Megan McCardle is still one of the dumbest fucking human beings on the planet.
I’m now longing for the days when she talked about $1000 blenders.
by John Cole| 86 Comments
This post is in: Pink Himalayan Salt, Technically True but Collectively Nonsense
Megan McCardle is still one of the dumbest fucking human beings on the planet.
I’m now longing for the days when she talked about $1000 blenders.
This post is in: Domestic Politics
… this isn’t too, too awful.
All at once, a “fiscal cliff” deal seems to be coming together. Speaker John Boehner’s latest offer doesn’t go quite far enough for the White House to agree, but it goes far enough that many think they can see the agreement taking shape.
Boehner offered to let tax rates rise for income over $1 million. The White House wanted to let tax rates rise for income over $250,000. The compromise will likely be somewhere in between. More revenue will come from limiting deductions, likely using some variant of the White House’s oft-proposed, oft-rejected idea for limiting itemized deductions to 28 percent. The total revenue raised by the two policies will likely be a bit north of $1 trillion. Congress will get instructions to use this new baseline to embark on tax reform next year. Importantly, if tax reform never happens, the revenue will already be locked in.
On the spending side, the Democrats’ headline concession will be accepting chained-CPI, which is to say, accepting a cut to Social Security benefits. Beyond that, the negotiators will agree to targets for spending cuts. Expect the final number here, too, to be in the neighborhood of $1 trillion, but also expect it to lack many specifics. Whether the cuts come from Medicare or Medicaid, whether they include raising the Medicare age, and many of the other contentious issues in the talks will be left up to Congress.
….
On stimulus, unemployment insurance will be extended, as will the refundable tax credits. Some amount of infrastructure spending is likely. Perversely, the payroll tax cut, one of the most stimulative policies in the fiscal cliff, will likely be allowed to lapse, which will deal a big blow to the economy.
I know folks will tell me the chained-CPI adjustment is a deal killer in their minds… but I have to admit, I don’t see the argument. The chained-CPI adjustment says that instead of just looking at a basket of good, you look at possible substitution effects when prices for one item rises. As a practical matter, this is actually how people make buying decisions, so it strikes me that a chained-CPI adjustment is not wildly problematic. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that while I am not part of the “make grandma eat cat food” crowd, I will note that redistributional politics have tended to benefit the elderly at the expense of working poor for a generation now. So while this change would clearly hurt the elderly somewhat, I am not sure that in the grand scheme of things this is a particularly awful change in itself. And if it helps stave off changes in the Medicare retirement age, it would be a net plus even for the elderly.
The payroll tax issue, I think, is actually a good change. From my perspective the payroll tax holiday is a political liability, since it reduces revenue for Social Security and plays into right-wing fearmongering about Social Security being “insolvent.” (And yes, I know that by law the Social Security trust fund is reimbursed from general revenue.)
Still a couple of issues that worry me. I’m not seeing anything about the Estate Tax. This is a huge issue in terms of concentration of wealth, and hopefully Obama will press hard to ensure both limited exemptions and higher rates on this front.
But what really worries me is this:
The deal will lift the spending sequester, but it will be backed up by, yes, another sequester-like policy. I’m told that the details on this next sequester haven’t been worked out yet, but the governing theory is that it should be more reasonable than the current sequester. That is to say, if the two parties can’t agree on something better, then this should be a policy they’re willing to live with.
….
As for the debt ceiling, that will likely be lifted for a year, at least. In contrast to a week or so ago, when the White House was very intent on finishing the debt ceiling fight now, they’re sounding considerably less committed to securing a long-term increase in these negotiations. The argument winning converts, I’m told, is that since the White House won’t negotiate on the debt ceiling now and won’t negotiate on it later, there’s little reason to make it the sine qua non of a deal.
I am not sure I see the political logic here. Will the president’s hand be stronger in six month? In a year?
I understand why Obama might agree to something like this. He’s, you know, a decent guy, and he doesn’t want to see average Americans hurt as a result of political gridlock. In other words, he’s saying he’s willing to compromise because he’s concerned about the fate of the hostages… but in the long run, doesn’t this just continue to empower the hostage takers?
Maybe generational change will continue to come at a rapid rate, and maybe the GOP will shrink into complete irrelevance quickly enough that buying time makes sense strategically. But I dunno. It strikes me that this process is likely to take longer than we’d like, and that as a result we’re going to need to confront the hostage takers directly at some point rather than just kicking the can. What do you think?
by John Cole| 66 Comments
This post is in: Gun nuts
Credit here credit is due. I’ve flamed Manchin on numerous occasions, but he might be the vanguard of a change in thought about gun control:
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — who has an “A” rating from the NRA and is a lifetime member of the pro-gun rights group — said Monday that it was time to “move beyond rhetoric” on gun control.
“I just came with my family from deer hunting,” Manchin said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I’ve never had more than three shells in a clip. Sometimes you don’t get more than one shot anyway at a deer. It’s common sense. It’s time to move beyond rhetoric. We need to sit down and have a common-sense discussion and move in a reasonable way.”
Two things- Manchin is the guy who used a rifle in a commercial to shoot climate control legislation. Second, if you watch the clip, Manchin seriously looks like he is about to cry. He’s not that skilled a thespian, so I think it is legit.
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Excellent Links
Firmin Debrabander, in the NYTImes, on “The Freedom of an Armed Society“:
The night of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., I was in the car with my wife and children, working out details for our eldest son’s 12th birthday the following Sunday — convening a group of friends at a showing of the film “The Hobbit.” The memory of the Aurora movie theatre massacre was fresh in his mind, so he was concerned that it not be a late night showing. At that moment, like so many families, my wife and I were weighing whether to turn on the radio and expose our children to coverage of the school shootings in Connecticut. We did. The car was silent in the face of the flood of gory details. When the story was over, there was a long thoughtful pause in the back of the car. Then my eldest son asked if he could be homeschooled…
Via the Washington Post, a mother talks about being on the other side of the nightmare:
I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.
A few weeks ago, [13-year-old] Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan—they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.
That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.
We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work….
by Tim F| 122 Comments
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads
Since one of you douchebuckets signed me up for a Tea Party newsletter, I get hourly alerts with titles like this, from ten minutes ago: “Sandy Hook Should Cause Us To Embrace our Guns and our God.”
Dear illiterates: you only get to pick one.
Pic of Max to wash out the stupid.
Chat about whatever.
This post is in: Gun nuts, Clown Shoes
Like Mistermix, I find it completely bizarre that the gun nuts have resorted to calling me a cook, telling me I am lying about what I clearly did, etc. I don’t know why they think I would make this shit up. I have no reason to embellish what I did- it was really no big deal. I did what millions of people have done, which was join the military, do their time, and then go to school. I’m not out all PX Commando-like marching down the street in Veterans Day parades with fake medals. At any rate, here is a picture of me not standing on my tank with my crew in the middle of the Kuwait desert:
That was after I didn’t go to OSUT at Disney Barracks at Fort Knox, but before I wasn’t actually a combat engineer after I got off active duty. I’m the good looking one violating protocol by not keeping three points of contact while on the vehicle (SEE, WE TOLD YOU HE WAS A BAD SOLDIER!).
by Tim F| 90 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
Civilians with basement gun stashes would do a pretty poor job of playing Wolverines! against any army worth ten bucks or more. You can argue all day about historical parallels, but insurgents acting without the aggressive support of a sizable third party state generally go the way of the Branch Davidians. However, if a certain kind of folks sieze power then gomer and his gun stash would make a right fine auxiliary civilian militia. I believe that shabiha translates to something like ‘white christian citizens’ brigade.’