No Exit

In the interest of fairness and balance, I note a study has been released that claims Obama's tax plans would cost the economy 700,000 jobs. (According to another study, that's actually 100,000 jobs fewer than The Rominee's!) It was done by Ernst & Young, at the behest of several Republican entities.

And in the interest of self-reflection and honesty, I admit I found myself ready to question the report without even reading it. I question the source, I question the motives of those who commissioned it, I question the findings. But I really don't know. When it comes to analyses of various political proposals -- the Ryan/Rominee budget, the effects of the ACA, the impending "fiscal cliff" for examples -- I've come to trust the CBO as the most impartial source of financial forecasting. Fact is, the CBO has said much the same thing.

But it's been worse on the Ryan/Rominee budget:

Since, as CBO notes, “spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year [since World War II]” and Ryan seeks a high level of defense spending — he increases defense funding by $228 billion over the next ten years above the pre-sequestration baseline — the rest of government would largely have to disappear. That includes everything from veterans’ programs to medical and scientific research, highways, education, nearly all programs for low-income families and individuals other than Medicaid, national parks, border patrols, protection of food safety and the water supply, law enforcement, and the like. (Blogatorial comment: As I've been saying ad nauseum!)

So there you have it: two imperfect plans, one of which will apparently cost jobs (the White House pushes back), the other of which, in addition to that, will end the country. In a functioning democracy, where both parties were willing to find solutions and to accept less than their version of the whole pie (one, demonstrably, has been and is), where it wasn't the case that one party had gone nuts and had become in the thrall of the very moneyed interests whose only concern is their personal profits, there might be reason to think resolution was possible. If one party weren't willing to see the end of government, and therefore of the country, rather than compromise on anything, things would look different.

If such a democracy exists, it's most certainly not on this side of the Atlantic and south of the Canadian border. So it's undeniable, as I've said a million times. We're:

Tea Leaves

The conventionally wise say the special election in New York, wherein a Democrat has just won in a strongly Republican congressional district, was a referendum on the Ryan budget, on to which every Congressional R originally signed (and from which many are backing away like a kid who just witnessed a parental primal scene). I don't know enough about the district in question to argue one way or the other, but since it's been in Republican hands for a long long time, it seems reasonable that it's true.

I hope so.

What's so interesting to me about Republicans after the 2010 mid-term elections is the freedom they've felt to unleash their darkest desires; their sudden abandonment of their carefully constructed pretense that they were other than who they really are. It's as if the ease with which they'd deceived the teabaggers, their confidence in the discomfort of enough Americans with a black leader, their certainty that the dishonest distortions and outright lies of Fox "news" and the rest of the RWS™ convinced them they had absolute license to unleash their full agenda, the one they'd hidden from view for all these years, at least since the heydays of Newt and the Bug Killer. They felt that, finally, like lizard visitors from outer space, they could shed their human skin, reveal their real intentions, and people would either fail to notice, or not care. In their insular world, they thought everyone was a teabagger.

Unfettered, Rs in state legislatures put abortion and gay marriage and creationism ahead of everything else. In the US Congress, they did the same, doubling down. In power for half a year, they've yet to come up with a legitimate jobs program. And now their budget has made it undeniable: it's not partisan political spin to say they value tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of their wealthy patrons over funding the most basic of human needs. Their plans for Medicare, on which the New York election evidently turned, was indefensible on any grounds: it was simply irresponsible, cold-hearted, a sop to insurers and a middle finger to everyone else.

So brilliant they've been, so successfully deceptive. Yet now, after years of careful misdirection and disingenuous manipulation of our worst instincts, painstakingly making the term "Machiavellian" seem naive, Republicans seem to have you know what. Seeing their sleight of hand work in the midterms like luring kids with candy, they assumed they'd achieved the critical mass of uncritical masses. And they went for it. No more need to waste time and money convincing people to vote against their interests. And why not? Teabaggers have proved to be a completely credulous substrate.

For years I've been agreeing with those who say we need to address budget deficits; but I've also pointed out the obvious: it was Republican ideas, Republican policies that got us where we are. Solutions will need to look more like the successes of Clinton than the failures of Reagan. If we're to retain the values that have made us great; if we are to retain our ability to educate, to innovate, to provide for the structural needs of our country and the physical needs of our people, budgetary sanity will need to include sensible adjustments in entitlements, cuts in military spending, AND returning tax rates toward where they were when we were flourishing and paying down debut under Clinton. Simple.

But not to the current crop of Republicans, who clearly aren't interested in functioning government. (And, yes, I realize I sound like a hyper-partisan frother at the mouth. But, looking at their budget and how it pays for tax cuts to the wealthy by cutting programs for everyone else, what else is there to conclude?) The only question is how they decided now was the time to drop the mask, and to do so with such abandon, such certainty that they'd bamboozled voters for so long that they'd have carte blanche.

I'm not naive enough to think the battle to retain America's soul is over. The ability of Democrats to pull defeat from the jaws of victory is impossible to overestimate. Likewise, the bottomless gullibility of teabaggers, the ease with which hates and fears can be stoked by the unscrupulous have been demonstrated by Rs more than amply. As there will always be a certain percentage of the populous that believe in alien abductions, faked moon landings, and that Obama is a terrorist, so there will remain many who'll stick with Rs no matter how obvious their disregard for them. (Need proof? Read this. Or this.)

But maybe -- maybe -- the congressional embrace of the Ryan budget with its bogus numbers, its undeniably unbalanced agenda, its siphoning of health care money out of the hands of consumers and into the hands of insurers, has unblinded enough people to make them look again at Democrats who, despite their disorganization and pandering and watering-down, are at least trying to find a way to address the needs of the many in the middle and on the bottom, and not just the few at the top. Maybe Republicans' undisguised focus on discrimination against gays, their disregard for women's health, their love for rewriting textbooks and imposing state religion has finally made enough people uncomfortable that some sense will return to the national dialogue.

One election in one district about which I know nothing other than it elected a Democrat for the first time in a very long time (ever?) does not a national trend make. But for a moment anyway, I'm letting myself think -- recognizing I'm probably delusional and will be disappointed yet again -- that it's still possible for our country to address its problems in ways that might actually lead to solutions; that at some point even the Murdochian efforts to feed what Ailes us, in collusion with the very powerful RWS™ and the wealthy underwriters of astroturf movements, might fail to maintain their sway. That the past and future failures of the fully revealed Republican agenda are finally too much to deny.

A guy can dream, can't he?

[Added: seems Gail Collins doesn't agree.]

Don't Take My Word For It

[I'm semi-computer-less for a bit. I wrote this one a while back (updated it slightly) and never got around to posting it. Not obsessively peering at a computer screen, reading all the bad stuff out there, makes for less blog-fodder, if also a certain sense of calm. Ignoring reality, it turns out, isn't all bad. Which explains several phenomena about which I've been prone to writing here.]

Read this post by conservative Andrew Sullivan, regarding Republicans going all in on the Ryan budget, of which the following is a part:

... They deserve political props for nailing this proposal to the door of the White House.

But the substantive criticism is still salient. It is that simply shifting Medicare to private insurance plans with subsidies that will mean progressively less and less healthcare for seniors does not really bring down healthcare costs - just shifts their responsibility away from the federal government. The likelihood that the insurance companies will actually want this new more vulnerable population without at some point, begging the government to provide more resources is ... well, slim. But since the GOP proposal is simply indifferent to whether people have healthcare or not (they effectively withdraw coverage for all those covered by the ACA), this is a feature, not a bug.

The much bigger problem with the GOP plan is its view of taxes. Even though we have historically low income tax rates for high-earning individuals, even though revenues have collapsed in the recession, even though we have empirically discovered that big tax cuts have not generated more economic growth, the GOP still insists on reforming taxes not to raise revenue but to reduce it. This is where the whole thing gets surreal. The very Laffer untruth that sank America into debt in the early 1990s s one still being peddled against all the relevant evidence to guide us through the next few decades...

Then tell me where he's wrong.

As did I recently, he also quotes Reagan's budget director, Bruce Bartlett.

It's simply madness. It's one thing to desire less government, to want to fix what's broken about it, to address ways to control costs of entitlements (but not, evidently, defense). It's quite another to do so with ideas that are unworkable on their face, that arrived stamped "disproved, time and again." And another still that it all passes as somehow serious in the minds of teabaggers. Sort of like the budget deal of a few weeks ago, forced by the supposedly fiscally-sound House Rs as the cost of renewing the Bush tax cuts (!) and yes, subsequently touted as historic by President Obama (why he submitted to the blackmail, I'll never understand): it raised spending this year by 3.2 billion.

If that's not proof that we're screwed, I don't know what is.

No Explanation

The above polling reiterates what I wrote recently: everyone likes the idea of cutting spending until they find out how the teabaggRs plan to do it. And when you detail their plan for Medicare, it gets even more dramatic. People hate it, as well they should.

So, what's going on here? Given their brilliance at messaging, heretofore able to convince teabaggRs to vote against their own interests (not to mention those of their country) as easily as getting a penguin to laugh, have the Ryanophiles finally blown it? Did they completely misjudge the public? Are they that insulated from reality? I find it a very interesting and puzzling question, and I don't have an answer. It's right up there with the discordance that a pro-abortion atheist is the fountainhead and revered icon of their philosophy. It doesn't grok.

It's one thing to be serious about addressing the problematic depth of our fiscal future. But what is it when a serious attempt produces such unworkable ideas? On one level, it's certainly brave. There's no doubt it's kindled a debate that is long overdue and which, until now, has been foolish on both sides. In that, there's much to be admired; and on some level I'm in awe of their willingness to go all in. No Democrat has, not in a long long time.* But to have come up with such uniformly bad ideas, so out of balance, so blatant in their fealty to the wealthy at the expense of everyone else... What the heck explains it?

For one thing, ironically, it might be the easy gullibility of teabaggers that led them down this path. For two years, Republican leaders (by which I don't just mean guys like Ryan and Boehner: I mean the Foxobeckians, the megamillionaire RWS™ and the billionaires who make Koch suckers of them all) have had their way with teabaggers, so easily that they must laugh themselves to sleep every night under their 1500 thread-count sheets of Egyptian cotton. Seriously. How not to get, well, incautious, if it's become so easy to get everything you want, simply by convincing teabaggers that down is up? Maybe they just stopped even pretending to care about the country as a whole. Why waste the time, they must figure. We've got them right where we want them; they're buying everything we're selling, like magnetic cure-alls on late-night tv.

Still, I don't sense that Mr Ryan is entirely dumb. Of his honesty, I have no way of knowing. Apparently, he absolutely believes in cutting taxes on the wealthy and that to pay for it it's perfectly acceptable to cut programs for the needy and, for practical purposes, to wipe away Medicare and all ability to underwrite our future. And yet, teabaggers notwithstanding (and even they don't like his reverse Robin Hood medicare plans), it seems so obvious that these needs of his wouldn't be acceptable to a majority -- anywhere near a majority -- of voters. So what made him put it out there anyway?

Did he figure that, as it always has, the RWS™ and Foxabeckohannitean blanket of propaganda would smother the country in disinformation? They've gotten away with everything else, so why not this?

Or perhaps he's the world's greatest and most selfless politician, willing to take the hits in order eventually to get to a plan that meets half way and is workable. Maybe he thought from the beginning that it was the only way to get the conversation started and he expected that the end point involved raising revenues and making less drastic cuts to social programs. But it doesn't seem so: before there was any reaction at all he proclaimed the only possible criticisms would be demagoguery and lies. Boehner has said changes in the tax ideas are off the table.

No, the impression I have is that they're deadly serious about their plan, and wish to brook no compromise. By all appearances, they're just out with it: they're rich, they want further to enrich themselves, and they don't seem to care about the consequences for anyone else. Or for the country.

But, sure, maybe it's a rope-a-dope.

An alternate explanation suggests the opposite: CongressionRs don't really believe in their budget, but they're afraid of teabagger backlash. There's no doubt that that small group of highly vocal and lowly knowledgeable people have disproportionate influence; god knows they've elected some impressively idiotic people at the expense of some, for Republicans, half-reasonable ones. But can the R brain trust be fully dismissive of the idea that their party could contain significant numbers of people who know arithmetic? Maybe so. And maybe they're right. They're just worried about their own political asses.

As I think I've made clear, I'm all for serious reform of the tax code, social programs, defense spending. More than most in my party, I'm okay with sensible changes in both Social Security and Medicare. Unlike some members of both parties, I'm on board with the idea of effectiveness research and oversight of implementation, as a serious plan, the best hope to control health care costs. But it's as clear to me as morning dew in sunshine that we cannot get our fiscal house in order and have the funds needed to maintain our infrastructure, education, research, energy needs, without also raising taxes. And cutting defense spending. It all has to happen in some form or another. Through the smoke, that's undeniable; the argument needs to be about how, and how much.

Paul Ryan has proposed an approach that he must have known would be unacceptable. Likely, he's even smart enough to know that even if he could sell it to teabaggers -- on whose selfish gullibility and magical thinking the RWS™ have always been able to count -- it can't actually work as a blueprint for our nation to survive. There's the plan, and then there's math.

So what explains it? Is it the overreach of the overprivileged, like rock stars and athletes who think they can get away with anything because to them the rules have never applied; do the Foxobeckians think that they're entitled to whatever they want, simply because it's they who want it?

Or was it a giant miscalculation? I've written several paragraphs now, and I still have no idea.

________________________

* I misspoke, and I should have known it, because I was aware of this plan by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It's bold. Bolder than Ryan's, I'd say. It has gotten, however, rounded-off, zero attention from the media.

Truth Be Told

In an article titled Imbalanced Budget: Ryan Gives Wealthy A Free Pass, Bruce Bartlett, Ronald Reagan's budget director and among the last of the sensible Republicans, tells it like it is:

.... One would think that a comprehensive budget proposal designed primarily for the purpose of reducing budget deficits and the national debt would put at least some of the burden on the revenue side of the equation. First, it would reduce the need to cut spending so heavily and improve the chances of passage; unless Ryan is only interested in scoring points with the Tea Party crowd, he will need the support of at least some Senate Democrats and President Obama if he wants any aspects of his plan enacted....

..... Conservatives dogmatically believe that taxation is the single most important factor in economic growth, and the lower taxes are the better. But if that were the case, then the late 1990s should have been a period of exceptionally slow growth: Federal taxes averaged 19.9 percent of GDP from 1997 to 2000. In fact, that period was among the most prosperous in American history, with real GDP growing an average of 4.5 percent per year. By contrast, during the last four years, federal revenues have been exceptionally low, averaging just 16.5 percent of GDP. But growth averaged less than 1 percent per year....

.... Distributionally, the Ryan plan is a monstrosity. The rich would receive huge tax cuts while the social safety net would be shredded to pay for them. Even as an opening bid to begin budget negotiations with the Democrats, the Ryan plan cannot be taken seriously. It is less of a wish list than a fairy tale utterly disconnected from the real world, backed up by make-believe numbers and unreasonable assumptions. Ryan’s plan isn’t even an act of courage; it’s just pandering to the Tea Party. A real act of courage would have been for him to admit, as all serious budget analysts know, that revenues will have to rise well above 19 percent of GDP to stabilize the debt.

Sound reasonable? Sound like points worth considering? For that matter, sound like what I've been saying? Or, as Ryan himself tried to pre-insulate himself from reality, merely "lies and demagoguery?"

Or, to put it another way:

(click pic to enlarge)

Pot Looks In Mirror, Sees Kettle

Beautiful. Paul Ryan, the champion of Republicans on budgetary issues, says this, to Fox "news" Chris Wallace, about his proposals and possible reaction:

WALLACE: Last question, as you look ahead, and a lot of people would say look, the answer is you're not going to get this budget passed. It's really setting up an issue and a sensible debate for 2012. As you look ahead to the next election, aren't Democrats going to be able to say "Look at Paul Ryan, look at the House Republicans. They want to kill Medicare.
They want to kill Medicaid. They want to gut the programs that you depend on." Aren't you playing into the Democrats hands?

RYAN: We are. We are giving them a political weapon to go against us, but they will have to lie and demagogue to make that a political weapon.

Right. Like health care reform and death panels. Government takeover. Killing grandma.

"Lie and demagogue." "Lie and demagogue to make that a political weapon." That's gonna overtake Alan Greenspan's as the most laughable political comment of the new century.

Ironically, in this case (assuming anyone is listening), all Democrats will have to do is tell the truth.

(I've said many times that any serious budget reform will have to address entitlements, and Ryan's appears to do so. Good for him. However, it appears his plan for Medicare is to can it entirely, in favor of, amusingly, a version of "Obamacare" for seniors. "Fixing" it by turning it into a money-maker for private insurers seems like a non-fix to me and hardly the way to save money. And, since vouchers won't cover the cost of insurance, it'll be de facto rationing of care without having to name it as such. At some point -- especially without appropriate taxes -- we'll have to address rationing. And when we do, let's call it that. Meanwhile, with vouchers the wealthy will be able to buy better insurance, and the poor won't. If that's what we want for Medicare, let's say so, explicitly. Teabaggers? Teabaggers?

In other areas, too, Ryan relies on completely phony numbers.

I've also said -- because it's true -- that any plan that refuses seriously to address the revenue side is seriously unserious. Spending cuts are fine, when they don't destroy research and education, wipe away help for those who need [and deserve] it, and prevent addressing our infrastructure needs. So far, though, Ryan's budget appears to be more of the same thing described in the previous post: rationalizing greed at the expense of a viable future. Lies? Demagoguery? We'll see, won't we?)