Talking With The Congressman About Poetry — Er, Tax Reform

Ever since I moved in 2003 from Barbara Lee’s district in Oakland, CA to Tom Price’s district in suburban Atlanta (Newt Gingrich’s old district), I’ve sort of felt a stepped-up need to interface with my congressperson. In Oakland, I could pretty much rest easy in the knowledge that my congressperson would propose or vote for issues that I myself would support, were I in congress. No politician matches one’s own preferences 100% of the time, but when you’ve got a congressperson as good as Barbara Lee, it’s easy to just sort of let her do the work, since it’s what you’d do anyway.

Not so since moving to the land of God, guns and Gingrich. These days, I tend to bedevil Tom Price on Twitter, and when I see tweets like this one, I feel compelled to act upon them:

So ya want my thoughts on tax reform, eh, Tom? Done…though I’m pretty sure my recommendations aren’t going to be what you were hoping for, given that the responses on Twitter to your solicitation were for idiotic things like the FairTax or banning state taxes altogether and making the corporate rate 2%. So, you’re welcome.

Fiscal NIMBYism

3/2 – see update at bottom*

Pew Research is out with another poll, this time focused on budgetary and financial issues, given the upcoming sequester, and the results are depressingly predictable. The title alone gives away the findings almost completely: As Sequester Deadline Looms, Little Support for Cutting Most Programs (pdf). The key graph is here:

Spending Cuts? Not In MY Backyard!

This is the quandary American politics – no, American policymaking – has found itself in for at least a couple of decades now. We on the left like to chuckle when Republican lawmakers are caught live on air being unable to name any specific projects they’d cut, but one can hardly blame the politicos. Their main job, in our money-driven political system, is to know what it takes to get re-elected. It takes money and it takes votes, in that order. Without money, you can’t attract enough votes, but – as people like Meg Whitman and Mitt Romney prove – without enough support from ordinary voters, no amount of money will get you elected.

What you’re seeing when you see a GOP politician caught stammering on TV, bereft of any answer at all to the question of which specific cuts to which specific programs they’d make is what happens when the interests of those two groups – the high-dollar funders and the voters who have to pull the actual levers to get the politicians elected – collide. It doesn’t happen often; usually the two groups interests are at least not in opposition, if not actually simpatico.

Even in the case of spending cuts, those groups’ interests seem at first to be at least superficially aligned. Starting in the early 1970s, forty-plus years of concerted faux-populist anti-tax rhetoric from a well-funded right wing determined to rise above the nearly permanent minority status it had enjoyed since the Great Depression have rendered the average American conservative certain that cuts must be made because spending is out of control and taxes are too damn high.

Yet ask these same Americans which particular programs they’d like to cut, as Pew did – and by how much, and the graph above shows what happens when well-funded, agenda-driven political propaganda collides with people’s own self-interest. I’m actually strangely heartened by the fact that not even most Republicans, apparently, feel like it’s a good idea to start cutting the benefits they or their loved ones or friends receive. Why? Because, to a greater or lesser degree, they know these programs work. They help pay medical bills and drug costs. They make the food budget go a little farther every month. They keep the bridges safe and the children well-educated. They do lots of things that are vital to the communities in which these poll respondents live. These things are called entitlements because voters – even Republican voters, apparently – feel entitled to them. These things are part of the social contract, what each of us is told our tax money goes to, what we agree to provide for ourselves and each other through the medium of government. Our civilization, in other words. And yes, even most GOP voters feel entitled to these things we’ve agreed upon.

That’s why, when you ask even most Republicans to really think about applying the rhetoric being discussed on their televisions by the pundits and the politicians to their OWN lives – when you ask them to think specifically about which programs they, the voters themselves, would cut, support drops away like support for Larry Craig dropped away among Senate Republicans after the “wide stance” issue.

I call this Fiscal NIMBYism because it represents the direct collision of those forty-plus years of well-funded GOP rhetoric about lower taxes and cutting spending and drowning government in a bathtub with the actual reality of what the lower spending parts mean. These same GOP voters who balk at naming any specific cuts they’d be willing to make were only too eager to accept the lower tax lollipop portion of the GOP rhetoric. They took the Bush tax cuts without hesitation, spent or saved it, and never looked back. It’s only when those same GOP agenda-setters come back to them and say “OK, now it’s time for the spending cuts” that people begin to say “hey, wait a minute…” when they begin to really think about what that’s going to mean in practice. A large deficit sounds bad in the abstract, but the scariness of an outsized debt-to-GDP ratio that Politician X is discussing on TV pales in comparison to the serious consideration of cutting one’s own benefits to bring that deficit down.

That’s why the only item on Pew’s list of potential funding cuts that even reached plurality support was cutting  aid to the world’s needy. That’s the perfect expression of the ambivalence and NIMBYism I’m referring to: cut someone ELSE’S benefits, but keep your stinkin’ government hands off my Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security/school funding/veteran’s benefits/etc…

To be fair, even cutting aid to the world’s needy didn’t reach actual majority support, probably because enough people realized just how heartless that sounded, as they checked the “don’t cut” box on all their own pet projects. All this may sound like a call for despair, that GOP or perhaps even just regular rank-and-file voters are too hopelessly selfish for redemption of any kind, but I see it as just the opposite. I think the fact that even most GOP voters can still at least recognize what their own self-interest is, is an unqualified good. It means they’re not completely delusional. It means that despite forty-plus years of Ayn Randian “you’re on your own” rhetoric and Reaganite “government IS the problem” rhetoric, not even most Republicans think government is so worthless that they’d be willing to throw away what it provides for them.

And that means there’s a potential wedge there for Democrats to break the lockstep voting of ordinary Republicans for austerity, against their own self-interest.

***UPDATE***

I just got an email from a group whose mailing list I’m on, Operation Homefront. You may already know them; they’re one of the higher-profile groups that provides assistance to military families, especially (but not exclusively) the deployed. They’re a great group doing work that shouldn’t be left to outside organizations but instead should be a part of what our nation guarantees to those men and women who put their lives at risk to defend our country. Nevertheless, due to already-existing shortages in everything from VA benefits to simple cash-flow issues, groups like Operation Homefront have to exist, and they do vital work very well.

This email is titled “Sequestration and Our Military Families,” and the reason I’m mentioning it is not because – or not only because – it’s an example of how the recent failure of congress to act to avoid the blunt instrument of the sequester affects real people in the real economy. The email is certainly that, but it’s also an example of what I just got done talking about in this post: fiscal NIMBYism. The author, OH’s President & CEO Jim Knotts, begins by talking about what sequestration is and how it will negatively affect military families, but then in paragraph four, he gets around to this:

Personally, I fully understand and even support the notion that we need to cut our federal budget to get our national fiscal house in order. What you may not know is that the Department of Defense will bear more than 20% of the total budget cuts under sequestration.

[...]

Many military spouses have jobs as DoD civilians at local installations, which means the budgets of many military families just got a significant cut. Programs on the installations that support families and kids will be cut or curtailed due to staffing gaps. Schools for military kids on the installations have to figure out how they’ll complete the school year.

Knotts goes on to detail numerous other ways in which sequestration’s cutbacks will impact military families, none of which I’m trying to brush aside or take lightly by pointing this out. But it’s a bit of a nutshell summary of the ridiculousness of federal policy as well as current conventional wisdom that even a man in the position Knotts is in, who knows better than most just what kinds of harm funding cuts at this time will do in real terms still believes and agrees with the notion that we need to make cuts.

He’d just prefer they not be in HIS backyard, if at all possible.

Here Are The ‘Six Studies’ Romney Says Refute Tax Policy Center Study Of His Tax Plan

*** 10/16 – SEE UPDATE BELOW; ROMNEY FINALLY RELEASES DETAILS OF TAX PLAN***

Did I say STUDIES? I meant blog posts.

Back at the beginning of August, the non-partisan Tax Policy Center issued a much-discussed study that was the first to try to run the numbers on Mitt Romney’s tax plan. Specifically, they wanted to see whether Romney’s claim to be able to leave the Bush tax cuts in place and then cut taxes by an additional 20% across the board would work, in light of Romney’s promise that he would make up for the revenue lost by such a tax cut without having to raise taxes on the middle class. Unsurprisingly, the TPC was therefore also the first to come to the conclusion – also much discussed since their study in late August – that the math on Romney’s promises simply didn’t add up.

Part of this guesswork and extrapolation has come from the fact that the Romney campaign steadfastly refuses to get specific about exactly HOW they will make up the lost revenue without either adding to the deficit or soaking the middle class (or poor). In the absence of genuine specifics from the Romney campaign, the TPC had to make some assumptions, based upon likely economic conditions, as well as on the things Romney HAS definitely said. So they did. And then they re-jiggered those assumptions to be as favorable and generous to Romney as they could be without departing from reality.

Even then, they still found that Romney’s promises, taken together, are simply not mathematically possible.

In an election season, them’s fighting words. Having a difference of opinion about various policies is the stuff electoral politics is made of. But saying a candidate’s plans are mathematically impossible is of another order: pundits and the press take notice, and the public pays more attention, too, since such a statement carries with it the implicit accusation that the candidate is intentionally lying.

In the intervening time, a great deal of ink on the right side of the political aisle has been spilled attempting to debunk the TPC study. One of the parties most interested in debunking the study is, unsurprisingly, the Romney campaign itself. Within days, the campaign began claiming to have “six other studies” that said Romney’s policies WOULD work without raising the deficit or raising taxes on the middle class or the poor. Throughout most of September and right up through the first Presidential debate and the VP debate, the Romney team stayed remarkably on-message about this: they have one study, we have SIX that say the opposite.

What WERE these studies? The Romney campaign didn’t say, initially. Journalists were able to conclude what the campaign likely was referring to, based on what the campaign did refer to when discussing tax policy, but Romney and his team were never explicit about where these “six studies” came from, or who did them.

Until now.

Josh Barro, who did some of the original press-work about the original TPC study and the subsequent back-and-forth with the Romney campaign, finally got them to go on-record about where he could find these “six studies” which all show the TPC study of August to be false, and Mitt Romney’s tax plan to be viable without ballooning the deficit or hurting the non-rich with additional taxes. Are you ready? The studies, according to Romney via Barro, are “…perhaps more accurately described as ‘analyses’, since four of them are blog posts or op-eds. I’m not hating — I blog for a living — but I don’t generally describe my posts as ‘studies’.” More interestingly, “[n]one of the analyses do what Romney’s campaign says: show that his tax plan is sound.”

You don’t say.

The sources (“studies”, if you believe the Romney campaign) are these: a blog post by Alex Brill at AEI (a conservative think-tank), a second blog post from AEI (this one by Matt Jensen), two pieces by Martin Feldstein (one an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal and the other a blog post), and two papers, one by Curtis Dubay of the Heritage Foundation, and the other by Princeton professor Harvey Rosen. Barro goes through these sources one-by-one, explaining why each does not show what Romney claims it does, in detail. It’s illuminating reading, I would guess especially if you’re someone who’s not already familiar with Mitt Romney’s casual relationship with the facts/truth. If you’re not familiar, the mere fact that, of Romney’s “six studies,” only two are even anything approaching an actual study, ought to give you a pretty good indication.

I won’t post Barro’s analysis here, because that’s what his piece is for. If you read it, though, you won’t be in any further doubt about whether the Tax Policy Center’s study was correct in its conclusions. It was.

---

***UPDATE*** – Hold, I say HOLD, those presses! Mitt Romney’s campaign, under relentless pressure has finally made the calculated decision to release the full details of how his tax plan will be achieved without either ballooning the debt or taxing the middle class and poor. Read the details at Romney Tax Plan.

On Mitt Romney’s 47% Comments

What Ezra said. Romney’s comments were so shocking – and disgusting – on their face, that it’s tempting to simply point to them or mirror the video and assume that the reader/viewer will know without thinking what’s wrong with them. Truthfully, most people probably will intuitively understand most or all of why Romney’s comments were so vile. But merely using implied assumptions to carry the day on a revelation of this magnitude is to do a disservice to the public record. In short, it’s not enough to simply point and roll our collective eyes at Romney’s despicable, divisive comments. It’s important, for the record (and even if it seems obvious), to point out exactly why Romney’s comments are so revealing about his character, his campaign, and his plans for the country.

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Ezra Klein does exactly that (so I don’t have to!). Go read it all, but here’s a taste of Ezra’s devastating takedown of Romney’s remarks and the broader implications of what they mean:

For what it’s worth, this division of “makers” and “takers” isn’t true. Among the Americans who paid no federal income taxes in 2011, 61 percent paid payroll taxes — which means they have jobs and, when you account for both sides of the payroll tax, they paid 15.3 percent of their income in taxes, which is higher than the 13.9 percent that Romney paid. Another 22 percent were elderly.

So 83 percent of those not paying federal income taxes are either working and paying payroll taxes or they’re elderly and Romney is promising to protect their benefits because they’ve earned them. The remainder, by and large, aren’t paying federal income or payroll taxes because they’re unemployed.

Ouch. And spot on. It’s devastating because it simply lays out the facts of who pays what kind of (and how much) taxes in modern America. I especially like Klein’s point that, at 15.3%, even someone who pays only payroll taxes is paying a greater percentage of his or her income than Mitt Romney himself paid in the one year we have complete data for (2011, in which Romney paid 13.9%). Romney’s surreptitiously-recorded statements, made behind closed (and presumably gold-plated) doors to a private audience of top-dollar donors when he thought nobody was listening, are in truth nothing new on the right. Their tone strongly echoes Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens, riding around in the free Cadillacs the government bought them. Such noxious nonsense wasn’t any more true in Reagan’s day than it is today when Romney says similar words.

Klein’s service in this column is reminding us of exactly how and why it’s so false. That’s worth remembering, and especially worth repeating, loudly and often, when it rears its ugly head, as it has this week. So, gratitude to Ezra for remembering this stuff doesn’t do itself. Go read the whole thing; it’s more than worth your time.

Payroll Tax Holiday Aftermath

I just received, as I’m sure many of you did, an email from the White House crowing about the recent total victory over John “Dr. No” Boehner and the GOTea party house.

I don’t blame the President and his team at all for sending out these glad tidings. It WAS a shockingly complete rout of Boehner and his pro-1% flying monkeys. Congratulations all ’round. For real. Only…the email focused upon the involvement of individual citizens who took to their computers and their webcams to record stories of what an extra $40 per paycheck means to them. While I’m sure that helped reassure the Democrats (and warn the Republicans) that the 99% really did stand with the President and the Democrats on this issue.

That made me write the following response:

Although I’d like to believe the heartwarming fiction that it was only the response of tens of thousands of people who took to the web to tell their stories of privation via a tax increase which made the difference between the payroll tax holiday passing and it NOT passing, I’ve watched Washington work for too long to be fooled by that story. And so have all of you.

After all, it wasn’t as if John Boehner and the rest of the obstructionists in the house GOP really didn’t understand the concept of a tax cut and what it could mean for people. That’s Republicans’ wheelhouse issue. Or at least it used to be. Perhaps that may be changing…that would be the true miracle of Christmas as it applies to gridlocked Washington this year.

No, what made the difference (as we both know) was the both the President and the Democrats in the House AND Senate simply stood firm. You knew you had the people at your backs and the facts on your side, and this time, you simply. didn’t. cave.

And look what it got you.

Everyone from Paul Krugman to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal took to their respective podiums and called this one an unmitigated disaster for Boehner and his Tea Party minions. And rightly so. It WAS an unmitigated disaster for them. But let’s be clear about the reasons, here: YOU did it, not us. The public has a responsibility every couple of years to change the makeup of Washington, if enough of us don’t like what’s been going on.

The problem is – or has been, up until now – that no matter how we seem to shuffle the deck each biennial election, Washington doesn’t seem to change into what we need, want or – in most cases – into what the people running for the seats we elect them to promised they’d push for.

This time was different. You stayed the course, to quote a certain ex-President. We’ve never doubted that you knew what was right, or what would work…we’ve just been disappointed because time and again, you seemed to lack either the political will or the negotiating skill to make it actually happen. There’s a limit to what the public can do, once the election is over. Every election, we’re painfully aware that we’re not electing policies, we’re electing individuals, and that means a crap-shoot. It means we’re getting a pig in a poke. We TRY to get what we want by electing people who SAY they’re for this or that…but, too often, it just doesn’t happen, even when it seems like it was quite possible.

This time, YOU held the line, not us. We don’t vote on the floor of congress. We don’t have veto power (or the power of a threatened veto). You do. And look what happens when you stick together and USE IT. You win.

Remember that. It’s an important lesson, one I’m sure I sound patronizing to even remind you about. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but the truth is that, from out here, far too often it seems as if you’ve forgotten that simple fact. Once the election’s over, YOU have the power. And when you step up and use it, you’ll instantly have that astonishingly hopeful coalition of the public behind you that you had in 2008.

I hope that won’t be lost on you as you head into 2012. Good job on this one, truly. See what YOU can accomplish when you don’t let the GOP steamroll you?

US Businesses NOT Being Strangled By Regulation And Taxation, World Bank Says

That’s the title of an article over at that noted socialist rag, Forbes Magazine (yes, FORBES!).

I capitalized the “not” in the title, because if one only listens to GOP Presidential candidates or the conservative media and talk radio, the cognitive dissonance from reading that article’s title might very well lead the reader to simply elide the “not.”

One of the few (but distinct) downsides to the Republicans having spent the last forty years crafting such a coherent narrative about what’s wrong in America and who’s to blame for it is that now, that narrative is so entrenched that most Republicans tend to recite it literally as if someone had just pressed the “play” button, i.e.: without even thinking if it’s in fact true. That sort of message coherence and party discipline has won them countless elections they did not deserve to win and would not otherwise have won…but it also means that they’re increasingly unable to think about the actual facts of the world in any other way than the received “wisdom” of their narrative.

That’s an opportunity for Democrats, or indeed for anyone (Occupy Wall Street?) who wishes to show just how wide the gap is between reality and GOP/conservative cant. According to Forbes, the World Bank found:

…according to the World Bank’s 212 page “Doing Business 2012″ report, released on Wednesday, there is less red tape for setting up shop in the U.S. than there is in all of Europe, Latin America, Africa and most of Asia…

What it looks like from the research desks at one of the most powerful and elite multilateral institutions on the planet is a U.S. that does not have the government in its way, but a U.S. whose government is more out of the way than it is in every other major economy on earth, including mainland China.

This article should be exhibit #1 on every Democrat’s and progressive’s list of why the GOP is simply out of touch with reality. This needs to be brought home to the media, again and again, and repeated in public spaces where a wide variety of people will hear it. We in the Reality-Based Community™ have always believed that facts matter, and we’ve been gobsmacked periodically at the extent to which the GOP message machine has appeared to be successful in rendering what should be an obvious truism like that UN-true. We’ve watched white, working-and-middle-class voters vote against their own economic interest time and again, and we’ve wondered why they DO that, because we keep bringing them the facts…sort of.

Well, these days, after so much economic turmoil, and with Occupy movements in so many states and even countries throughout the world, even the thick hides (skulls?) of the low-information and “swing” voters here in the United States is in an unusual situation: they’re receptive to having their perspective changed…if we mount an organized campaign to do it. We can’t just leave this out there as a fact, we have to hammer it home, again and again and again.

When (and HOW) Will Our Manufactured Debt-Ceiling Crisis End?

I will leave this poll up in the sidebar for new votes until the crisis is actually resolved – however (and whenever) it gets resolved. I stopped at seven answers (including the ever-popular “other”), but in truth, I could have just as easily constructed a poll with eleven or fifteen answers, all slightly different. Between the “Grand Bargain” floated by Obama, the McConnell deal (both the “clean” and “dirty” (I guess) versions of it), the Biden talks framework, and various other miscellaneous proposals, the bottom line is that there’s really no way at all to know what the final package will look like exactly. That’s why I expect “other” to be such a popular answer: because everyone seems to have their own ideas of both what should happen and what likely will happen. As always, unless you happen to be a member of congress (in which case, what the fuck are you doing here, you lazy bastard: go solve the debt-ceiling crisis!), there’s really no way to know what the final package will actually look like. The tea-partiers appear to be dug in deeply, with conflicting reports coming out; one saying that Boehner had Paul Ryan take these eager frosh to the woodshed for a combination beating/instructional video session, another report has the tea-totalers holding firm and saying they “didn’t come here to have long careers; they came here to DO something.” So it’s truly anyone’s guess. I won’t go on at length about my own suspicions until after (though I will vote in the poll). I don’t have the interest (or the money) to award any prizes for the most-accurate answer, but we should see if anyone gets it right. So, good luck…and may the “flaming end of American civilization” answer not be the correct one. Check out the poll right over in the sidebar!   =====>

Does Hypocrisy Matter?

Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum writes a quick, irked post in which he takes the ever-odious Gregg Easterbrook to task for the admittedly annoying habit of always looking for perceived hypocrisy, even when it’s not there or the charge of hypocrisy isn’t relevant or accurate:

The point of laws is to provide a level playing field, and no one is a hypocrite for following existing law even if they think it should be changed. That goes for congressmen who accept earmarks even though they think earmarks should be banned, it goes for drivers who park for free on city streets even though they think parking meters should be installed, and it goes for rich people who pay taxes at the current rate even though they think that rate is too low.

No one is obligated to be a sucker. The whole point of taxation is that it’s a collective enterprise: I’m willing to pay my taxes for the common good as long as everyone else is doing it too. But until then, there’s no reason that I should impoverish myself (or my constituents) while everyone else is merrily taking full advantage of current law. Fairness matters, and that ain’t fair.

Drum’s so obviously irritated (and Easterbrook is so deservedly a target of his annoyance) that I want to just throw up my hands in the ubiquitous Limbaugh-ian “ditto” sign and move on. But I don’t think Drum’s criticism of those who bring a charge of hypocrisy against public figures who appear to be saying “do as I say, not as I do” is warranted in all cases. To be fair to Drum, he doesn’t use the phrase “do as I say, not as I do.” Instead, he talks about not metaphorically tying one’s own hand behind one’s back by following rules that don’t exist (or not taking advantage of ones that do) in comparison to everyone else who does take advantage of those rules or laws.

I agree, but only up to a point.

Paul Ryan Cannot Identify Even One Spending Cut

Hilarious (in that inimitable, GOP sort of way). Watch it here.

Darn those perky middle-aged female fluff-show anchors: always bringing the hardball against the GOP!

Expanded Thoughts On Why This Tax ‘Deal’ Is Bad Medicine

I usually tend towards the lengthy and expository on this blog, because although the blog community tends to be catholic in its tastes (birds of a feather often flocking together, I mean), I’m always aware that you never know who might be reading any given post, or what their level of understanding of background issues is.

This week, however, I am in the midst of scrambling around trying to get our family ready to go out to the west coast this Saturday to spend the Christmas holidays with family. That’s unfortunate, because the current lame-duck congressional session has been much more full of activity and strife than anyone expected. And none of the issues has caused more of that strife than the current tax bill/compromise/capitulation being rushed through congress so the Bush tax cuts won’t expire on Dec. 31 at midnight.

Let me be blunt: this deal is SO bad, I would be remiss if I did not post my strenuous opposition to it. I’m going to try to be brief and leave out backstory and explanation. But let me repeat: simply put, this tax deal is awful. Terrible. I mean worse than doing nothing. Join me after the fold, and I’ll explain why.