Category: Politics

From the NYTimes comes this…
Now That’s Rich
By Paul Krugman

We need to pinch pennies these days. Don’t you know we have a budget deficit? For months that has been the word from Republicans and conservative Democrats, who have rejected every suggestion that we do more to avoid deep cuts in public services and help the ailing economy.

But these same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.

What — you haven’t heard about this proposal? Actually, you have: I’m talking about demands that we make all of the Bush tax cuts, not just those for the middle class, permanent.

Some background: Back in 2001, when the first set of Bush tax cuts was rammed through Congress, the legislation was written with a peculiar provision — namely, that the whole thing would expire, with tax rates reverting to 2000 levels, on the last day of 2010.

Why the cutoff date? In part, it was used to disguise the fiscal irresponsibility of the tax cuts: lopping off that last year reduced the headline cost of the cuts, because such costs are normally calculated over a 10-year period. It also allowed the Bush administration to pass the tax cuts using reconciliation — yes, the same procedure that Republicans denounced when it was used to enact health reform — while sidestepping rules designed to prevent the use of that procedure to increase long-run budget deficits.

Obviously, the idea was to go back at a later date and make those tax cuts permanent. But things didn’t go according to plan. And now the witching hour is upon us.

So what’s the choice now? The Obama administration wants to preserve those parts of the original tax cuts that mainly benefit the middle class — which is an expensive proposition in its own right — but to let those provisions benefiting only people with very high incomes expire on schedule. Republicans, with support from some conservative Democrats, want to keep the whole thing.

And there’s a real chance that Republicans will get what they want. That’s a demonstration, if anyone needed one, that our political culture has become not just dysfunctional but deeply corrupt.

What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

How can this kind of giveaway be justified at a time when politicians claim to care about budget deficits? Well, history is repeating itself. The original campaign for the Bush tax cuts relied on deception and dishonesty. In fact, my first suspicions that we were being misled into invading Iraq were based on the resemblance between the campaign for war and the campaign for tax cuts the previous year. And sure enough, that same trademark deception and dishonesty is being deployed on behalf of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

So, for example, we’re told that it’s all about helping small business; but only a tiny fraction of small-business owners would receive any tax break at all. And how many small-business owners do you know making several million a year?

Or we’re told that it’s about helping the economy recover. But it’s hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy than giving money to people who already have plenty, and aren’t likely to spend a windfall.

No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.

So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.

From the Washington Post comes this…

The biggest day of her life: Elena Kagan, Chelsea, and Prop 8
By Alexandra Petri

It’s that day every little girl dreams of. It will mark the beginning of a new life as part of something bigger than herself. Centuries of tradition have determined what she’ll wear, what she’ll say. Some have objected, but they’ll hold their peace on the big day.

Forget Chelsea’s wedding! I’m talking about Elena Kagan’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice.

Weddings, confirmation hearings — potato, potahto! They’re practically the same. Both are the focus of years of longing and preparation. People wear funny outfits and family members cry. If you’re lucky, Antonin Scalia is there! (Okay, maybe that’s just my dream wedding.)

Still, there was something in the above paragraph that probably made us think “wedding.” Why do people still see “little girl’s long-awaited big day” and think white gowns rather than black robes?

When Chelsea Clinton wed Marc Mezvinsky (I bet they were attracted to each other by their mutual alliteration), I was struck by many things: the dress, the fuss, the security officer who kept insisting that I leave. But what stuck with me most was the comment, from Bill Clinton to Ryan Seacrest, that “it’s the biggest day of her life, probably.”

This remark struck me as a straggler from another era, the way it would have if he’d said, “I’m giving them a Model T!” or “She’s spent the last decade furnishing her hope chest!” For me, the idea that a wedding is the biggest day of a little girl’s life falls somewhere between “I’m going clubbing-and-dragging-back-to-my-cave” and “I’m going clubbing!” I always thought that for my generation of women, sure, weddings were important, if only because they allowed you to put tiny scale models of yourself on cakes without people thinking you were some sort of weirdo, but they weren’t that important. If you didn’t marry and wound up becoming a Supreme Court justice instead — who cared! As long as you threw a nice reception with those toast things, wore something blue and invoked the Fifth a lot, or whatever it is you’re supposed to do.

But I think I was wrong. There’s still something about marriage.

The news of Kagan’s confirmation followed on the heels of something else — the judge’s ruling that overturned Proposition 8. Somehow, the only objection to that I haven’t heard is “Not more weddings! Weddings aren’t important! No one cares about them!” Everyone, it seems, still puts a value on these things.

Perhaps that’s because, while only three in every 100 million of us will turn out to be Supreme Court justices (better than the odds of being killed by a shark, a fact I will attempt to use with the next shark that bothers me), the odds are pretty excellent we’ll get married, sometimes six or eight times. It’s one of those rituals we all go through at some point, like learning to drive or accidentally killing a hamster. Everyone cared about Chelsea’s big day because a wedding is something everyone can experience — from your neighbor who wants you to fly to a beach in Ontario to Bristol Palin (oh, wait).

It wasn’t just Chelsea. This day is big not because Bill doesn’t expect his daughter to lead a fulfilling and exciting life — but because it marks a special occasion that is qualitatively different from a professional milestone like being elected president, the kind that stands out even in a rich life. It is a celebration of finding the proverbial needle of love and commitment in the haystack of the singles scene. Johnson called second marriages “the triumph of hope over experience.” Given the divorce rate, so are first marriages. Yet we have them anyway. And with the Prop 8 ruling, more little girls can look forward to that special day — even two at a time!

Now we just have to see what happens when it gets to the Supreme Court. Talk about big days, probably.

From Andrew Sullivan comes this…

I have a friend – one of my very best, actually – who I affectionately refer to as my “anti-me”. She is everything I am not.

She is Republican, Evangelical, Christianist, and Liberty University educated. She married at 22 followed in short order by 2 kids. She lived in the suburbs when we met and now lives in a rural area outside of a very small town. She is homophobic, anti-abortion, and a Tea Party sympathizer. She loves Sarah Palin. She thinks Barack Obama is an over-educated socialist who is trying to ruin America.

I am a Democrat, a skeptical Catholic, never been married and with no kids. I live in the city and can’t imagine living in a small town. I have gay friends and gay relatives and I am pro-gay marriage. I am pro-choice. I think Sarah Palin is an uneducated extremist who is trying to ruin America (to say the least). I voted for and continue to support Obama.

There is no reason that we should be friends. But we listen to each other. We talk, civilly, about the things we disagree about but it doesn’t dominate our friendship. We respect each others’ viewpoints, even when we think it is the craziest thing we’ve ever heard. I think I have become a better, more intellectually well-rounded person because I know her. I am less quick to judge and more open to hearing new ideas. I challenge my own beliefs more and I am better at examining view points I oppose.

We should all have an anti-me.

James Fallows writes Why bipartisanship can’t work: the expert view

I got this note from someone with many decades’ experience in national politics, about a discussion between two Congressmen over details of the stimulus bill:

“GOP member: ‘I’d like this in the bill.’

“Dem member response: ‘If we put it in, will you vote for the bill?’

“GOP member: ‘You know I can’t vote for the bill.’

“Dem member: ‘Then why should we put it in the bill?’

“I witnessed this myself.”

I wrote back saying, “Great story!” and got the response I quote below and after the jump. It is worth reading because its argument has the valuable quality of being obvious — once it is pointed out. The emphasis is mine rather than in the original; it is to highlight a basic structural reality that has escaped most recent analysis of the “bipartisanship” challenge.

“BTW, that exchange I quoted is not really a great story. It is a basic story, fundamental to legislation — a sort of ‘duh!’ moment — and to the US Congressional system, and to the key difference between our system and a parliamentary system when it comes to bipartisanship. I’m astonished every pundit doesn’t already get it, but many either don’t or seem willfully to ignore it.

“In our system, if the minority party can create and enforce party discipline (which has never really been done before, but which the GOP has now accomplished), then OF COURSE there can be no ‘bipartisanship’ on major legislative matters, in the sense of (1) the minority adding provisions to legislation as the majority compromises with them, and (2) at least some minority party members then voting with the majority.
“In a parliamentary system, the minority party is not involved in helping write or voting for major legislation either. If you think about it, and as that exchange I quoted shows, that sort of ‘bipartisanship’ really can’t happen in a parliamentary system on issues where the minority party has the power to tell its members to boycott the majority’s major bills on final passage.

“Bipartisanship in the American sense means compromising on legislation so that a sufficient number of members of Congress from BOTH parties will support it, even if (as is typically the case) a few majority party members defect and most minority party members don’t join. Bipartisanship consists of getting ENOUGH members of the minority party to join the (incomplete) majority in voting for major legislation. It can’t happen if the minority party members vote as a block against major legislation. And that can happen only if the minority party has the ability to discipline its ranks so that none join the majority, which is the unprecedented situation we’ve got in Congress today.

“The way parliamentary parties maintain their discipline is straightforward. No candidate can run for office using the party label unless the party bestows that label upon him or her. And usually, the party itself and not the candidate raises and controls all the campaign funds. As every political scientist knows, the fact that in the U.S. any candidate can pick his or her own party label without needing anyone else’s approval, and can also raise his or her own campaign funds, is why there cannot be and never really has been any sustained party discipline before — even though it is a feature of parliamentary systems.

“The GOP now maintains party discipline by the equivalent of a parliamentary party’s tools: The GOP can effectively deny a candidate the party label (by running a more conservative GOP candidate against him or her), and the GOP can also provide the needed funds to the candidate of the party’s choice. And every GOP member of Congress knows it. (Snowe and Collins may be immune, but that’s about it.)

“I’ve missed almost all the punditry this past week… but what I’ve seen seems almost like a lot of misleading fluff designed to fill the void that should follow an understanding of the foregoing, at least on the subject of ‘why no bipartisanship?’ There’s really nothing more to be said about “why no bipartisanship,” once one recognizes the GOP party discipline. On this issue, it’s absolutely astounding to blame Obama or even the Congressional leadership (although Pelosi and Reid leave much to be desired otherwise). It’s doubly astounding that the GOP did it once before, less perfectly, but with a very large reward for bad behavior in the form of the 1994 mid-term elections. Yet no one calls them on it effectively, and bad behavior seems about to be rewarded again…

“Ironically, the one thing that might lubricate some bipartisanship — earmarks, or their functional equivalent in specific amendments of general policy — is becoming unavailable just when needed, and when it might help. After the exchange I quoted (and observed), a Dem could run against that GOP incumbent by pointing out that the GOP opponent lost X or Y or Z project or policy benefit for his or her district or state by insisting on voting down the line with the GOP. ‘Put his party above his constituents,’ might be the charge, or ‘Put Michael Steele above you and me.’ But so far, the Dems don’t seem to have cottoned onto this. They could go into the 2010 elections not just challenging the obstructionists in the GOP, but showing the electorate what the price of obstruction has been for real people back home.”

As I have pointed out a time or two or a thousand, the structural failures of American government are the country’s main problem right now. In this installment, we see that the US now has the drawbacks of a parliamentary system — absolute party-line voting by the opposition, for instance — without any of the advantages, from comparable solidarity among the governing party to the principle of “majority rules.” If Democrats could find a way to talk about structural issues — if everyone can find a way to talk about them — that would be at least a step. And the Dems could talk about the simple impossibility of governing when the opposition is committed to “No” as a bloc.

From Ta-nehisi Coates comes this:

I Just Remembered Chris Matthews Was White, posted 28 Jan 2010 10:30 am

Here’s Matthews on Obama:

I was trying to think about who he was tonight. It’s interesting; he is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. He’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and past so much history in just a year or two. I mean it’s something we don’t even think about. I was watching and I said, wait a minute, he’s an African-American guy in front of a bunch of other white people and there he is, president of the United States, and we’ve completely forgotten that tonight — completely forgotten it. I think it was in the scope of the discussion, it was so broad ranging, so in tune with so many problems and aspects and aspects of American life. That you don’t think in terms of the old tribalism and the old ethnicity. It was astounding in that regard, a very subtle fact. It’s so hard to even talk about it. Maybe I shouldn’t talk about it, but I am.

I think it’s worth noting that Chris Matthews wasn’t trying to take a shot at anybody. I also think it’s worth noting that he was attempting to compliment Obama and say something positive about what he’s done for race relations. (See Matthews’ clarification here.) But I think it’s most worth noting that “I forgot Obama was black”–in all its iterations–is something that white people should stop saying, if only because it’s really dishonest.

One way to think about this is to flip the frame. Around these parts, we’ve been known, from time to time, to chat about the NFL. We’ve also been known to chat about the intricacies of beer. If you hang around you’ll notice that there are no shortage of women in these discussions. Having read a particularly smart take on Brett Favre, or having received a good recommendations on a particular IPA, it would not be a compliment for me to say, “Wow, I forgot you were a woman.” Indeed, it would be pretty offensive.

The problems is three-fold. First, it takes my necessarily limited, and necessarily blinkered, experience with the fairer sex and builds it into a shibboleth of invented truth. Then it takes that invented truth as a fair standard by which I can measure one’s “woman-ness.” So if football and beer don’t fit into my standard, I stop seeing the person as a woman. Finally instead of admitting that my invented truth is the problem, I put the onus on the woman. Hence the claim “I forgot you were a woman,” as opposed to “I just realized my invented truth was wrong.”

Ditto for Chris Matthews. The “I forgot Obama was black” sentiment allows the speaker the comfort of accepting, even lauding, a black person without interrogating their invented truth. It allows the speaker a luxurious ignorance–you get to name people (this is what black is) even when you don’t know people. In fact, Chris Matthews didn’t forget Barack Obama was black. Chris Matthews forgot that Chris Matthews was white.

I’m put back in the mind of the The Wire, when Slim Charles tells Avon that it really doesn’t matter that our wars are based on a lie. Once we’re fighting, we fight on that lie until the end. I would submit that a significant number of white people in this country, can not stop fighting on the lie. They can’t cop to the fact that they really have no standing to speak on Obama’s relationship to blackness, because they know so little about black people. It’s always hard to say, “I don’t know.” But no one else can say it for you.

This is why Obama will never be postracial–he can’t make white people face the lie of their ignorance, anymore than Jimmy Baldwin could make black people face the lie of our homophobia. It’s white people’s responsibility to make themselves postracial, not the president’s. Whatever my disagreements with him, the fact is that he is brilliant. That he is black and brilliant is pleasant but unsurprising to me. I’ve known very brilliant, very black people all my life. At some point that number of white people who still can’t their head around our humanity will have to accept the truth: the president is black, and even if you don’t quite know what that means.

From Andrew Sullivan comes this … Unrepresentative Democracy, Ctd

Fallows adds to his earlier post about the disproportionate power of 41 GOP senators:

Five Justices of the Supreme Court, outvoting their four colleagues, can work a fundamental change in election law that goes far beyond the issues presented by the parties to the case. Courts always have the option of deciding cases narrowly or broadly. The breadth of this one, reaching far beyond the merits of the case so as to enact the majority Justices’ views, is staggering even to a non-lawyer like me. A one-person margin* is enough for a change of this magnitude. In the least accountable branch of government, the narrowest margin prevails; in our elected legislative branch, substantial majorities are neutered

.

From the new bill, these benefits will be available in 2010. (as proposed by the Senate, to be passed through the House and signed by Pres. Obama). You hear so much of what’s not in it, it’s good to know that some very good things are in it.