LIke It Never Happened

It's as if there wasn't an election. It was pretty clear what Rs had in mind before the election: despite obfuscations and unfilled-in blanks, voters knew what would happen if Romney won and if Rs had enough seats in the two chambers to activate their agenda. Instead, voters chose Barack Obama; and they chose to increase the number of D senators and representatives. (Ds couldn't overcome the gerrymandering to retake the House, but they did get 1.5 million more votes in total for that body.)

So it's pretty interesting that Rs, in the name of the holy ghost known as Paul Ryan, have just put forth a budget that does everything they threatened to do and more: it'd be a huge tax break for the wealthy, wipe out funding for all things important except the military, and provide tax increases for many at the lower end of the economic spectrum. Promoting his budget, Ryan explicitly stated that the voice of the people doesn't matter. Smoking mirrors, along with other mischaracterizations of the problem, and some basic misunderstanding of government, it also assumes the highly unlikely repealing  of Obamacare and, once again, promotes (the latest in the sine-wave of proposing and denying) voucherizing Medicare.

Golly. It's as if Ds were telling the truth!

Well, a right-wing economist, former McCain adviser, says it'd create jobs. Or, what he said was, a balanced budget would. He didn't really make specific claims about the Ryan slash/burn, nor compare it to other methods of balancing the budget.

Which is exactly the point: if it's desirable to balance the budget -- and I think it is, although there are many economists who suggest that as long as deficits are below a certain level relative to GDP it's okay (which I'm not smart enough to know whether to buy or not, but, long-term, it feels wrong) -- the question is how, and to what end? With what vision of the future in mind?

Rs, as usual, lay down their markers on the multiply-failed idea that if rich people are rich enough, richer even than now, and if corporations are allowed to run free, even freer than now, money will magically run down their legs like juice from a lemon, and find its way into the mouths of everyone else. They mark their territory in the thicket of less government spending on such frivolities as education and health care and the rest of the long list, called out again and again. They are wedded to that, intractably, despite the fact that voters rejected it; and despite the fact that it's failed, and failed again, to do what they claim it will. It's a vision, all right. A frightening one, to be sure, for anyone concerned about preservation of the country for the next generation; for the preservation of the so-called American dream, meaning opportunity. But a vision, nonetheless.

As radical as it is, it's no wonder that President Obama is saying there may be no way to find common ground. (Like the well-known definition of insanity, he's still trying.) There is no leadership among Rs that would allow any give whatsoever on the matter of taxes. To them, elections don't matter; nor does the central idea at the time of creation (of the country): compromise. So, where do we go from here? Nowhere, I'd guess, until the full impact of what Rs want is understood, even by those heretofore so unable to understand: the teabagging Foxified masses that send people like them to D.C.

Because otherwise, why even have elections?

[Image source]

Veep-What's-At-Stakes

Having deferred to Mr Pierce in my initial response to The Rominee's pick for veep, I must include my two cents at some point, which point is now.

I think Mitt made a useful choice, in the sense that it makes abundantly and undeniably clear what's at stake in the election. Romney, following form, having once given his imprimatur to the Ryan budget, is already running away from it. Or not. (It's Mitt Romney, after all.) He can't. Ryan's budget is everything today's R party and its teabagging engine are about. The election will allow voters to decide if they buy what's being sold to them, and it'll give Democrats the chance to find out if they're capable of producing a coherent and effective message about how destructive it is.

Paul Ryan has taken the pre-failed Reagan model of economics and pushed it further than the Gipper could have imagined or, given his ultimate recognition of the need to raise taxes, supported. Further to lower already-low tax rates on the wealthy while increasing military spending, already greater than the rest of the world put together, he'll cut domestic spending not just to but into the bone, enough that the remaining skeleton of government won't support its weight. By cutting trillions in domestic spending, he'll paralyze our ability to educate our young people (a teabaggR, he'd see that as a good thing), turn Medicare into a voucher system (which will be great for insurance companies and lousy for patients), reduce Social Security, ignore failing infrastructure, eliminate funding for research, all while further enriching the already-wealthy. I'm not making it up: every independent analysis of the Ryan budget has drawn the same conclusion. The question will be whether most Americans think that's a good thing.

Paul "I Never Said I Love Ayn Rand" Ryan claims he'll pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy (but not for the non-wealthy) and balance the budget by closing loopholes, but has never specified which ones and how much. (Those same analyses have recognized that, even giving him the benefit of the doubt, it does NOT balance the budget.) I hope someone will ask Mr Ryan if he's thinking of the rules that allowed Mitt Romney to pay so little and to hide his money in tax havens. Like other specifics, I'd guess he'd dodge that one. Maybe because it seems the answer is a resounding NO.

Everyone likes the idea of a balanced budget, including me. Heck, when Bill Clinton actually did it, by a combination of raising taxes and cutting spending, I was doing pretty well. Weren't you? The question is the best way to achieve it. Is it really tax cuts for the wealthy? This time around, will that, magically, for the first time in history, actually cause revenue to increase? Do we really need to spend even more on the military, or is it possible to find ways to reduce that spending, as Obama proposed, while maintaining the strongest military on the planet? Do we think so little of government that we'd prefer it to stop doing those things heretofore considered important and central to its purpose? Is "you didn't build that" a truism about succeeding together and the role of government in promoting private enterprise, or, as Romney would have you believe, a call to end capitalism? Is "every man for himself" the way America became great? (I'd have added "and woman" but since women's health goes out Ryan's window, it's sort of moot.)

These are serious questions, deserving of forthright and open discussion. In my view, the answers are pretty obvious, which is why we'll see hundreds of millions spent by a handful of very rich white guys to obscure them, to convince voters to chose a path to their own ruination; once again to buy into the Reaganobushian mythology, despite its serial failures. But if it's what voters really want, so be it. Like the other people the goring of whose oxen Ryan has carefully seen to it won't happen in their lifetimes, I guess I don't need to care.

But, unlike today's Rs, whose central idea is to de-edify and disenfranchise voters, I sort of like the idea of democracy; it seems to have worked out pretty well for us. But I admit I'm feeling pessimistic (could you guess?). I don't think our founders envisioned the ease and thoroughness with which it's been possible to diseducate people, actually to get people to reject the very idea of knowledge and expertise, equating them with some sort of fey and foppish unAmerican liberal feloniousness. I doubt they foresaw the taking over of the press by a very small number of very rich people with a very specific and self-aggrandizing agenda; nor did they imagine that, in order to keep their own taxes low, consideration of the common good and promotion of the general welfare would be forsworn so completely by a major political party. Our constitution doesn't account for that.

As I see it, despite failing to be particularly bold of late, nor entirely genuous, President Obama seems to recognize two obvious things, which Rs would like us to ignore: one, that government has an important role in securing and preserving our future, in more ways than militarily; and, two, that you can't fulfill that role absent the ability to pay for it. (Ironic, isn't it, that our president's attempt to cut waste in Medicare, for which Rs actually voted in agreement and on which they've based campaign after campaign before that black guy took over, has been demagogued by the Rs, taking their already-unprecedented cynicism to ionospheric levels.)

If a majority of our people really want to see government stop functioning as anything other than a conduit for money to the already wealthy and as a military operation; if, having carefully considered it, they believe we no longer need to educate our kids and that it's okay to cede the future to China and India, stop building roads and bridges, funding research, well, okay. It'll be an America I won't recognize, but then, it's been a little hard to see it through the fog for a while now.

The worst part is I won't be alive to say I told you so. But by then, it'll be so hot that people, suffocating and sweating in their browned-out homes by the potholed roads above the ever-encroaching sea-level, will be too enervated to care.