Good piece by David Leonhardt on what the money spent on tax cuts for millionaires could be buying:
•A tripling of federal funding for medical research.
•Universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, with relatively small class sizes.
•A much larger troop surge in Afghanistan, raising spending by 60 percent from current levels.
•A national infrastructure program to repair and upgrade roads, bridges, mass transit, water systems and levees.
•A 15 percent cut in corporate taxes.
•Twice as much money for clean-energy research as suggested by a recent bipartisan plan.
•Free college, including room and board, for about half of all full-time students, at both four- and two-year colleges.
•A $500 tax cut for all households.
Sixty billion dollars is even enough money to build the tunnel to NY from NJ- saving millions of man hours of misery and lost hours of productivity. This whole country is just depressing as we slide into second-rate nation status. At a time when we should be debating how to rebuild the country, how to invest in our failing infrastructure, how to invest in renewable resources and rebuild our waste management systems, etc. It used to be, we all at least the government had the responsibility to build roads, bridges, and tunnels. Now, they’re just another partisan toy that GOP frontrunners can axe to “piss off liberals” and build wingnut street cred.
But hey- tax cuts for the rich it is, while we ignore our crumbling nation and debate how to starve future senior citizens.
The Grand Panjandrum
Cheer up John! Here’s more good news!
BTW I knew you wouldn’t last until sundown when you threatened to go on hiatus.
BGinCHI
I wonder what we could add to the list if we get out of Afgh altogether.
How about some creative solutions for the military (strike forces in terrorist training ground hot spots, for example) instead of repeating the mistakes of an even stupider empire (USSR) in an impossible conflict.
BGinCHI
@The Grand Panjandrum: In the future I assume all op-ed writers at the WaPo will be named Kaplan.
It’s just good brand management.
cathyx
But Obama has to concede these tax cuts for all in order to get unemployment benefits extended. At least that’s been the underlying plan all along. It’s the only way Obama can get his dwindling democratic base and his benefactors to continue to support him. It’s a win win for him.
celticdragonchick
Future historians are going to point to us an example of how democracy can fail and fail badly.
The Grand Panjandrum
David Cay Johnston has written something other than a “will he, or won’t he” set piece about why Obama should NOT cave on the tax cuts.
Dennis SGMM
@cathyx:
The Republican position on extending UI, at least according to the articles that I’ve read, is that they might be willing to extend UI as long as that doesn’t increase the deficit. To me that signals that they’ll either go after any unspent stimulus money (Again) or demand that the Dems go along with cuts in other programs. The R’s will spin that as a win-win for them – and they’ll be right this time.
val
— from the comments section of the Kaplan piece. How true.
Odie Hugh Manatee
This mess has been a long time coming. Lowering tax rates over the years only gave rich people more money to buy the rest of the government. A DC political job is the ticket to the gravy train for anyone who can make it. If you parlay your position into one of power you will make a good chunk of change, guaranteed. Money is power and the rich exercise their power by spreading a bit of it around to the right people. The money they ‘invest’ in politicians is a pittance to them but a large sum to the pols who are glad to take it. DC politics is a power/cash game, if you don’t have it you don’t get it.
A high tax rate on the rich is a good thing, it stops the rich from robbing the public only to fill their pockets faster. I am all for a fair profit but the shit that has been going on for years now is just too much to swallow. As the top tax rates dropped, executive salaries jumped. More and more money was necessary to support those increased salaries, thus the squeezing of the public through outsourcing, importing, lowering quality, killing unions and so on.
Taxes on the rich need to go up. Way up.
SpotWeld
You know, when the right says that the additional tax cut on the income above $250,000 is needed because the economy needs more jobs they *never* never come to the table suggesting a corporate tax cut as a compromise (Unless I’m wrong, if so please correct me)
And the left would pretty much take that compromise without much discussion.
I think that pretty much says all you need to do about the state of bipartisanship
Kryptik
@Dennis SGMM:
This. They’re demanding the Unemployment Benefits be paid for, despite the cost of the Tax Cuts for the rich they so desperately fight for costing 40 fucking times as much.
It’s a whole lot of bullshit, and all the triangulating the Dems and White House have done have painted themselves in a corner.
Meg
Or maybe they could think of actually reducing the deficit?
I thought that was the goal?
maye
gosh, you sound like a socialist.
cathyx
@Dennis SGMM: I think that ultimately the republicans want tax cuts, no matter what. They are singing the deficit reduction song solely to look like they are different than Obama in their goals. We’ve seen in the past that they don’t really care about deficit reduction by how they spent money during the previous administration.
Obama will go along with all the concessions that the republicans want, hey, he had no choice, right? At least that’s what he’ll say. And so will Odie Hugh Manatee, Nick, General Stuck, and John S.
cmorenc
The problem with the Obama Administration undertaking Health Care reform as the FIRST big-ticket progressive priority (aside from the TARP-type efforts to save the economic system from collapse) is essentially the same thing that tripped up the Clinton Administration’s efforts to push HC reform: before undertaking such a huge-scale social/economic/industrial transformation, it would have been much, much better to FIRST successfully undertake some other inarguably essential reform effort of a nature much more difficult for the GOP to oppose on ideological or practical grounds, or to mount any effective mendacious, demagoguing campaign against.
The FIRST thing the Obama administration should have taken on was a massive campaign to repair and upgrade the nation’s infrastructure – which would have not only tied in with mounting an urgently needed unemployment and recession-fighting stimulus program, but which would have proven extremely difficult for the GOP to mount any effective grass-roots or ideological opposition to. The Administration would have been able to point to a plethora of highly successful undertakings over the course of our nation’s history – from the interstate highway system to the space program to the Erie Canal, to TVA during the depression, as examples they could have sold to the public, AND while they were about it, could have implemented subsidized transformation of our energy grid and other elements of our housing, industry, and cities to greener technologies.
THAT success under their belt from the first Obama administration, the public would have been much less susceptible to the dishonest demagoguing of the GOP if Health-Care reform had been the first priority of the second Obama administration, and we wouldn’t have lost anywhere near so many of those 60 house seats, six Senate seats, and several state legislatures and governorships in the 2010 elections, and Obama would be a prohibitively heavy favorite to win in 2012, with very long coattails to regain any modest “normal” off-year congressional losses and much more.
THE OTHER big error was so quickly after inauguration in 2009 giving both appearance and reality of giving such huge subsidy to save the very Wall Street interests that played such a huge, irresponsible, greedy role in causing the economic crisis in the first place, especially without FIRST insistently demanding, requiring subservient agreement by the financial sector to strong reform measures, such as reinstatement of Glass-Stegall type requirements on regular banks, as opposed to investment banks. What appeared to happen though was that the fat cats got premium, quick bailouts, while very little effective relief got implemented for the huge mass of middle-class folks struggling to survive the downturn.
Progressives would do well to remember this, next time we have another huge opportunity to mount a permanent political and economic transformation, instead of so hugely blowing it. And so would any future incoming Democratic Administration. LOOK AT HOW FDR DID IT, model it, use it.
Dave C
@The Grand Panjandrum:
That Op-Ed was mind-bogglingly asinine–even by WaPo standards!
cmorenc
To follow up on the theme of my previous post, had the Obama Administration made a huge infrastructure-repair/reform/recession-fighting project the landmark of it’s first four years, the GOP would never have been able to mount effective sabotage to the NY/NJ tunnel project or to high-speed mass-transit projects in other states, for just one example. The amounts proposed to be spent would have been much easier to sell to the public as providing tangible benefit rather than threat to the murkin way of life, and progressives would, by 2012 have may HUGE successes to point to by way of convincing the public of the competence of government by progressive principles and undertakings.
Opportunity now lost for a decade or two.
PeakVT
Sixty billion dollars is even enough money to build the tunnel to NY from NJ- saving millions of man hours of misery and lost hours of productivity.
It’s enough to build a tunnel from NJ to CT. The ARC project was projected to cost less than $10B before Fathead Chris killed it.
Omnes Omnibus
@cathyx: Your proposal is? Please be detailed and explain how to get it through Congress.
Sly
@SpotWeld:
Nested within the rhetoric of the personal rate deduction is the argument that it applies to “small business”. Of course most people don’t realize the technical details of what constitutes a “small business”: The public thinks mom and pop operations, but the reality is that their argument applies to anything designated as a partnership or subchapter S. And income for subchapter S corporations is highly concentrated: A study in 2008 by the JCT reported that 61% of net income generated by these business are done so by firms with more than $10 million in gross receipts, and 43% by firms with gross receipts over $50 million.
A company limited to 35 shareholders or less that makes over $50 million isn’t your local hardware store or plumber. Those are usually on schedule C. No, the business they’re talking about are hedge funds or law partnerships. And that’s why they want the top bracket cuts.
@The Grand Panjandrum: Much hand-ringing and naval gazing ensued after the British let India go. National greatness demands an Empire. A benign one of course, one that civilizes everything it touches.
BGinCHI
@Sly: In that case, literal naval gazing, as they watched their ships sail home….
WyldPirate
@Kryptik:
And do you hear much of that from the Dems? No.
I haven’t heard Obama frame it in those terms (without the cursing) A SINGLE TIME.
At some point, you have to assume as digby says that Obama is fine with this and that it is what he wants.
Davis X. Machina
Rubbish.
There are approximately 40 million voters in this country who don’t care if they’re unemployed. They don’t care if they’re unensured. They don’t care if they’re killed on the way to work when a bridge collapses. They don’t care if their supper kills them or their family. They don’t care if their own children go hungry. And that’s enough people to deliver an election
It’s not ‘sliding into second-rate nation status.’ It’s embracing second rate status. And they’re doing it for their faith. For half of them, it’s the bastard Calvinism that’s been our state religion for two centuries. For the rest, it’s marketolatry.
We’ve reached the Masada stage of a cold Civil War.
cathyx
@Omnes Omnibus: The extension of unemployment benefits could have and should have been worked on this summer while there was time and majorities to do it, and they could have been paid for by the tax cuts running out. But as always, nothing was done when it could have been, and now that it’s crunch time, Obama conveniently needs to compromise in order to get what the extension.
WyldPirate
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
While you won’t read this–as I know that I am on your “pie-filter”–I agree completely.
Here is someone else that does:
The Republicans are working right out of Joseph Goebbles play book– the “big lie” repeated often and loudly enough becomes “the truth:.
Omnes Omnibus
@cathyx: That is hindsight. One can always look back and say this or that thing should have been prioritized over such and such. If we know what didn’t work, we can suggest that something that wasn’t tried would have been more successful. It also could have been worse. Counterfactuals work that way. the question I was asking, and the one that I believe matters now, today, is: what should be done now?
Brachiator
@cmorenc:
I don’t think it matters what Obama did first, second or third, certainly not with respect to the Republicans, who have their Opposition Button set permanently to ON.
Health care reform is part of economic recovery, particularly the portability of health care.
As for the rest, there was no reason for the Democrats to cave in on the Bush tax cuts, and this is going to hurt them from now through the 2012 elections.
The financial bailout was in place before the presidential elections. Obama could neither campaign against it nor pull the plug on it after his victory.
The bottom line is that what’s done is done. What matters now is what Obama does next. The unfortunate thing is that the background is worse than before. More right leaning Republicans have been elected, the Democrats do not control the House, where money bills must originate, Obama still does not have judges and administrators requiring confirmation in place. It’s going to be rough.
And you need to get more liberals and progressives elected.
Alex
It was worked on. Multiple times over the summer. They tried passing longer term extensions that were paid for (via windfall taxes on oil companies) and those were blocked by the Republican party. So they had to go for short-term fixes that were then eventually blocked by the Republican party.
Alex
Really, the most defining moment of Obama’s presidency was when the entire Republican party voted against tax cuts for the first $250,000 of income — and that was played in the media as the Republicans stopping a tax increase and painted as a failure by Obama.
How is it possible to fight in a media world that accepts that narrative?
Brachiator
@Alex:
The media is lazy, and stupid, with increasingly larger chunks controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
You fight back the way that Democrats have always successfully fought, by getting your message out there clearly and simply.
Likes, for instance, explaining that Obama’s plan included tax cuts for everyone but that the Republican plan piled it on for the rich.
It’s one thing for the average person not to understand marginal tax rates.
But the Obama Administration is in charge of the damned economy and the tax system. You’d expect them to understand it.
Chuck Butcher
The way forward is to analyze the mistakes of the last two years and learn something from them. The problem that now exists, politically, is that the GOP has made large gains in Congress. This happened for reasons, reasons that are susceptible to analysis. I don’t have the data or the time to do it or the money to run enough polls but it can be done.
There will be answers that are unaddressable and there will be those that are. There is no answer to the “27%” that is addressable, it is something that has to be lived with. I can look at some outcomes and make correlations: when things like do nothing Congress, tax hikes, socialized medicine are outcomes and reality is directly the opposite you have to look at messaging.
I’ve been kicked around for talking about the bully pulpit, mainly I think because people thought I believed it would change the Senate – my concern was the public’s perception and I never intended that to mean it was only the President’s job. A large majority of the Senate Democrats were not only at least on the side of the President or father along. The House had even larger percentages. That is a lot of people available to talk – a lot. The President’s advantages in that are at least two fold, best access to media and possibly the best rhetorician, and then the majesty of office.
It is now catch up time, that Congress is gone (very nearly). The GOP House is going to be a mess. There is a small institutional memory thanks to the size of the delegation and of that delegation a large portion were loons from real safe districts. The newbies are neophytes and have a large contingent of loons and Beohner is neither a brainiac or a master strategist. The strategy of no to everything and consistent lying worked as an impotent minority, no longer true. Messaging can still work, though it is now a longer term end orientation since it means using two years to try to influence the next election rather than keep accomplishing things.
Painting the now as Obama’s failure is stupidly narrow sighted, he had his failures and mistakes but a hell of alot more notice should be focussed on the Gongress. No the House didn’t fall down on getting things done, they sure the hell didn’t sell them either. The Senate deserves most of the rocks that can get thrown at it. But in the end of all the blame sharing is this, in the Democratic Party the Democratic President is the head of the Party.
Next time some Democrat says something similar to permanent majorities it would pay to look at the GOP in ’06 and Ds in ’10. You don’t get anywhere without selling the public and to do that you have to be first, most, and always with the message. It doesn’t have to be lockstepped or all inclusive to work but it does have to be first, most, and always. Defense is second word and a damned tough thing to do, stay away from there. Define, tout, attack. There’s no need to be rude or “fight.”
I want a second term for Obama and I want a Congress that can do something about the mess we’re in. The Democrats’ “leftism” didn’t fail, their inability to communicate sure provided for failure and naturally will lead for some to talk about moving right as though that will change the underlying fault.
cathyx
@Omnes Omnibus: Your response was exactly predicted. See, the scenario goes just like this. I want tax cuts for the rich continued and extended funding for my wars. I tell the public that I want the tax cuts for the rich ended, the wars to end, and unemployment benefit extended for a year. Congress fuddles around and doesn’t make it a priority or take advantage of the time to do it. I, the pres, don’t press my members to make them a priority, let them “try to work it out on their own” because they are big boys after all, and low and behold, time has slipped by and nothing got done. Now, the unemployed are desperate for an extension. Well, now I have to “compromise” to get those extensions with tax cuts for my friends and funding for the war. Like I said, it’s a win win for Obama.
Chuck Butcher
@cathyx:
That’s pretty damn silly and supposes some rather fanciful things, like a gun pointed at the Senate’s head or some mythic 60 number. The other is that the break is so important to Obama, why would it be? There are plenty of wealthy that take the break but never cared about getting it, the simple “wealthy” doesn’t do the definition. I’m scarcely going to downplay the number of greedheads, but you’re being an ass here.
After a few back flips to make a conspiracy theory work it starts to look pretty stupid to those not making it up.
If you wanted to make the same argument about the Senate, well jeeze all I’d say yeah and look at their votes – D votes.
Chuck Butcher
@Chuck Butcher:
Now I’ve said something critical, where’s that cowardly figment Fuckstuck to make it into coded racism. come out little figment, put the little doggy down and play with the bad man.
Piece of lying shit.
NR
@cathyx: Yep. It’s becoming more and more clear that for the past two years, Obama has been using the Republicans as the Bad Cop so that he can play the Good Cop and come to the nation’s rescue.
But what people forget is that the Good Cop and the Bad Cop are working for the same person, and it ain’t you.
Church Lady
Imagine all of the stuff we could buy and build if we repealed ALL of the Bush tax cuts. It’s just mind boggling.
Chuck Butcher
@Church Lady:
OH hell, go back to 1969 tax rates…. You know when the nation couldn’t make a job thanks to the “tax the job creators”…
Time to work…
cmorenc
@Brachiator:
WADR, you’re dead wrong about this, at least insofar as the Obama Administration made a colossal unforced error almost right out of the gate which left themselves in a position of vulnerability for the GOP to take over ownership of the greedy blunders of the Bush Administration and Treasury Secretary Paulson. How? The AIG bailout, followed almost immediately by news that AIG’s top staff, including particularly the exact people and division whose activities were prototypical of the ones responsible for bringing on the economic crash, were entitled to hefty bonuses from the bailout money; and new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner prominently proclaiming that legally, there was no way for the Administration to undo their alleged entitlement to the huge bonuses. Geithner strongly came across as someone who privately believed that the AIG folks WERE indeed entitled to those bonuses, and also conveyed an impression of corrupt ineptness. The stink from this event is precisely what gave the GOP enough leverage to begin digging in for their campaign of stubborn NO. The AIG mess was the key event that began unraveling Obama’s mantle of being the “next FDR” and began paving the way for him to be morphed into the “black Jimmy Carter”.
Davis X. Machina
Overdetermined. Find me three people in a bar who aren’t soccer fans, or Glen Beck listeners, who even know what ‘AIG’ is…
Brachiator
@cmorenc:
Nonsense. Beginning in the 1960s, the Republicans pushed the lie that Americans naturally preferred Republicans (Silent Majority, etc). This hardened around the time of Clinton into the current stance that the only legitimate political party is the GOP, and that only conservative Republicans should be president.
The Republicans have busily purged all moderates, and hitched its future to the insanity that is the Tea Party.
There is no conceivable magic trick that Obama (or Hillary Clinton, had she been elected) could do to ensure Republican co-operation.
Apart from being irrelevant, being the black Jimmy Carter is supposed to be an insult?
RalfW
It all reminds me of post-empire Britain. I visited several times in the early 80’s, just as she was awaking from the slumber and retrenchment of the post-colonial, post world wars era.
Grim, small-bore, scrapping for entitlements. Occasional ‘patriotic’ moments like a totally asymmetric whupping of Argentina over a sparsely populated group or rocks in the S Atlantic. But a nation that was adrift, boring, tatty, and cold.
Post empire America is gonna be unpleasant for a while.
On the bright side, the by the late 80’s, England was increasingly dynamic, appealing, and prosperous. But it took them over a generation to get there. An entire leadership class that only knew how to lead as a world-dominant empire – not just in gov’t, but in business, as well as aspects of culture and academia – had to retire, recede, die off before the grumbling, put-upon, stagnant populace could move ahead.
The boomer generation has no idea how to lead us through what’s next. But by dint of age, work experience, and sheer numbers, we’ll be saddled with them for another decade of bullshit selfishness, navel-gazing and American exceptionalism gone Brazilishly awry.
Koz
“The FIRST thing the Obama administration should have taken on was a massive campaign to repair and upgrade the nation’s infrastructure – which would have not only tied in with mounting an urgently needed unemployment and recession-fighting stimulus program, but which would have proven extremely difficult for the GOP to mount any effective grass-roots or ideological opposition to.”
That would have been a better way to play it imo. But the bad people were threatening to shoot any retreaters on health care Stalingrad-style. So now here we are.
Koz
“And like an extra cherry atop a sundae, the Republicans gave Obama a gift when they said they have no interest in renewing his $400 Making Work Pay tax credit. That statement alone lets the president paint Republicans as tax hikers who want to hit people who work, while shielding billionaires.”
It could work this way but it probably won’t. People already know that the GOP wants low taxes, the Obama Administration is looking to get some traction that it doesn’t have at the moment. The question is, can the President and the enough Democrats in Congress punch a some hippies to demonstrate credibility with the American people (and the rest of the world for that matter)?
Koz
“On the bright side, the by the late 80’s, England was increasingly dynamic, appealing, and prosperous. But it took them over a generation to get there.”
And we need to do here what Mrs. Thatcher did there. Scale back the bloated public sector and give the private economy the chance to create some jobs.
Wile E. Quixote
@Koz:
Right, which is why we should immediately withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq, cut foreign aid to Israel and Egypt (let them kill each other) and cut defense spending by 75 percent. Seriously, who in their right mind thinks that it’s a good policy to borrow money from China so we can defend South Korea and Japan from North Korea, a Chinese client state? Who in their right mind could support continuing to spend money on boondoggles like the V-22 Osprey or anything built by General Dynamics? Who in their right mind thinks that it’s a great idea to take billions of dollars from hardworking citizens and hand it to corrupt companies like Blackwater/Xe and KBR, companies that only flourish because of bloated government contracts they’ve received from corrupt politicians? Who in their right mind could support the incredibly corrupt concept of “cost plus” contracts that the entire military industrial sector relies upon?
After we do that we should end the War on Drugs, which costs billions of dollars a year, because who in their right mind thinks the government has any business telling you what to put in your body. Yeah, those would be some absolutely fantastic cuts to the bloated public sector. Make all of those fucking cops, prison guards, DEA agents and defense contractors go out and get real jobs instead of sucking on the government tit. Oh, we also need to eliminate farm subsidies and ethanol, two more incredibly wasteful public sector projects.
I’m sure that Koz and his fellow teabaggers will be all over that agenda, which would save billions of dollars a year. Right Koz? Right?
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Nobody giving John any love over his Steven Brust reference?
someofparts
Medicare for everyone who wants it and lifetime unemployment payments. Countries smaller than California do it and we should too.