less than 10 percent this year.
During the 1960s, the United States consistently raised nearly 4 percent of GDP in corporate revenue. During the 1970s, the total was still above 2.5 percent of GDP. Now, the U.S. raises less than 1.5 percent of GDP from the corporate income tax. As the Congressional Research Service put it, “Despite concerns expressed about the size of the corporate tax rate, current corporate taxes are extremely low by historical standards.”
The United States effective corporate tax rate is also low by international standards (though the 35 percent statutory rate is the second highest in the world). There are plenty of reasons for this drop, but chief among them is the proliferation of loopholes and credits clogging up the corporate tax code (alongside the growing use of offshore tax havens and the ability of corporations to defer taxes on offshore profits indefinitely).
Huge corporations, such as ExxonMobil, have recently had years where they paid literally nothing to the U.S. Treasury, despite making huge profits. The New York Times made waves by finding that General Electric paid no federal income tax last year, instead pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax benefits. Mega-manufacturer Boeing has done the same, paying no federal taxes in 2009 while collecting $132 million in tax benefits. Google last year had a 2.4 percent effective tax rate, while California-based Broadcom’s rate was just 1.4 percent, far below the rate that the average American pays.
The Treasury Department estimated in 2007 that corporate tax preferences cost $1.2 trillion in lost revenue over a decade. So there is ample room to remove credits and deductions (like those that benefit, amongst others, hugely profitable oil companies and agribusinesses), lower the statutory rate, while still bringing in more revenue. Some companies would see their taxes go up, but others would see their tax bills drop, and the corporate tax code would be more fair, efficient, and competitive, while ensuring that all corporations pay their fair share.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, “corporate tax reform is a solid candidate to make a contribution to fiscal improvement … Taking a major revenue source off the table for deficit reduction at the outset would be ill-advised.” Indeed, with corporate profits skyrocketing—up 81 percent over a year ago—and corporations sitting on trillions in cash reserves, there is no reason that corporate tax reform should be done in a way that is deficit neutral, besides the fact that raising more revenue will be politically difficult, as corporations will likely throw their considerable lobbying weight against such a move. But in the end, failing to raise additional corporate tax revenue will simply shift more of the deficit reduction burden onto a middle-class already battered by the Great Recession.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, May 25, 2011
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