on lemmings and the republican base

            You have to wonder just how blatant GOP hypocrisy has to get before even the most  troglodytic of its base begins to scratch their oversize craniums and say, “run that by  me again.”

            We could choose examples from any number of areas: military (support the military-industrial complex, ignore veterans); justice system (beware “activist” judges unless they are our “activist” judges—see Roberts, Scalia, Thomas et al); health care (decry rising medical costs but make sure nothing prevents big Pharma for charging four times in America what it charges for the same drugs in Canada); financial system (rail against “big bank bailouts” but block legislation that would have made big banks pay for their own bailouts).  And that ignores the most obvious Republican hypocrisy of late—the 24/7 screeching about the criticality of reducing the budget deficit, intoned in chorus with 24/7 screeching about the criticality of tax reduction—especially for the high income sectors of the economy.  Is it really possible that only Progressives can see the disconnect there?

            We recently had the spectacle of Mitch McConnell and his lock-step minions literally holding the unemployed hostage to insure the preservation of a lower tax rate for the richest 5% of Americans.  As I noted in an earlier blog, their argument was that unemployment benefits could not be extended without finding a corresponding amount of money to cut from somewhere else in the budget (defense spending being exempted from that).  Failure to do so, the GOP argued out of one side of its mouth, would clearly add to the budget deficit.

            Letting the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest 5% of Americans rise to Clinton era levels would have added 900 billion dollars to the Treasury over the next 10 years, which, logic suggests, would lower the budget deficit by a similar amount.  From the other side of its mouth, the GOP mumbled something about that not being important because raising taxes would prevent our wealthiest from creating all the new jobs they haven’t been creating for the past 8 years.  Under the lower tax rate that had to be preserved.

            Nor were the unemployed the only group held hostage.  Had Obama not capitulated, the 95% of Americans who don’t make more than 250K a year would have seen their taxes go up as well.  That means the lower income earners—who put nearly every dollar they make back into the economy—and the middle income earners—who put most of their earnings back—would have had fewer dollars to do that with.  No matter.  The wealthiest, who simply invest most of what a lower tax rate saves them in accounts (often off-shore) that benefit no one but themselves, were protected.

            That particular hypocrisy has been well-documented, even by some conservative pundits.  Less commented on was the fight McConnell et al staged to insure that the reinstated estate tax would be as low as possible.  Republicans pushed up—to 5 million dollars—the amount that would be excluded from the tax, and pushed down—to 35% from the 55% under Clinton—the rate at which the amount over 5 million would be taxed. 

The justification from the GOP on this?  Why, clearly taxing a man’s estate represents double taxation.  John Q. Richguy already paid taxes on whatever money was in his estate.  True enough in theory—though in practice John Q.’s army of accountants and tax lawyers probably sheltered most of his estate.  Even that begs the issue however.  When the estate is passed on to the inheritor—John Q. Richguy II—sonny boy is receiving income on which HE never paid taxes.  Taxing pappy twice would be no good, but taxing pappy when he earns his income, then taxing sonny when he inherits his income is two separate things.

The effect on the budget deficit that Republican changes in the estate tax provision produce?  In the near term, the next 5 years or so, it adds about 140 billion to the deficit we MUST reduce.

All this GOP obfuscation took place in the Senate.  On Dec. 22, what portends an even greater level of hypocrisy took place in the House.  On that day, Republican House leaders released the “budget rules” they intend to adopt when they take over the House in January. 

Before getting to the GOP plan, a little history.  In 2007, Democratic majorities in the House and Senate adopted (actually, re-adopted what had been in place under Clinton) what was referred to as “pay-go.”  Pay-go meant that tax cuts or increases in entitlement spending  had to be offset by tax increases or entitlement cuts.  So if you wanted to increase federal Medicaid support, you had to pay for it with tax increases or corresponding cuts in other entitlement programs.  Similarly, and probably more importantly, if you wanted to cut taxes, you had to make offsetting cuts in entitlement programs.  Essentially, these were zero sum rules.

Under the new GOP rules, there have to be offsets for any entitlement increases, but not for tax cuts.  More perversely, you can only offset an increase in one area of entitlement spending by decreasing it in another entitlement.  In other words, if you increase Medicaid spending you have to decrease Medicare spending (or some other entitlement—veterans’ programs would be a likely GOP target).  Under the new Republican rules, you couldn’t pay for that increase in Medicaid spending by raising taxes.

It gets worse.  The rules direct the leader of the House Budget Committee to ignore several costs when computing the budget impact of certain actions.  For example, making the Bush tax cuts permanent would cost the Treasury in excess of a trillion dollars by approximately 2030, but the House Budget Committee is forbidden to take that cost into consideration when it considers the affordability of any legislative actions.  Similarly, the cost—also estimated in the trillions—of repealing the health reform law could not be factored into new budget considerations. 

What these new rules reflect is the Republican mantra, chanted now since Reagan, that the only thing needed to propel the economy forward is a never-ending string of tax reductions or eliminations.  Sanctifying tax cuts and demonizing spending has rallied the Republican base for 30 years, so it should probably be no surprise they’re still doing it.  Wouldn’t it be nice if  the rural red state voters who think of themselves as the Republican base would finally realize that there are two Republican bases—the mostly lower and middle income rural red staters who continually elect Republicans, and the wildly wealthy top 5% whose interests the party will do anything to further?  Wouldn’t it be nice if the Joe the Plumber’s of the world would finally see that the most consistent effect of “trickle down economics” has been an inexorable “trickling up” of the nation’s wealth?

But that’s clearly asking too much.  Lemmings, after all, follow their leader off the cliff because they steadfastly keep their eyes down and see nothing but the lemming butt in front of them.

             

beck, hannity and Fox (pretends to be) News

            Periodically, I force myself to visit Fox (I refuse to add the second word of their official title) and endure the pain of watching Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity (or O’Reilly, Palin, Gingrich, Malkin—pick your Fox fanatic) do what they do.  I do this, I suppose, on the theory that a little suffering is good for the soul, a carryover no doubt from my early days as a captive of Catholicism.

            A while back, Beck’s show happened to be the one I visited.  I got there in time to see the start of a video he had prepared, the title of which I believe was something like, The Puppet Master? (I remember the question mark—may have the words a little off).  With horror film like music playing forebodingly in the background while images of disasters dating back to the 1920’s were displayed, a voice track said—and I’m paraphrasing here, I couldn’t grab my audio recorder quickly enough—Eighty years ago, George Soros entered this world.  Little did the world know then that economies would collapse, world wars would ensue, countries would crumble.  And one billionaire would just happen to find himself in the middle of it all.”

            Beck would go on to accuse Soros of creating a “shadow government,” the purpose of which is the instigation of coups in countries like Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Georgia and a couple of others I don’t recall.  His evidence for this?  Well, there was none that anyone cognizant of the meaning of the word evidence would accept, but there was the “fact” Beck found interesting that Soros had plowed money into all of them. (What is a fact is that Soros has given money to his Open Society Foundation, which supports democracy movements in many countries.)

            He concluded this little spot with another “fact” he found interesting—that as a teenager in Hungary during WWII, Soros had essentially looted the estate of a fellow Jew who had been forced to flee Hungary.  What this had to do with Soros as a leader of a “shadow government” bent on taking over the world I’m not sure—unless it was to imply that a Jew who would take advantage of a fellow Jew’s misfortune was clearly capable of any level of malfeasance.

            My ears pricked up at that little bit because I had finished not too long before a well-researched and documented biography of Soros by Michael Kaufman in which he describes in detail how Soros, at 13, had been taken under the protection of a wealthy Christian family.  The scion of that family was ordered to inventory the estate of a wealthy Jewish aristocrat who had fled Hungary, and when he journeyed to carry out that order, he took Soros with him.  While his protector inventoried the estate (taking nothing from it), Soros wandered the grounds, rode one of the horses and generally kept himself out of the way.  He never took anything.  Something even the most elementary research on the subject of his segment would have revealed to Beck.

            I recount that story because it is indicative of what Beck and Hannity do regularly on their programs—lie.  Now that’s a strong word and a strong accusation I know.  And on the rare occasions it is actually applied by mainstream pundits to Beck or Hannity, they either jump immediately to the victim card—the liberal media is out to get them—or they loudly deny.  Or, on the couple of occasions that the media has stayed on them doggedly enough and proven conclusively that what they said wasn’t true,  they excuse themselves on the basis of ignorance.  They just didn’t know what they were saying was untrue.

            The question that begs of course is why didn’t they?  Their programs air on national TV.  Doesn’t that give them an obligation to be sure what they are saying is true before they say it?  One would think so, but that is coming from a progressive point of view where facts are still held in some esteem. A book chapter could be filled with examples of both Beck and Hannity using their cable platforms to spew out information they knew was false—or should have known unless they are truly too stupid to deserve a television platform.  In the interest of space, I’m going to include just one example from each person’s show

            Full disclosure first.  I’m not such a fan of the therapeutic value of suffering that I watch either Beck or Hannity religiously.  Both of the examples I’m about to recount are things I did see myself on at least one episode of their daily soap operas, but I’m using  an excellent book by John Amato and David Neiwert called Over the Cliff for the full details.

            Let’s do Beck first.  You may recall about 10 months or so into Obama’s presidency, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn was quoted in Time magazine as saying that what Fox offered was “opinion journalism masquerading as news.”  Not surprisingly, this hit Fox like raw meat in a piranha pool, and both Beck and Hannity were among the loudest decrying Ms. Dunn.  For Beck, getting Ms. Dunn became a mission.

            The first shot in that mission occurred on Oct. 15, when he aired a video of a commencement address Dunn had given at a high school earlier that year.  In it she said:
“The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite philosophers: Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa—not often coupled with one another , but the two people I turn to most to deliver a simple point which is you’re going to make choices.”

            Dunn went to on to note how when Mao was reminded of how insurmountable the odds against being able to overcome the government were, he responded, “you fight your war, I’ll fight mine,”  meaning of course that he had the ability to choose a different way to accomplish his goal.  Mother Teresa, when asked to bring the magic she had done in Calcutta to another region, famously replied, “find your own Calcutta.”  Both people were suggesting that our obligation as humans is to make our own choices and find our own way.

            What grabbed Beck was the name Mao.  Beck had been engaged for a couple months in trying to prove that the Obama administration was replete with “closet Marxists” who were intent on invisibly subverting the American way of life.  That his communication director would quote Mao could only mean one thing—she was one of the closet Marxists.  (Had Beck been concerned about his homework, he would have noted that his hero, George W, fairly regularly quoted and referred to Mao.  Or perhaps he did do that homework, but didn’t find it convenient to attach the Marxist label to W)

            That rant apparently didn’t gain much traction, so on Oct. 19, Beck amped it up a bit.  (This was the episode I saw.)  Here, he edited the clip so that all the audience heard was “ Mao Tse-tung and Mother Teresa—not often coupled with one another but the two people I turn to most . . .”  In his typically aggrieved way, he emphasized the words “the two people I turn to most . . .”, then played the clip again and emphasized those words again.  Not to be outdone, Hannity played the same mutilated clip and emphasized the same seven words.

            Was Beck lying?  Not actually.  Was he telling the truth?  Far from it.  No where in that speech did Dunn say anything that a reasonable person could interpret as agreeing with Mao’s Marxist principles.  She was clearly using one statement of his to make a rather banal point about staying true to yourself and making your own choices.  What makes this example, in my mind at least, so egregious is that when the full text of what Dunn said didn’t cause any ripples, Beck had no problem of conscience with cherry-picking out the words he wanted and then interpreting them in a way he knew their author never intended.

            Let’s grab a quick example of Hannity similarly ignoring facts that were readily available.  Obama had appointed an openly gay man, Kevin Jennings, to be one of his education advisors.  In 1994, Jennings had written a book entitled One Teacher in Ten in which he described a situation where a male sophomore had come to him for counseling about his sexual relationship with an older man.  In his book, Jennings said, “I listened, sympathized, and offered advice.”  Hannity didn’t even do the original spade work on this one.  The Family Research Council (yes, James Dobson’s infamous group) cherry picked that incident and used it to conclude that Jennings was “a radical homosexual activist.”  On his Sept. 30 show (the one I saw), Hannity actually devoted most of his program to Jennings, during which he argued that “at the very least, statutory rape occurred.  And [Jennings] didn’t report it.”

            In Virginia, statutory rape occurs whenever someone 15 or younger is abused.  All Jennings said in his book was that the student was a sophomore, which meant he could have been as young as 14 or as old as 16.  One would think that before charging a presidential advisor with the crime of failing to report statutory rape, Hannity would have done a little homework and found out exactly how old the student was.  Instead, one of two things happened: he did the homework and chose to ignore what it revealed, or he didn’t bother to do the homework.  A few days later, Media Matters produced a birth certificate that showed the student was 16 at the time. 

            Fox quietly ran a correction to Hannity’s charge a few days later, but did so on its web site, not on air.  Nor did the truth get in Hannity’s way.  Over the next 10 days, Hannity ran 12 segments attacking Jennings, and while he didn’t use the words statutory rape in any of them, he didn’t retract his earlier use of them either.  Instead, he railed against Jennings’ impropriety in not making it clear to the student that what he was doing was wrong.

            Who was it (Harry Truman, Mark Twain?) who said there are lies and there are damn lies?  My question is how exactly does the first amendment give a television personality—or the network on which he appears—the right to knowingly prevaricate.  Every news organization gets things wrong now and then, but responsible ones quickly admit their mistake and take responsibility for it.  At Fox, Roger Ailes seems to have taken the position that his pundits can say whatever they want, however far from truth or reality it might be, because they are somehow separate from “the news side.”

            Even that fiction is hard to maintain, however, when you look at some of the things that have made it to the “news side.”  On Beck’s Oct. 23 show (another one I saw) he appeared on stage with a baseball bat which he waved about while engaging in a wandering rant about how the Obama administration’s desire to “get Fox” by limiting its access to administration officials was Chicago-style politics at its roughest.  To underscore his point, he played clips from the Kevin Costner/Robert deNiro film, The Untouchables, including one in which deNiro’s Al Capone character bashed in the head of an adversary with a bat that looked very similar to Beck’s. 

            Two days later, on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, surely part of  Fox’s news side, Wallace played one of the clips Beck had played—this one of Sean Connery saying “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun.  He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of  his to the morgue.  That’s the Chicago way.”

            Wallace watched the clip, then intoned, “the latest chapter in the Chicago way was that the administration made an effort this week to use the White House pool—that’s the—all the five major networks—to try to exclude Fox from interviewing pay czar Ken Feinberg.”

            In fact,  Fox hadn’t been excluded—it had simply not requested to join the other pool reporters in the interview.  When Anita Dunn (yes, that one) was notified by pool members that Fox wasn’t on the list, she made sure that Major Garrett, Fox’s chief White House correspondent was put on the list.  Garret confirmed that Fox had not been excluded.  Somehow, Wallace never got around to correcting that little boo-boo on air.

            No one wants truth police scouring the airwaves (or bandwidths) for lies, distortions or propoganda.  ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN do everything they can to make sure what they say on air is accurate and to correct it when they do err.  Even MSNBC does a halfway decent job of self-policing.  Only Fox feels comfortable with bending, distorting, ignoring or simply denying facts that don’t suit its political agenda.  Perhaps the government should start charging Fox the going rate for info-mercials and let them say whatever they want.      

how did we get here

            I was 9 years old (actually, 8 and a half) when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president.  I had followed the progress (or lack thereof) of the Korean War with great interest initially, great repugnance eventually, during the final years of Harry Truman’s presidency.  When Eisenhower almost immediately made it clear he was serious about ending that conflict, I became a fan—which I suppose means my first party affiliation was Republican.

            In those days, however, being Republican or Democrat didn’t mean you considered members of the other party satans incarnate.  Democrats didn’t consider Republicans innately stupid, nor did Republicans consider Democrats innately evil.  The two parties, and their members, differed with one another on the role of government, on economics, on most aspects of foreign policy (everyone agreed that Russia was bad), but the disagreements were—for the most part—philosophical not personal.  And that was important because it meant two politicians could debate an issue without despising each other.

            Equally important, during the Eisenhower years, and the Kennedy/Johnson years that followed, both parties operated under the premise that, once an election was over, it was the obligation of the people elected to actually govern the country—not spend 80% of his/her time meeting with focus groups and consultants and lobbyists to plan out the next campaign. 

            Just as significantly, maybe more so, most members of both parties accepted the idea that, for the moment at least, the party with the majority represented the most accurate reflection of the country’s image of itself, and so that party’s ideas should be given a certain degree of deference.  In practical terms, that meant there were times when Democrats had to work with Republicans to achieve Republican goals, and other times when Republicans needed to work with Democrats to achieve Democratic goals.  Eisenhowever didn’t create the interstate highway system by executive fiat; he needed and got help and support from Democrats in Congress.  Similarly, Lyndon Johnson didn’t get the Civil Rights Act passed by willing it so; he needed and got help from Republicans (Republican Everett Dirksen was a lot more helpful than Democrat Strom Thurmond). 

            It’s hard to escape the conclusion that civility and recognition of a shared responsibility to govern eroded substantially during the Nixon years.  Aided and abetted by minor league Machiavells like John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, Nixon pushed the Republican party very hard to see things in an “us against them” light, with “us”—the Republican party—always being right and “them”—the Democrats always being wrong.

            Ironically, his election in 1968 came as a result of a campaign built on the need for “reconciliation.”  Vietnam and the age of Aquarius had badly shredded the social and cultural fabrics of the country and Nixon presented himself as someone who could weave them back together.  And for most of his first term, that’s what he did. Domestically, he introduced revenue sharing with the states, sponsored a number of strong anti-crime laws, even started this country’s first federal environmental protection program.  Internationally, he defused rapidly increasing tensions with China by visiting The Great Wall, and negotiated the first treaty with Russia to limit strategic nuclear weapons.

            He was undone of course by Watergate, the very existence of which pointed to the underlying paranoia of his administration and its determination to remain in power at any cost.  The Watergate scandal essentially ended when Nixon resigned in 1974, but the damage it did to American political life unfortunately didn’t die with it.  Nixon had been the head of the Republican party long enough, and had made enough appointments of like-minded people that far outlived his own tenure, that a “win at all costs” mentality was firmly planted in the Republican party.  Just as importantly, Democrats became infected with the notion that all Republicans were liars, schemers, or simply political hacks.

            The two men who succeeded Nixon, Republican Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter, were, ironically, almost the antitheses of the poisonous attitudes that had begun to infect their parties.  Politically, Ford was clearly right of center and Carter just as clearly left of center, but both believed that men of good will working together  could solve problems.  Neither, unfortunately, had the power of personality to force their parties to behave accordingly.   

            In my next blog, I’ll take a look at what happened inside the Republican party during the Reagan years—most of which had much more to do with Nixon attitudes and Nixon appointments than with Reagan.  Not sure when that post will happen because I’m having some surgery this week, but hopefully it will be next weekend.

tax cut deal: a compromise (really?)

            In light of President Obama’s latest capitulation to GOP demands, extending Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, I thought it might be interesting to dig through some numbers to put into perspective what doing that means.

            The number that most immediately jumps out is $900 billion: that’s the amount Americans won’t pay in taxes because of the lower rates, and correspondingly, the amount by which the federal budget deficit will grow.  And remember, that’s just in two years.  When the GOP comes back in 2012 and finds something else to hold hostage (it was extending unemployment benefits this time) so it can demand the cuts be made permanent, that $900 billion catapults into the multi-trillion dollar range over the ensuing decade.  Oh, and as a by the by, because the Bush tax cuts were slanted so heavily toward the rich, fully 25% of the $900 billion that won’t be paid in taxes over the next two years, won’t be paid by the top 1% of the population.  If you extend that out to the top 5% of the population, the number tops 40%.

            Did the GOP give up anything in return for receiving its main priority?  Well, yes it did, sort of.  It agreed to extend unemployment benefits through the end of 2011 (notice this is a year less than the tax cuts will remain in place), it agreed to fairly sharply reduced Social Security payroll taxes for the coming year, and it accepted a reinstatement of the estate tax, though at a rate of 25% instead of the 55% it had been.  So why all the crying and complaining from Democrats and Progressives?  Both sides gave a little, both sides got a little.

            Perhaps the reason for the whining lies in the transparent unfairness of the deal and the perception of GOP motives that are hard to describe as anything but callow.  The line in the sand Republicans drew was extending long term unemployment benefits; its justification for drawing the line was that extending benefits would adversely effect the budget deficit.  The hypocrisy here is jaw-dropping.  Unemployment benefits average about $270/week and the GAO estimated that extending them would add, at most, $5-7 billion to the deficit.  And, as has also been pointed out by numerous non-partisan studies, even that number is misleading because essentially every dollar of unemployment is going to be spend on goods and services which in turn will generate tax revenue.

            Republicans who couldn’t stomach mouthing that shibboleth turned instead to the fiction that extending the tax cuts will stimulate the economy.  Here they found a big supporter in Obama, who said the tax relief “will spur our private sector to create millions of new jobs and add momentum that our economy badly needs.”  Say what?  Let’s keep in mind that what happened here wasn’t adding new or deeper tax cuts.  It was keeping in place the tax rates we have all been paying for the past seven or eight years.  So if the level at which we are all being taxed now isn’t doing much to create new jobs or stimulate the economy, how exactly does continuing those rates change that?  I’m reminded of Einstein’s definition of insanity.

            The final Republican fall-back argument I’ve dealt with on this blog before—the notion that raising the tax rate on those making over $250,000 would hurt small business (see "Tax Cut Poppycock).  I found some interesting numbers germaine to this argument.  There are approximately 220,000 “sole proprietorships” in the U.S.  That means  a business entity that is the sole source of income for an individual.  Their average annual income is less than $100,000.  Under the original Democratic plan, their taxes would be unchanged.  Of all the small business operations in the country, only 3% fall into the $250,000 category, and nearly all of them are professional organizations like law firms or medical groups.  So, yes, owners of those businesses would take a higher tax hit, but as I pointed out in my earlier blog, that in itself would have no impact on their ability to expand the business or increase the number of employees.

            Reducing the Social Security payroll tax sounds like a surprising act of compassion on the part of the GOP, but keep in mind that the Social Security payroll taxes employees pay is matched by their employer, so this cut is as much a break for business as for wage-earners.  In fact, proportionally, it’s a much bigger break for business.

           

            More to the point, Social Security is currently solvent, but is projected to remain so only another 25 years or so.  At that point, it will become what Republicans disingenuously say it is now, a contributor to budget deficits.  This one smacks a bit of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

            The one thing Obama got to his credit was reinstatement of the estate tax.  That will effect only the wealthiest Americans and, even at the 25% rate, will have a positive effect on the deficit.

            Beyond the substantive problems with Obama’s deal is the perception that he once again conceded the field to the Republicans without a fight.  If ever there were a position more blatantly hypocritical than the GOP’s insistence that unemployment benefits couldn’t be extended because the budget couldn’t take it, but an exponentially larger hit to the budget in the form of tax cuts was an ideal to be sought, I can’t imagine what it would be.  It is probably true that there are enough Republicans and DIMO’s (Democrats in name only) in the Senate to have kept extending tax cuts only on the rich from happening, but what so many of us wonder is why the President refuses to call the Republicans out and make them actually cast a vote against unemployment benefits and for the richest 1 % of the country.

              

DADT and Oz

            I’m fascinated by watching politicians wiggle and squirm when the curtain they have hidden behind on substantive issues is ripped away.  The spectacle is positively Wizard of Oz-ian.

            Though examples are legion, the most recent is also one of the most glaring; the dance of obfuscation that conservative congressmen from both parties have recently engaged in over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

            A little history might be helpful.  Before DADT became official policy in the 1990’s, conservatives from both parties spoke as little as possible about the subject of gays in the military, but when they did, it was generally along the lines of  “Homosexual men can’t (or won’t) fight the way straight men will.  No American soldier should be forced to share a foxhole with a homosexual.”

            There was, and remains, a broad swath of the American poplulace that accepted that line of thought as a given.  Homosexuality was (is) an offense against God.  To that sector of the population, homosexuals would, if allowed into the close confines of military life,  surely contaminate our fighting men.  For these folks, it was a safe assumption that if you put a gay man in a foxhole with a straight man, the straight man would have to sight his weapon with one eye, while keeping the other eye on his foxhole mate to make sure his hands stayed on his weapon.

            Though it seems a distant memory now, that’s a pretty apt description of the arguments advanced by the opponents of DADT in the ‘90’s.  When the policy was put in place anyway, they grudgingly applauded the fact that it still made being open about one’s sexuality grounds for dismissal from the service.  What they quickly realized, however, was that DADT also provided a much more politically correct position for them.  Now they could deplore homosexuality, cheer the fact that openness about it resulted in mustering out, but do that privately—only for the constituents who wanted to hear it—while publically jumping behind an Oz-ian curtain and saying “Hey, we’re just supporting the policy our military leaders have adopted.”  Some of them, John McCain springs to mind, went so far as to say they would support DADT so long as the military wanted it.

            Oops! Turns out the military doesn’t want it anymore—in fact, wants it rescinded immediately.  This was the message Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen and vice-Chairman Gen. James Cartwright delivered last week to the Senate Armed Services Committee.  According to Cartwright, American service members “think in terms of mission accomplishment and look beyond issues of race, religion, gender, and, frankly, sexual orientation.” His choice of words there is telling, as much for what they allude to as what they say.  Religion has never been an issue with regard to military service, but race and gender have.  Blacks and women were historically excluded from mainstream service, and there was a huge hue and cry from the same segments of the population so adamant about gays in the military when blacks and women were fully incorporated.  Amazingly, the military’s fighting capacity was not diminished one iota by either.

            The defense secretary and the Chiefs were reacting to a survey of over 100,000 active duty service men and women, the gist of which was, do you consider gays in the military a problem?  The very substantial majority response was NO. 

            So what does McCain do?  First he announces that the survey was “faulty,” though he provides no indication of what in it was bad.  Then he announces that he would only support repeal of DADT after a series of 13 hearings, the focus of which would be to elicit enlisted men’s views on the subject.  (Though not responding directly to Senator McCain, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey noted that the military is not a democracy.) Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell later announced that he would “follow Senator McCain’s lead” on the subject.  The rest of the Republican leadership fell quickly in line, as did Democrats like Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas.

            What seems clear here is that DADT is not a military policy issue, it’s a cultural issue and when you get right down to it, a religious issue.  For the born agains among us, homosexuality is a sin, and when politicians oppose repeal of DADT, their real reason for doing so has nothing to do with military readiness; it has to do with appeasing the most religious among their constituents—or, in some cases, with reflecting their own religious beliefs. 

           

            Is there anything wrong with a politican voting his conscience or the consciences of his constituents?  Absolutely not.  But let’s call it what it is and stop hiding behind Oz-ian curtains like military effectiveness.  Gay men and women have been serving in the military for as long as we have had a military.  In proportions at least equal to that of straights, their service has been honorable and their fighting record admirable.  Removing DADT isn’t going to increase the number of gay men and women in service; it will simply allow them to serve without lying about—or at least concealing—who they are.

            Something that has always puzzled me about religious objections to gays in the military: because God couldn’t possibly create something as heinous as a homosexual, religious folks are adamant that being gay is a choice individuals make.  If that’s true, why would allowing people who have made that choice to admit it cause people who haven’t made the choice to suddenly decide to do so?  Not sure there’s a logic to follow here.

            

more points to ponder

            There are a number of issues in this country’s current political scene where the disconnect between logic and action makes my brain contemplate implosion.  To wit:

            Privatizing Social Security.  To those calling for this—mostly Republicans and mostly (though not entirely) from the Tea Party wing of the party—one wants to holler through the world’s largest bullhorn, “Where the hell were you from 2007-2009? Visiting another planet?”  Did you miss the fact that the investment market tanked during those years and flushed literally trillions of 401(k) dollars down the toilet?  Assuming you ever took Econ 101 (or simply have a modicum of common sense), did you miss the part about investment entailing risk?  First Congress enabled, indeed encouraged, businesses to discard defined benefit retirement systems and push their employees into personal risk investment plans; now the GOP wants to yank the last remaining safety net for older Americans, Social Security, and replace it with the same kind of private investment accounts that wiped out so many people over the past two years.

            The excuse drummed up by conservatives to support this counter-intuitive idea?

Why, the ballooning national debt of course.  Only one problem here.  Social Security has since its inception paid for itself, and will continue to do so until at least 2037.  It adds not one dollar to the budget deficit or the national debt.  At this moment, more money is coming into the Social Security Trust Fund every year than is going out.  As we draw closer to 2037, some changes in the system will be needed to make sure that continues, but none of those is so drastic as to justify the scuttling of the entire program.  For a start, simply extend the FICA (payroll) tax to all earnings instead of cutting it off at $97,000.

            Cut Off Unemployment Benefits AND Extend Tax Cuts For The Rich.  While this one is a Republican mantra, it is a theme now being espoused by some conservative Democrats as well.  For me, this poses both a logical and an ethical conundrum.  The logical problem is obvious.  It’s hard to estimate how much extending unemployment will cost because it’s hard to predict how long it will be needed, but most economists put the probable price tag at somewhere around one billion dollars.  That sounds like a lot, but it’s actually adding about 1% to the budget deficit.  Extending tax cuts for the rich, on the other hand, will deny the U.S. Treasury something in the order of seven hundred billion dollars in just the next decade.  So if the urgent thing is to get the budget deficit down, which should be more worrisome—adding one billion dollars to the deficit, or refusing to reduce it by seven hundred billion?  I was never super-acute in math, but that seems like a no-brainer.

            The ethical problem is equally obvious.  It’s been estimated that allowing the tax rate on the rich to go up 3% will add, on average, about $9,000 to their tax liability.  Taking away the $270/week an unemployed citizen is currently receiving deprives him of his ability even to buy food.  I’m not sure how the Jim DeMint’s of the world go to sleep at night faced with that dichotomy.

            This position makes no sense even when looked at from an economic policy point of view.  That $270/week the unemployed receive is going right back into the economy for the goods and services its recipient needs to live.  It is adding, in other words, to the consumer spending everyone agrees is the key to full economic recovery.  The $9,000 in additional taxes the rich aren’t paying is, for the most part, going into investment accounts that produce nothing, purchase nothing, indeed, do nothing in terms of spurring economic recovery.

            Cut Federal Spending In A Recession.  Little history lesson is appropriate here.

In this country, the stock market bombed in 1929.  FDR was elected in 1932 and he immediately did things like declare a bank “holiday,” but more importantly, he initiated a whole raft of  government funded programs like the CCC and the WPA to put Americans back to work and put money into the economy.  Added side benefit—a lot of improvements were made to infrastructure.  When he was re-elected in 1936, the economy was beginning to recover and Roosevelt, stupidly as it turned out, lent an ear to political advisors who cautioned him to drastically slash the level of federal spending.  The result was that the economy dove deeper into recession than it had originally been, and would in all likelihood have remained there were it not for a world war.

            In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s Japan, which had been a world economic leader for two decades, experienced a bubble-burst not unlike the one we recently experienced.  The Japanese government’s immediate reaction was to cut back on spending at every conceivable corner.  Three years or so later, it realized the fecklessness of that approach and began spending, but at levels far too low to move the economic needle.  The result was what is usually described as Japan’s “lost decade,” a ten year period that vacillated between deflation and stagflation, but showed no growth.

            Economics is often referred to as the “dismal science,” and, to be sure, it is perhaps the least empirical of even the social sciences.  Nevertheless, when virtually every economist not employed by the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute states unequivocally that what is needed now is the aggressive federal spending that characterized FDR’s first response to the Great Depression, one has to wonder—why is no one in Washington, including our supposedly professorial President, listening?

            How much gray matter does it take, really, to understand that when you remove money from an already struggling economy, fewer people have jobs, meaning fewer people have money to buy things, meaning demand for things goes down, meaning more and more businesses either fail entirely or cut back on production, meaning even fewer people have jobs . . . surely the point is obvious.

            I’m not suggesting the budget deficit and the national debt aren’t problems.  But a cure that is entirely focused on cutting spending has historically been shown to be worse than the disease.

            A little thought please that doesn’t revolve around ideology, what’s best for the party, or what’s most likely to get me re-elected. 

pollyannas versus cynics

            Don’t know if there’s a genetic difference between conservatives and liberals (though I recently saw one study that suggested there might be),  but they are separated by much more than just their political viewpoints. 

           

            An easy distinction to draw between the two is to label liberals as optimists and conservatives as pessimists, but those words seem insufficient to me.  From where I stand, liberal behavior seems driven by, not a belief, but something actually much deeper than that—call it an assumption—that in the end, fair play, basic human decency and an underlying, genuine devotion to the common weal will carry the day.

            Conservative behavior, again, from where I stand, seems driven likewise by an assumption that runs deeper even than a belief, to wit, that fair play, human decency and devotion to the common weal are clear evidences of naivete, and in general present opportunities to be seized. Carpe diem.

            For certain, there is a Pollyanna quality to liberal thinking, just as there is a cynical quality to conservative thinking.  In perhaps simpler terms, liberals tend to focus on what’s needed to protect the weakest; conservatives tend to focus on what’s in the best interest of the strongest.

            In today’s polarized political world, the distinction between conservatives and liberals is embodied in the two major parties—liberalism from the Democrats, conservatism from the Republicans.  Interestingly, at least since Reagan, the fundamental difference between a liberal outlook and a conservative one has resulted in democrats seeing government as a tool for promoting the common good while republicans see it as a tool for serving the self-interest of the Republican party.

            From Reagan’s proclamation that government is the problem not the solution, through the “defund the left” programs launched so successfully by Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff (yes, that Jack Abramoff), through the Newt Gincrich to Karl Rove programs to install a “permanent Republican majority,” the Republican party has shown not a lot of interest in actually governing, but quite a lot of interest in self-aggrandizement.

            Perhaps nowhere was that conservative/Republican modus operandi  more apparent than in recent skirmishes with Barack Obama.  Unfortunately, the Pollyanna quality of  liberal/Democratic thinking is equally apparent in the same skirmishes.

            Obama’s campaign for the presidency was relatively skimpy on specific programs and proposals but high on hope and a commitment to moving past the rabid partisanship that had defined Washington for at least two decades.  We chuckle all the time about athletes falling on their faces when they spend too much time “reading their press clippings,” but in a way that’s what happened with Obama.

            John Roberts had scarcely finished mangling the Oath of Office when two things happened.  Obama made clear that he wanted to work with Republicans to fashion programs that would benefit all the country, while simultaneously, the Republican congressional caucus was meeting to devise a strategy to defeat whatever Obama proposed.

            The first major initiative Obama proposed was health care reform, and he made it clear he wanted Republican input.  What he got instead was South Carolina senator Jim DeMint announcing on the floor of the Senate that the Republican strategy would be to use health care to “destroy” Obama’s presidency.

            Now let’s be clear here.  The Republicans knew they didn’t have enough votes to prevent some form of health reform package from passing.  What they could do—and in fact did do—was everything possible to delay the actual passing of the bill (could the dems get 60 votes to kill a filibuster), and, more importantly, introduce as many distortions (a public option equals socialism) and outright lies (remember death panels?) as possible in order to create enough confusion about the program that, once it was passed, it could become a 2010 mid-term election issue Republicans could exploit. That seems a pretty decent description of cynical behavior.

            Hardball politics from the Democrats would have been to put what they wanted in the bill, then introduce it for a vote every day and force the Republicans to put up or shut up.  Instead, Obama and the Democratic leadership caved and pandered and in the end passed a bill that had something in it for nearly everyone to dislike.  Why did they do that?  Perhaps because they thought what they were able to get was better for the country than nothing.

            If you are a liberal, it’s hard not to pine for the Democrats to produce again someone like Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom believed passionately in government FOR the people, but had in them enough of that conservative instinct for the jugular that made bashing heads and  twisting arms  something they were comfortable with.  Roosevelt was willing to pack the Supreme Court with justices who would support his agenda.  He didn’t get away with it (thankfully), but his willingness to do it sent a clear message to the opposition party and to the country that he was willing to fight for the mandate his election had given him.

            LBJ might have been a Texas rube who referred to African-Americans as “coloreds,” but he was passionately devoted to civil rights and made it very clear to Republican and Democratic congressmen alike that if they fought him on that issue, they would come to rue that action.

            Today, a liberal with balls is about as easy to find as a snowball in hell.  And conservatives?  Well, they’re united behind Mitch McConnell who says publically that the number one Republican objective is to make sure Obama is a one-term president.  Think about that.  Record unemployment, rampant foreclosures, declining median incomes, two wars, disappearing retirement incomes, skyrocketing medical costs, to name just a few problems—and the number one conservative/Republican objective is to limit Obama to one term.

            I’m not certain a one-term Obama presidency would be a bad thing.  I do however think it’s sad, and more than a little scary, that causing that to happen is important to the Republican Senate leader than any other problem the country faces.

angry or stupid

            Anger, frustration, disappointment, disillusion—all these can be powerful factors in motivating  behavior.  A creep tries to hit on your girl friend and when she rebuffs him, he slaps her around and calls her a slut.  When you hear about this, you’re overwhelmed with anger, so you grab a baseball bat and play T-ball with the creep’s head.  Watching him drop in a heap provides a real sense of gratification for you, but then the cops show up and haul you off to prison.  Unfortunately, when emotion drives our behavior, short term-gain often leads to long-term pain.           

            In the political arena, emotion-based behavior very often results in people voting against what is clearly their best interest.  I can’t help but be reminded of that when I think about some of the candidates who won big victories November 2.  The specific examples are legion, but in the interest of time and space, let me focus here on just two of them: Rand Paul and Mario Rubio.

            I was born and grew up Kentucky, so this isn’t the first time I’ve looked at a Kentucky election and wondered what the hell were they thinking about.  Kentucky is a state that basically has three industries: coal in the eastern third, horses in the central third, and bourbon everywhere.  If you head east on I-64, about the time you cross the Kentucky River, you’re in Kentucky coal country.  It’s often called mountain country, though jagged hills would probably describe it better (the tallest mountain, Black Mountain, is only about 4,800 feet high).  In some places, you’re in the foothills of the Appalachian range; in others you’re in the Cumberland range. 

            In either case, it’s an area of rugged looking hillsides and deep valleys, most of them cut by one of Kentucky’s numerous rivers and streams.  When I lived in Kentucky in the 1950’s, it was one of the most scenic areas of the country, truly a feast for the senses to drive, or better yet, hike through.  No more.

            As I said before, this is coal country—as it was in the ‘50’s.  Whether the rapaciousness of the coal industry has grown exponentially since then, or perhaps just its technological capacity, the rape of the land then is nothing compared to now.  Now, as you drive along any road in coal country, what you will see is hillside after hillside where literally the entire side of the mountain has been scraped away.  If you look high enough, you’ll also notice that in many cases, the top of the mountain has been blasted away.  And if you look at the streams and rivers running along the valley floors, you’ll see where everything that wasn’t coal has gone.

            Nor is it just the topographical environment that the coal industry has destroyed.  My oldest daughter spent a summer in the ‘90’s performing with an outdoor drama in Prestonburg, which is heart of coal country.  We went to see her and started the visit by checking into (as I recall) the one motel in town.  We unloaded the car, unpacked our bags, freshened up a little, and went back to the car to go to dinner.  We had been in the room for maybe 45 minutes.  When we got to the car, I was horrified to realize that I could literally write my name in the fine rock dust that had settled on it.  WE WERE BREATHING THAT!

            The point of this?  The people of Kentucky, including a significant majority in eastern Kentucky, elected Rand Paul who has made clear that getting rid of what federal regulatory agencies still exist  is one of his top priorities.  They voted, in other words for a man who would make it even easier for the coal industry to rape the countryside, pollute the streams, and foul the air that they have to live in and breathe.  It no doubt made them feel better when they cast their ballot to figuratively smack Washington insiders in the face, but at what cost to themselves, their children and their children’s children?

            Then there’s Rubio in Florida.  Though the number of seniors retiring in or to Florida has slowed some in recent years, Florida is still one of our grayest states, and no one gets elected to state-wide office there without polling well among seniors.  And while Rubio’s embrace of the Tea Party smacks awfully of a marriage of convenience, he did very carefully toe the Tea Party line during his run against Charlie Crist, which means that, among other things, he espoused doing away with Social Security and replacing it with private investment accounts.  This on the heels of the 401(K) debacle a couple years back in which literally thousands of people saw their retirement incomes  disappear almost literally overnight. 

            I have money in an IRA account myself, and I vividly remember two years ago watching $20-30,000 disappear from that account every quarter for a year.  I’m retired, and while I don’t depend on Social Security for my retirement income, if all I could depend on was that IRA, I’d be worried, very worried.  It’s inconceivable to me how the many, many seniors in Florida who had to have experienced, like I did, the rapid withering of a private investment account, would vote for someone who wanted to ensure that such an account would be all they had to retire on.

            At what point does anger simply become another word for stupidity?

are 10 commandments too many?

            Been thinking today about religion, which, for those of you who know me, is kind of weird.  Specifically, I was thinking about how a relatively close approximation of the 10 commandments exists in pretty much every religion, major or otherwise.  No news there,  but then I got to thinking how if you forgot—or just never knew—that Moses got his commandments from a burning bush, you might think, “damn, he was one pretty savvy dude.”  

You might think that because,  if you throw out the first four (three in the Roman Catholic version), all of which exhort us to honor only the one true God (Allah for Muslims), the  commandments (and their cousins in other religions) are really just expressions of what we might call societal common sense.  They provide a fundamental—one might even say essential—framework for people living together successfully in a social unit.  As such they constitute as much a social compact as a moral contract.

            Think about it: don’t kill (more on this in a moment), don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat, honor your parents, have all come to be regarded as moral dicta because they were on Moses’ tablets and among Allah’s revelations to Mohammed, but they are also pretty clearly necessary agreements we make with one another if we want to live harmoniously with others. And that would be true even if they had no moral gravitas.

            I’m not trying to diminish the spiritual importance of these dicta, just suggesting that they would be equally important without any moral connotations at all. 

            Ah, but then there’s the first four (or three) commandments: I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other Gods before me; you shall not make for yourself any graven idols; you shall not take the Lord’s name in vain; you must remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. (The Qu’ranic equivalents are: There is no other god beside Allah; protect me and my children from worshipping idols; make not Allah’s name an excuse in your oaths against doing good; when the congregational prayer is announced on Friday, you shall hasten to the commemoration of God, and drop all business.)

            The problem with these dicta  is that they assume the existence of  an all-powerful being who takes a very personal interest in being recognized as the only one of his kind and in being worshipped in very specific ways and at a very specific time.  Why do I call that a problem?  Because it’s very hard for me to imagine what the human race gains by acceding to those exhortations if it is in fact fully committed to following the 6 or 7 commandments that follow. 

             Stay with me on this.  If I honor my father and mother (and by extension all those who earn/deserve my respect), if I never cheat or lie, if I never steal, if I never commit murder, if I never commit adultery (and by extension, never break any compact I’ve freely made with another person), would I not fully qualify as a good person?  Someone you’d welcome into your heart and home?  Someone who, and this is key, fully deserves a heavenly reward if in fact such a thing exists?

            Cut me some slack now and stay the course.  The commandments, it seems to me,  fall into two categories: one that charges us to recognize the divinity of  a superior being, and one that gives us very specific guidance about living well among our neighbors.  The second category we clearly need—indeed, couldn’t survive without.  The first, maybe not so much.

            Hindu and Buddhist religions offer a god figure considerably more laid back and less needy than the god of Christianity or Islam.  That may explain why their followers have more frequently been victims of religious persecution than instigators of it. Christianity and Islam--kind of a different story.

            You can  make a case that the Christian god and the Muslim God share so many attributes that they might easily be considered the same being.  Muslims and Christians (at least the rank and file of each) have never seen it that way.  Hence, when the Christian god leads off his commandments with “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other Gods before me,” and Allah leads off his revelations to Mohammed with “There is no other God beside Allah,” it’s easy to see the potential for conflict.

            And conflict there has been, from the beginnings of Islam in the 7^th century straight through 9/11 and today.  Lest there be any confusion, as much of that conflict has been started by  Christians as Muslims.  Witness the Crusades of the 12^th and 13^th centuries or the imperial proselytizing of the Middle East during the 19^th and 20^th  centuries.

            And how many thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of lives have been destroyed by wars over—not my god is better than your god—but over my way of worshipping OUR god is better than yours.  How many Jews have Christians killed?  How many Protestants have Catholics killed?  How many Catholics have Protestants killed?  How many Protestants have Protestants killed?   On the Muslim side, how many Shi'ites have Sunnis killed?  Or vice-versa.

            Does make one wonder what the world would be like if we all just chose to ignore the first few commandments.  Maybe, without those “I’m your god, fall down and worship me” commands at the top of the list, it wouldn’t make sense to amend Thou Shalt Not Kill to Thou Shalt Not Kill Unless .  .  . with the ellipse standing for You Try To Put Your God (Or Your Way Of Worshipping Him) Over Mine.

insurance company/health care paradox

          The newly ascendant Republican party, especially its Tea Party fringe, in a couple of months will be positioned to show off at least one of the horses most of them rode to Washington on—the repeal and replacement of the health care reform bill.  Actually, they’ll be in a position to VOTE for repeal and replace, not to in fact do it.  President Obama and the Democrats can still sustain a veto.

            I recall being surprised a little during the debate on health care reform at the unanimity of the Republican caucus in opposing it.  Why did that surprise me?  Because the health insurance industry is one of the major bankrollers of Republican members of congress (it gave over three times as much to Republican candidates as it did to Demcorats).  But what’s surprising about that, you might ask?  Surely, the insurance industry was bitterly opposed to the health care bill.

            The question that kept nagging at me was simple.  Why would the insurance industry oppose a bill that significantly strengthens the employer-based insurance system that has been a gold mine for it for decades, AND guarantees them billions in new premium revenue once the requirement that everyone have insurance (known as the individual mandate) kicks in 3 years from now?  The answer to that question, it now appears, is equally simple—the industry in fact supported a bill that included an individual mandate but excluded a public option.

            In a Newsweek article based on his book, Deadly Spin, Wendell Potter—who was one of the industry’s spinmeisters for over two decades (he was a leader in killing the Clinton health reform, the patients’ bill of rights and was one of the leaders in prepping industry lobbyists on how to “guide” construction of Obama’s bill), leads off the article by saying,

                        Conservatives who voted for congressional candidates because they

                        Pledged to repeal and replace the health-care reform law are in for

                        a rude awakening.  Once those newly elected members of Congress

                        have a little talk with the insurance company’s lobbyists and

                        executives, they will back off from that pledge.

The reason they will be counseled to back off is that the health-care reform bill, as presently constructed, will be a tremendous financial boon to the insurance industry.  The backing off may well have already started.  Have you noticed how the loud noises about the individual mandate being unconstitutional aren’t coming from Republican congressmen anymore (except of course for Tea Party wingnuts like Rand Paul), but from Republican state Attorneys-General, who, because they aren’t concentrated in Washington, are much harder for the industry to control?

            In his article, Potter argues that the industry’s only real fear about the health reform bill was that it might contain a public option which would have the effect of constraining the degree to which it could engage in premium-gouging.

            Lest one come away with the silly notion that the insurance industry backs health reform altruistically, Potter also notes that what it will be expecting its Republican friends to do is chip away at the consumer protection clauses of the bill that adversely affect the bottom line.  The industry is not happy about no longer being allowed to refuse coverage based on pre-existing conditions; it’s very unhappy about no longer being able to cancel policies when people actually get sick; it’s even more unhappy that it can no longer set annual and lifetime limits on benefits; it’s virtually livid about the requirement that, henceforth, 80 cents out of every premium dollar must go toward actual medical care; and its nearly apoplectic over the provisions that severely cut back on the billions of dollars the government has been overpaying the industry for its participation in private Medicare plans.

            As Potter puts it, “Be on the look-out for a death panel-like fearmongering campaign to scare people into thinking, erroneously, that Granny and Pawpaw will lose their government health care if Congress doesn’t restore those ‘cuts’ to Medicare.”

            My guess as to what will happen in January?  The Republicans in the House will hold hearings stocked with “expert witnesses” from conservative propaganda mills like the Heritage Foundation, and Republicans in both houses of congress will take to the floor for C-Span moments to rail against the bill.  Ultimately, and with as much fanfare as they can generate, they will toss a final piece of red meat to the lunatic fringe by introducing a bill to repeal the law that they have no intention of passing.

            Then they’ll get down to the serious business of eroding or eliminating as many consumer protections as possible. 

PERSONAL NOTE: You may have noticed that my postings have become less frequent of late.  Much to my chagrin, circumstances have required me to "unretire" till mid-December, so I don't at the moment have as much time for blogging as I'd like.  That should change in January when my rambling rants will return in force.

  

bang that lie

            There is an old bromide that a lie told often enough becomes a truth.  Unfortunately the truth of that bromide is no lie.  Case in point?  Virtually every “truth” the Republican party rode to its recent landslide legislative victory.  I thought it might be interesting (depressing might actually be a better word) to catalogue the lies Republicans, and their 24/7/365 “news” channel, have alchemized magically into truths.  Some of these I’ve alluded to at least in earlier blogs.

            OBAMACARE IS THE FIRST STEP TO SOCIALIZED MEDICINE.  To the chagrin of progressives, the health care reform package did not include a public option.  What it did do, in the short term, was outlaw the most rapacious of insurance industry practices (cancelling policies when claims are filed, denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions, forcing children off their parents’ policies the minute they leave school), and, in the long term, mandate that every one have at least a minimal level of health insurance.  Ay, there’s the socialism rub, Republicans say.   But no, what the bill says is that insurance must be purchased from private insurance companies—which sounds like quite a “free market” thing to me.  Oh, and there won't be any death panels or any rationing of health care unless the private insurers try to institute same.  In which case, there are now regulatory agencies that can tell them no.

            OBAMACARE WILL MONUMENTALLY INCREASE THE FEDERAL BUDGET DEFICIT AND ULTIMATELY THE NATIONAL DEBT.  In fact, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has said repeatedly that the health care bill will cut costs by as much as 10 billion dollars during its first decade or two, and then decrease costs at an even higher rate after that.  The CBO’s analysis, which was first released BEFORE the bill was actually passed and has been released again several times since, is that the long-term effect of the bill will be reduction of the federal budget deficit and the national debt.

            OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRATS HAVE CAUSED AN EXPLOSIVE INCREASE IN THE FEDERAL BUDGET DEFICIT AND MORTGAGED THE FUTURE OF OUR CHILDREN.  It takes a pair of cast-iron cajones to tell this lie, but it’s been one of the most popular.  In fiscal year 2000, the last for which President Clinton was responsible, the federal budget showed an 86.4 billion dollar surplus.  In fiscal 2008, the last year for which W. was responsible, the federal budget showed a 458 billion dollar deficit.  (these figures from the Congressional Budget Office).  But that ½ trillion dollar swing into red ink actually understates Bush’s deficit creation.  The cost of his two wars, estimated in 2008 at 1 trillion dollars, isn’t reflected in any of his budgets because the entirety of both wars under Bush was fought “off-budget.”  Afghanistan and Iraq were both paid for under Bush by “supplemental appropriations,” that is, additional moneys approved by Congress AFTER that year’s budget was already in place.  Just as important, maybe more so long term, the Bush administration made no attempt to actually pay for the supplemental appropriations.  Rather, it simply borrowed the money—meaning that in the long run the cost of his wars will be substantially greater than 1 trillion dollars.

            If one needed a glaring illustration of the abject cynicism of the Republican party when it comes  to things economic, it would be hard to find a better one than the cavalier manner in which the Bush administration became the first administration ever to launch two wars and CUT taxes at the same time.  And not just cut taxes, but do so in a way that aimed 95% of the cut at the top 5% of incomes. 

            The budget deficit at the end of fiscal 2009, the first year for which Obama was responsible, was 1.4 trillion dollars.  Look, the Republicans say, in one year the  deficit increased by nearly a trillion dollars.  Can’t deny that, but let’s put it into context.  First, fiscal 2009 was the first year that the cost of two wars was actually included in the budget.  Second, the bank bailout program (TARP) was authorized under Bush in October, 2008 and half the money it authorized (350 billion) was released on Oct. 3, 2008, so it was counted as a fiscal 2009 expenditure even though Obama and the Democrats had nothing directly to do with it.  Third, even before Obama took office, it was clear the auto industry was about to implode.  The first step in bailing that industry out was taken in December, 2008 (again, fiscal 2009) by Bush when he authorized 17.4 billion dollars in emergency loans.  That figure ultimately grew to about 86 billion under Obama, but in the latter case, it came in the form of purchases of GM and Chrysler common stock by the government.  It was recently announced that GM intends to buy back over half of that stock from the government within the next few months, and all of it as soon after that as possible.  Ultimately, the Treasury will turn a profit on its investment in the auto industry.  Republican children won't have to pay for that one.

           

          Then there is the 814 billion dollar stimulus bill.  This one is in fact all on Obama and is clearly a huge factor in the 2009 budget deficit.  It’s hard to take credit for something that didn’t happen, but what didn’t happen in this case is that the world financial system and the American economy did not collapse and at least 3 million Americans didn’t lose their jobs.  True the unemployment rate climbed to and has remained in the 9.5/9.6% range, but every economic study indicates that without the stimulus package, it would be closer to 12%.  Some studies have placed the figure as high as 15%. 

           

            What the Republicans also ignore (what they generally do with facts they don’t like) is the fact that the budget deficit actually decreased from 1.4 to slightly less than 1.3 trillion in the recently concluded fiscal 2010.   Not a huge reduction, granted, but an indication that Democratic policies are beginning to move things in the right direction.  Perhaps more significant, the actual deficit represents 8.9% of the nation’s economy, down from 10% the year before.

            One last Republican hypocrisy regarding the deficit and the future they fear it will mortgage.  The Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of this year.  Obama has proposed extending those cuts for everyone making under $250,000; the Republicans want to extend them for everyone--and to add a fix (basically an elimination) of the Alternative Minimum Tax that mostly effects the highest income earners.  Obama's plan would result in approximately a 678 billion dollar increase in federal revenue by 2020.  The Republican plan would subtract approximately 3 trillion dollars from federal revenue during the same period.  That certainly wouldn't help the economic future of our kids, but it's a great boon to the economic health of today's richest Americans.

          My brain is exploding from ferreting out all these numbers, as yours probably is from reading them, so I’m going to stop here for now.  Check back with the blog in the near future and we’ll have more things to add to the catalogue of lies the Republicans told often enough and loudly enough to make them truths for way too many.