This does say it all, doesn’t it:
Exempting war spending — which goes untouched in Boehner’s plan — the legislation would reduce spending by only $5 billion next fiscal year. And its impact on the deficit is even less — a paltry $1 billion.
This provides occasion for yet another penetrating glimpse of the obvious: the debt ceiling battle is not about the debt. It’s about the Republican attempt to rob the middle class and the poor to feed the rich.
That the collateral damage will be the long term erosion of America’s capacity to create wealth and wield power is…acceptable, it seems.
Per Doug J and Krugman (and David Kurtz), you do have to ask: what would it take to get the VSPs on cable to, you know, look at the actual numbers and who’s proposing what?
Meanwhile, back at the headquarters of the Party That Hates America™, Boehner’s claque of merry pranksters are trying to rewrite the bill to grab back a fig-leaf of deficit cutting respectability.
Which is to say, a bunch of economic illiterates are trying to make fiscal and social policy in hours and minutes that would, if enacted, have ramifications for a generation or more.
We are “governed” (sic-ed.) by feral children. May the FSM envelop them all in cosmic cappellini.*
*String theory, you know.
Image: Paul Cezanne, Pierrot and Harlequin, 1888
Elisabeth
The CBO scores Boehner’s bill at $850 billion in “savings” versus the $1 trillion the Speaker’s office was touting. Cantor must have a hard time keeping a straight face.
lamh34
I posted this is the open thread, but I think it fits here too.
Boehner’s Boners
by BooMan
dr. bloor
I’m actually amazed that the number came in that high. I was expecting a negative number or, perhaps, a press release announcing the mass suicide of the CBO actuaries.
The Dangerman
Was Boehner being an idiot or was he being responsible by backloading the cuts into the out years (i.e. cutting in a jobless recovery isn’t the best idea ever)?
Silly me; he’s probably just an idiot.
Chris Wolf
It’s pretty obvious who’s winning the argument here.
Violet
@Elisabeth:
From TPM on the CBO analysis:
So they’re going to rewrite it now?
kdaug
I feel a twinge of pity for Boehner of Orange. He didn’t volunteer for being corralled with the lunatics. He just wants to smoke, drink, and do business on the golf course.
You know, the way politics used to be.
Events have overtaken him, and he’s fumbling to catch up.
jl
And if you check Krugman’s blog late today, he is getting even shriller on the US national affairs press.
Interesting to see the next time he is deemed fit to appear on This Week.
More civil just to talk BS, spout convenient self serving fantasy, and get pissy if anyone talks back, like well behaved thoughtful conservatives do. Might be one or two of them on the news talkies, but I am uncouth and cannot think of any names now, them folks being high class with names too fancy to keep in my head.
Violet
@kdaug:
He shouldn’t have run for Leader of his party if he didn’t want to take the heat. Anyone with half a brain could see this showdown with the Tea Party coming since 2008. The fact he didn’t see it says a lot. If he did see it, and still wanted the job, well, I won’t waste any time feeling sorry for him.
Golfing and drinking is for Representatives who don’t take on any responsibility.
dmsilev
@Violet: It reminds me of some less-than-stellar students I’ve had, who react to a graded assignment covered with red ink by “can I redo it to get a better grade?”. Next thing we know, Boehner’s going to go on TV whining that he needs to get at least a B or he’ll lose his scholarship.
lamh34
So wait, TPM reporting that Boehner’s office are “rewriting” the bill. What?? Boner really is a joke isn’t he. So they’ve scuttled the voter that was “scheduled” for tomorrow and they are gonna what, find how many more cuts that they couldn’t even find before in oh what 2 days??? How the heck did Boehner get the job a speaker anyway? Say what you will about Nancy Smash, but she held her caucus together…period!
guckertgannon
FSM and string theory! Suddenly, everything makes sense!
dr. bloor
Nice cover. The rewrite undoubtedly has more to do with the number “217” than it does with “$850 Billion.”
General Stuck
Dems have always had the upper hand in this current episode of As the Wingnut Turns. It is stupid to pick a fight in an arena, where the worst that can happen, will happen to a very important, in fact most important part of your base.
That being a default will hurt the big business guys more than anyone else. The ones that keep the wingnuts in high dollar digs and drinks. And in case of default, it will be Obama with his hands on the purse strings, to decide who gets paid and who gets an IOU.
Reid’s plan is largely a gimmick, using projected savings from winding down wars, and forming another clown commission or committee, that will simply arrive at the same stalemate we are at now. Wingnuts want to destroy entitlements, and dems won’t let them. So I figure it will be this as the end game, so wingers can salvage some face, other than a clean bill.
And in the end, the plutocrats will start busting some heads to call this bullshit off. It might be too late to not cause them and the country a lot of damage. But the wingers are on cruise control to fly straight into the mountain they built for this little tragicomedy.
rikyrah
Orange Julius is so incompetent
Elisabeth
Either way Boehner looks ridiculous, incompetent, and math challenged. Unfortunately, at least one of those qualities doesn’t seem to disqualify him from holding office.
WereBear
Now the ads are for professional party clowns. Let’s send them to Congress. At least we’ll get professionals.
FlipYrWhig
Is it really the best move to gloat over this? Shouldn’t we be saying, “Oh, please, Mr. Boehner, don’t throw us in your terrible deficit reduction briar patch”? If Boehner has a backloaded plan and Reid has a backloaded plan, maybe we’ll stand to get a backloaded plan… which is a fuckload better than something that actually hastens the Teabaggerdammerung.
scav
I am developing near supposedly Catholic levels of guilt by irrepressible howling at the equivalent of the pin-cushioning of Saint Sebastian. Martyrdom of the Mango Man.
mea culpa, mea culpa mea maxima culpa maxima giggla
bleh
… the debt ceiling battle is not about the debt. It’s about the Republican attempt to rob the middle class and the poor to feed the rich.
No! Wait! Are you saying that Republicans are actually orienting legislation to transfer wealth from the middle class to the rich?!
Stop the presses! Alert the ever-vigilant and -objective punditry! But be careful to ease them into it, so the shock does not disorient them.
Some Guy
First off, Tom, your posts are great.
As to the substance, at this point I wonder how many indices of crazy are necessary? Have we even gotten to the attempt to demand that Obama continue to pay all major bills while in default that Toomey coughed up today? I mean, this shit is nuts, totally fully nuts.
All of this comes down to some number of Republicans in the House breaking with the far, far right. Are there any willing to do right by the citizenry, or is every last one of them a fucking coward?
That is the real end game to all of this, because otherwise, we default.
MikeJ
In other words, if his plan had passed, we might have allowed him to save a little face and actual pass something that wasn’t horrible. I realise it was the right that killed it, not the left, but what would we have heard from the usual suspects had any deal been made?
El Cid
__
If this does happen, one interesting development will be watching how all the people who normally dismiss as paranoid leftist conspiracy mongering arguments that the actual capitalist classes really do get involved in shaping short- and medium-term governance in their own economic class interests will now be happy admitting that not only do our job-creators do it, it’s a good thing.
Jc
So was the plan a Back-loaded ‘fake’ deficit plan, or a plan that saved nothing but shifted income to the filthy rich?
danimal
Stuck – Defunding wars is not a gimmick. Draining the Iraq/Afghanistan war account is a progressive victory. Without that slush fund available, funding new
warsnational liberations will be more difficult (though obviously not impossible, see Libya). Once that line item is shrunk, it will be hard to significantly reinflate in today’s environment.dr. bloor
I thought there was something vaguely tragic (in the dramatic sense) about the position he was while trying to negotiate a deal that could never be made, but the drunken-ass, bald-faced lying he’s been using to try to cover his ass just makes him hateful.
RossInDetroit
I’ve noticed that. I’d worry less if he didn’t have such a great track record of being proved right.
General Stuck
Okay, point taken. I should have said it was going to happen anyways
Batocchio
You said it.
Also – hey, I resemble that painting! (My blog avatar, anyway.)
El Cid
__
OK, but that also means that the best alternatives in this new approach to legislating will have had weeks, maybe months to be formed. Given that no suggestion is concrete and will just emerge from these or that subset of elected leaders ready to go.
Be it Medicare or not or whatever else, fuck all this ‘months of open debate’ shit and ‘bills’ and ‘proposed amendments’ and shit.
Just throw a bunch of shit together, who knows, good, bad, disconnected — and make sure not to mention that it’s a fake reason to pass such gigantic, generations-affecting legislation in a hurry — and slam it down and there you go, and we the people will hear about it when they’re damned good and ready to tell us.
jo6pac
It does so it all and how sad for the citizens of this nation.
jl
Oops, TL links to the very post I was talking about. My bad. Sorry. I was hasty and thought the link in the post was to the earlier press criticism by Krugman.
But still, will be interesting to see when Krugman is on a big news talkie show again, and what his tone will be.
danimal
The end game is looking like it will break on Democratic terms. Not bad for an incompetent negotiator who wants to force granny to turn tricks after stealing her SS check and destroying her Medicare.
Jager
I am trying to start one of those fabled, wonderful, back bone of the country, small businesses and I am so pissed at the Republican Tea Party assholes. I’ve been trying for the last two weeks to finalize the required paper work so I can get into operation. I have 3 full time and two partime employees standing around with little or nothing to do and they are getting paid! Know what’s hanging me up? God damned budget cuts! Not red tape, not do-nothing, lazy state workers, its the fucking fact there are no state workers anymore in California. I paid my fees, filed the paperwork in February to become a California LLC. The check wasn’t cashed until June and I have never received my certified copy proving I’m a California business entity. The business is listed online, I have a number, but no paperwork. Without the paper, I can’t go into business! Why? Because another understaffed state office needs it to give me approval. My attorney told me before all the budget cuts, Sacramento turned the paperwork around in an hour if you presented in person, a few days by mail. I just hired an expeditor do walk it through for me (for 500 bucks) and I may get it in a week. This shit has been going on in California for years. The state office I was in today had 24 cubicles and 4 employees. The guy I’m working with looked like somebody kicked his ass and took his name. These fuckers in congress know nothing and they could give a shit about the “backbone of America”! I’ve got a couple of hundred thousand dollars tied up since February and because of budget cuts I haven’t had a chance to even try to get it back. Do those dick heads have any idea what its going to be like for business with even more cuts? I’d like to get on plane and slap the shit out of them all!
Punchy
Here’s what I dont get:
If he’s going to rewrite it so it passes the House TeaTard Test(TM), and knowing that no matter what, it’ll have zero chance in the Senate, why doesnt he just PACK it full of ridiculous teatard shit, like “cutting spending $48.2 trillion over the next 6 months” and “eliminating activist judges” and demanding the ACA mandate get stripped, etc. In other words, why is it NOT packed to the hilt with the most insane shit? He knows it’s going down in the Senate/veto anyways….What’s to lose?
Martin
The problem I suspect is that Boehner has been using his own baseline on what the deficit will look like over the next decade, and CBO is factoring things in that are inconvenient for him to deal with – like savings from PPACA and other stuff that’d he’d prefer to repeal.
A lot of the discretionary stuff is pork that his own caucus doesn’t want to get rid of, they won’t touch defense which is 50% of discretionary. And that’s the problem the house faces – they have to go home and get re-elected every 2 years. At least the Senate allows people to bypass the pork barrel for 4 out of every 6 years – and that’s why they’re so adverse to cuts in the near term.
El Cid
@Jager: Clearly the answer is to get rid of any licensing of business entities; we’ll just let Amazon.com sell such licenses and if two businesses get names or records duplicated or mixed up, well, hey, eventually the Free Market will work it out.
Martin
Sortof. I still suspect that we’re going to wind up with a clean bill because they’re simply running out of time to play this retarded game. The House vote is back to Thursday because Boehner can’t count to 8, and even if that passes, the Senate will nuke it. Then we’re down to 5 days. They could try for Reid’s bill, but if that fails, I don’t see how anything longer than 3 pages gets passed on time. Obama’s proposal is way the fuck too big to try and pass now. The clock is already out on that.
Reality Check
AHAHAHAHAHAH!
What are you smoking? You are incredibly deluded. Republicans hold all the cards, baby.
El Cid
George W. Bush Jr. once proposed an Amtrak budget of zero dollars, so, this would seem to be the TeaTard Maximus of budget proposals.
At least he was very upfront about it.
PurpleGirl
Boehner — never trust or respect a person who changes the pronunciation of his name. “OE” is not an “a” sound in German. It is not bay-ner. Bo-ner is closest to the correct sound. If he doesn’t like the name, he should change it completely. (I have a Germanic name and I constantly tell people to use the German pronunciation when they give it the English translation. Not so much from pride of the name, but I don’t like the English translation.)
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Reality Check
What’s up schmuck, your mom late with your gruel?
teresamac0
“The Headquarters of the Party that Hates America” yep… sad, but oh so true.
Amir_Khalid
@PurpleGirl:
Would the original German name be Böhner? If so, I’ve always imagined that it would sound something like the British pronunciation of “burner” — i.e. without the “r” sound you’d hear in the American pronunciation.
Jager
@El Cid:
The state guy I was working with today, mentioned something about going up to Big Bear. I said “good, you look like you need some time off!” He said,”time off, I have to go up there and work, when my counterpart retired two years ago, he wasn’t replaced!” He gave me his card with the other office number and address and told me to send the certificate to him and he’d give me immediate approval. He is just another example of lazy, give a shit, greedy, retire too fucking young, underworked and incompetent state workers, right?
Linda Featheringill
@Reality Check:
Then why haven’t they repealed the health care bill? Why haven’t they repealed to end to DADT? Why haven’t they gotten rid of the judges that Obama succeeded in seating?
Looking forward to your explanation.
PurpleGirl
Amir_Khalid: It might be. And you’re right to use an umlaut in there. I’m not actually a trained expert in Germanic pronunciation but having taken several terms of German and experiencing telling people how to pronounce my name, I get finicky about how Americans want to change German names they don’t like. Another example is former skater Tim Goeble, who also did the oe into a thing.
Amir_Khalid
@PurpleGirl:
You’ve actually studied German in school, which is more than I can claim. My only background in the language is an Oxford University Press self-instruction kit; I learned German as a hobby.
Richard Fox
I don’t think President Obama will allow a debt default, despite all the clowns running around him on their tiny tricycles. And the business folk who bank the republicans will help him, despite themselves. Money rules all, and will have its say. It always does. Which is why I am so blase about all the shrillness. This too shall pass, yada yada yada…
PurpleGirl
Amir_Khalid: I managed to barely pass two terms in college. Then I stopped taking German when I began to stutter in German. Just at that point when you should be thinking in the other language and not doing a translation in your head (English into other language) I would begin to stutter. It also happened in high school with French. My father’s parents spoke some German at home so I heard native speakers as a child. It sort of stays with you.
jl
@42, 45, 48, 49:
I don’t think there is close enough sound in English to do the German ‘ö’ very well.
I wouldn’t be too hard on the family. At least you can still tell it is a German name. The ancestors of, ahem, a friend of mine, yeah, it’s a friend, not me, turned out to have changed their last name as the moved from one ethnic community to another in the early US. We wondered why the name doesn’t exist at all in German speaking Europe, it’s because they changed it so much. So much for glorious and proud family trees in
my, my friends, family.TheMy friend’s cousin who found out thought it was funny.Below is info on the name from a geneology site:
North German (Böhner): occupational name from an agent derivative of Middle Low German bönen ‘to board’, ‘to lay a floor’
North German (Böhner): topographic name for someone who lived in a loft, a variant of Boehne + the suffix -er denoting an inhabitant
http://genealogy.familyeducation.com/surname-origin/boehner
Some one who lived in a loft, eh? Sounds pretty lefty to me. His career is done.
waratah
Tom, the painting is great, and so is your post.
I wonder if you could find a painting of idiots and that would be so much better. Sorry but I should not have listened to even a little of the garbage Republicans were saying on CSPAN
Richard Fox
Hogarth has great images of Bedlam. That would work, I think. Though the Cezanne is just brilliant.
PurpleGirl
jL: thanks for that link. They tell me my last name is north German. Not going to actually tell my name. But I prefer the German form and pronunciation.
Calouste
@Amir_Khalid:
Correct. Burner without the r is the closest approximation.
Btw, in North German dialect, Böhnhase means someone who does a job without being qualified. Basically in the same sense you’d talk about cowboy electricians etc. It’s the only word that begins with Böhn…
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@PurpleGirl: Actually, the umlaut (shown as “oe” in Boehner) makes it, in German pronunciation, quite close to “Buerre-ner,” (pronounced as in the French “beurre”) which the midwestern flattening dialect sort of ellides in to Bay-ner. That’s in fact how it happened, if you’d like to get pedantic about it. At least the very Germanic midwestern town from which the AOS hails has over the years done that to the umlauted “o” sound.
Bruce S
What’s most galling about this – at least to me – is that the GOPers won this thing on day one when “deficits” – to be resolved mostly by spending cuts – became the focus of policy, but they’re too f-ing stupid to realize it…
http://titanicsailsatdawn.blogspot.com/2011/07/america-and-beltway-parallel-universes.html
PurpleGirl
Neato, finding a bunch of you who know enough of the language to understand. Whether or not you agree with my nit-pick, you at least understand the language thing.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@PurpleGirl: We’re kind of equal opportunity pedantifiers here, aren’t we? At least I am.
Living in the town from which the AOS hails, with lots of German surnames, and having started with Deutsch in grade school (continuing into college), I’m quite opinionated on the topic, heh. In this town, when we didn’t hear what you said, instead of “what?” or “beg pardon?” we say “please?” from the German expression in that instance, “bitte?” …
Thoughtcrime
Reality Check @ 40
Everybody knows you never go full retard.
Caz
With such idiotic assumptions about the actions of the R’s, you have to ask yourself, “what is their motivation, and how does that benefit them?”
You claim that the R’s want to hurt the poor, minorities, the middle-class, working Americans, women, and pretty much everyone except the rich, white folks. So I ask you, how does that benefit them? Clearly, that is a pretty small voting block. Sure they have lots of money, but what good is that if they are alienating 90% of the population. If you can’t articulate how hurting pretty much every non-rich person helps them, then you have to say “maybe I’m wrong.”
So I ask you: why would the R’s be out to purposefully hurt all those voting groups in favor of only the rich? I can’t think a single, logical reason.
So the only other possibility is that the majority of R’s are literally insane or mentally unstable as a group, and that their goal of hurting most Americans is just totally irrational actions by insane people. That’s quite an allegation – that most R’s are literally insane, and it makes you look like a supreme fool if you really believe that.
So either you are totally ignorant and gullable, or you are the one who is insane.
So hit me back with how the R’s hurting everyone but the rich agenda benefits them, or how they think it benefits them.
I guarantee you can’t come up with any logical, reasonable answer to that. I also guarantee that you will either call me an idiot troll and just dismiss what I’m saying, or you’ll dodge the issue in favor of some irrelevant, shallow statement about basically just how evil R’s are.
I’ll be back to check if anyone has anything logical to say, but I won’t hold my breath!
someguy
Yeah, it’s terrible how the Republicans rob the middle class to pay off the rich. Too bad we didn’t have any Democrats in power 2006-2008 or 2008-2010 to prevent that kind of heinous shit.
Hey checkit out. Sometimes “they’re all the same” is actually sorta true.
Emma
Caz: That’s one of the things my very conservative father is trying to figure out. “His” Republican party isn’t there any more, and it’s giving him agitas to think he might have to vote for a Democrat next time around, but he won’t vote for the crazies.
His words, not mine.
SRW1
Amir_Khalid
Correct on both counts.
Mike G
It’s the difference between ‘tepidly tapping on the brake pedal’ as the greedheads frog-march us to penury and destruction, or ‘flooring the accelerator’.
Yutsano
@Caz:
The illusion of Horatio Alger. They think it might be possible that one day too they could be rich and therefore think they should vote in the interests of the rich. You’re also taking a very narrow view of who Republicans are. The two big components of the Republican tribe are wealth and white skin. They pursue policies to protect one or the other with significant overlap. Or do we need to give you the sparrow lecture again?
Brachiator
This is it. The Democrats need to show the numbers and demolish the GOP position.
Some Democrat, not Obama, needs to show Boehner to be a hypocrite and a fool.
Yutsano
@Brachiator: Well the AOS picked up his marbles and went home already. So the opportunity for crow eating here may have passed. Incidentally we still have zero guidance at work as far as what’s supposed to happen if there’s a default. I think they’re trying to stop a run for the exits.
A Conservative Teacher
This blog is written by economic illiterates- no, rather this blog and most those who comment are not merely ignorant of basic economics, but they are dangerous extremists who live in unreality and sadly vote.
Cutting taxes results in increased revenues to to the government. Spending money results in deficits. If you run deficits, excess savings are soaked up by the government rather than spent on creating jobs and wealth. The government does not create wealth, only redistributes it. If it grows too big, it chokes the economy, resulting in less wealth to redistribute, meaning that those who are arguing for higher debt hate poor people and want old people to starve.
In addition, once a nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio goes over 90%, history has demonstrated that nation’s collapse (Greece, Iceland, Portugal, etc) and face severe and harsh austerity. We are at 96% now; which means we shouldn’t add any more debt.
This may really go against what many of you believe- that private companies that build things should have all or most of their profits taken from them so they all go out of business, and that those profits should be given to a government so it can redistribute that wealth to those who did not earn it, thus creating a tyrannical state that attacks life, liberty, and property in the name of creating elites and slaves. But become literate, learned, and study economics (Laffer curve, economic recession of 1920, etc) and you may hopefully change someday.
Samara Morgan
Dr. Levenson, here is a sparkly bit of hope at the bottom of the conservitard box of horrorshow monsters that is contemporary American politics.
Behold.
Looks like CERN may have found the god particle!
On to superparticles and supersymmetry!
JGabriel
@A Conservative Teacher:
Yes, also up is down and ignorance is strength. Take your Orwellian bullshit elsewhere, jackass.
.
Samara Morgan
@conservitard teacher
LOL, you are the economic illiterate.
Have you heard of evolutionary economics?
The “freed” market is teleologically incapable of improving the human condition. It only improves the human condition of the overclass.
This is empirically true, supply side economics do not work, and the Econopalypse That Ate America’s Jobs was the direct result of “lightly regulated” capitalism.
Go back to Oral Roberts or BYU or whatever educational abomination you graduated from.
THE
@A Conservative Teacher.
I would ask you one question then — there is an accounting identity linking private savings, public savings, and the current account deficit.
If the private sector wants to deleverage, which they clearly do, given the low to negative rates of private credit growth we’ve seen since 2008, how do we accommodate the positive savings of the private sector without negative savings (deficits) in the public sector?
I really don’t think the entire world can run current account surpluses at the same time, unless the people of Earth are trading with the fine people of Mars.
I suggest you watch this two part presentation by Namura’s Chief Economist Richard Koo.