Dan Wasserman is a genius.
Needs no further comment.
Politics
The President and Gay Marriage
The commentators are in full flower. “This is a great move.” “It is risky.” “This could cost him the election.” What does it really mean? We won’t know until the election in November, but we can try to bring some clarity to some of the noise.
Photograph by Pete Souza
We know that many of those who oppose gay marriage for religious or other grounds will never be convinced, but I expect that some will come around to saying something like “I personally don’t support gay marriage, but as a matter of rights, people should be able to choose.” Kind of like what many Democrats have said about abortion. But the majority of the opposition will remain opposed.
Some will say this was a cynical move on the part of the President to solidify his gay and lesbian supporter. I don’t think so. Richard Socarides wrote in the New Yorker
For a long time, Democrats have taken the gay vote for granted. Political consultants tell Democrats that gay and lesbian voters have nowhere else to go, and thus, in effect, can be counted on, so long as politicians pay lip service to the issue. But that is old thinking, out of touch with the new reality of the gay-rights movement. While I know that most gays and lesbians would have supported President Obama, both with their votes and with their financial contributions, no matter what he did on the issue of marriage equality, we were also not going to take “no” for an answer on the most important civil-rights issue of our day. That meant holding the President’s feet to the fire—first on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and then on marriage equality.
What we do know is that this was an act of courage and leadership. President Obama may be part of the tide rising toward marriage equality, but he is part of the leading edge. Andrew Sullivan
I do not know how orchestrated this was; and I do not know how calculated it is. What I know is that, absorbing the news, I was uncharacteristically at a loss for words for a while, didn’t know what to write, and, like many Dish readers, there are tears in my eyes.
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The interview changes no laws; it has no tangible effect. But it reaffirms for me the integrity of this man we are immensely lucky to have in the White House. Obama’s journey on this has been like that of many other Americans, when faced with the actual reality of gay lives and gay relationships. Yes, there was politics in a lot of it. But not all of it. I was in the room long before the 2008 primaries when Obama spoke to the mother of a gay son about marriage equality. He said he was for equality, but not marriage. Five years later, he sees – as we all see – that you cannot have one without the other. But even then, you knew he saw that woman’s son as his equal as a citizen. It was a moment – way off the record at the time – that clinched my support for him.
Today Obama did more than make a logical step. He let go of fear. He is clearly prepared to let the political chips fall as they may. That’s why we elected him. That’s the change we believed in. The contrast with a candidate who wants to abolish all rights for gay couples by amending the federal constitution, and who has donated to organizations that seek to “cure” gays, who bowed to pressure from bigots who demanded the head of a spokesman on foreign policy solely because he was gay: how much starker can it get?
Both Sullivan and Socarides do believe that in the long run, this will not hurt Obama’s reelection chances. Sullivan first
My view politically is that this will help Obama. He will be looking to the future generations as his opponent panders to the past. The clearer the choice this year the likelier his victory. And after the darkness of last night, this feels like a widening dawn.
Then Socarides
This is not to take anything away from the courage exhibited by President Obama today. His willingness to share with the American people his thinking, indeed, his struggle around this issue will help build a national consensus. Everyone is entitled to a journey on this issue.
I suspect that at the end of this national conversation the result will be a good one, and the process, including Obama’s painstakingly slow evolution, will have been a positive experience for the country. Hopefully, it will lead us in a positive direction—which, after all, is the job of a President.
This is a conversation that is just beginning and we owe the President a conversation that is at once passionate and reasoned. Let me end with this from him
This is something that, you know, we’ve talked about over the years and she, you know, she feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, you know, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president, and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a dad and a husband and, hopefully, the better I’ll be as president.
Elizabeth Warren and the race card
I’ve been thinking about this since the story broke that Senator Scott Brown and the Boston Herald had uncovered what they thought was Elizabeth Warren’s deception: She had checked off the Native American box when in law school and Harvard Law School had listed her as Native American in some directory a number of years back. First, I don’t think she and her campaign handled it well at first saying she didn’t remember ever telling Harvard about her racial heritage, but saying she did have an ancestor who was Native American. Second, why is Scott Brown doing this?
Warren has made a better answer since her initial reaction, but she would have been a lot better off if she had just said “I’m from Oklahoma and have some Cherokee and Delaware ancestors and I’m proud of it.” But checking that box is always fraught with pitfalls for anyone who is mixed race. This is the Tiger Woods dilemma. What box do you check and how do you decide? Back in 1990 when I was a census worker we were told that a person was whatever they said they were. I have a family story my aunt told me to explain why my hair is naturally curly in humidity even through I am clear Asian. She said that I had a Portuguese ancestor from long ago who had had a liaison with a great, great, etc. grandmother. True? Who knows. But I think it is clear that Warren does have the right to claim Native American heritage.
Steven Senne/Associated Press
And then I read this very thoughtful piece in the New York Times by Kevin Noble Maillard. Titled Elizabeth Warren’s Birther Moment, It begins
If you are 1/32 Cherokee and your grandfather has high cheekbones, does that make you Native American? It depends. Last Friday, Republicans in Massachusetts questioned the racial ancestry of Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate candidate. Her opponent, Senator Scott Brown, has accused her of using minority status as an American Indian to advance her career as a law professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas. The Brown campaign calls her ties to the Cherokee and Delaware nations a “hypocritical sham.”
In a press conference on Wednesday, Warren defended herself, saying, “Native American has been a part of my story, I guess since the day I was born, I don’t know any other way to describe it.” Despite her personal belief in her origins, her opponents have seized this moment in an unnecessary fire drill that guarantees media attention and forestalls real debate.
This tactic is straight from the Republican cookbook of fake controversy. First, you need a rarefied elected office typically occupied by a certain breed of privileged men. Both the Presidency and the Senate fit this bill. Second, add a bit of interracial intrigue. It could be Kenyan economists eloping with Midwestern anthropologists, or white frontiersmen pairing with indigenous women. Third, throw in some suspicion about their qualifications and ambitions. Last but not least, demand documentation of ancestry and be dissatisfied upon its receipt. Voila! You have a genuine birther movement.
In this case, Brown seems to be claiming that Warren’s success is all because she checked that box. Of course when Warren first came to public notice working for Congress monitoring the financial bailout and making sure consumers weren’t hurt no one questioned her smarts or her ability. Neither did all those Harvard students she has taught over the years. Neither did anyone she worked with when she was doing her famous early study of bankruptcy. The whole idea that she owes her success to her having checked that box is laughable. More from Maillard:
Even within Indian Country, the meaning of race and citizenship is contested. And now the Brown campaign wants to dictate Warren’s own belief in her identity. According to the Brown campaign, Warren could not be Indian because she is blonde, rich and most of all, a Harvard law professor. Her 1/32 Cherokee ancestry, sufficient for tribal citizenship, is not enough for the Republican party. To most people, she appears as white as, well, Betty White, but to the Scott Brown campaign, she is just Dancing With Wolves.
The Brown campaign asserts that Warren knowingly classified herself as Native American in the 1990s when Harvard weathered sharp criticism for its lack of faculty diversity. During this time, they argue, Warren relied upon this classification to enhance her employment opportunities and to improve Harvard’s numbers. Her faculty mentors at Harvard deny this and assert that the law school hired Warren without any knowledge of her ancestry.
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For the Cherokee Nation, Warren is “Indian enough”; she has the same blood quantum as Cherokee Nation Chief Bill John Baker. For non-Natives, this may be surprising. They expect to see “high cheekbones,” as Warren described her grandfather as having, or tan skin. They want to know of pow wows, dusty reservations, sweat lodges, peyote and cheap cigarettes. When outsiders look at these ostensibly white people as members of Native America, they don’t see minorities. As a result, Warren feels she must satisfy these new birthers and justify her existence.
As a law professor and Native American himself, Maillard concludes that Harvard could not have used Warren’s status to promote her since
Looked at from the inside, however, the Warren controversy is all new. When the Brown campaign accused Elizabeth Warren of touting herself as American Indian to advance her career, this was news to Native law professors. We have a good eye for welcoming faculty to the community and identifying promising scholars. We know where people teach, what they have published and we honor them when they die. Harvard Law School named its first Native American tenured professor? Really? In our small indigenous faculty town, we would have heard about it already.
My own conclusion is that Warren checked that box somewhere way back. She has said she was hoping to meet others like her by doing so. She has every right to call herself Native American. Someone at Harvard picked up on the checked box and noted it in the directory, but Harvard never made a big deal about it and they could have. Hey, maybe someone messed up and forgot to announce the appointment of a Native American.
Scott Brown has nothing of substance on which to talk so why not create a birther controversy. He is the one playing the race card. It is tight race and if he can convince a few voters that Elizabeth Warren is untrustworthy and of mixed race ancestry, it might just make a difference.
Can we take Mitt seriously?
Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is difficult to peg. I’m not sure that he is interested in governing based on his track record here in Massachusetts while Governor. Romney spent large hunks of his time running for President and not showing much interest in the state. He seems to understand capitalism as practiced by companies like Bain Capital, but is really uninterested in what goes on with ordinary middle class and the working poor. He can’t seem to hit the right notes and for the left is all too often the butt of jokes. Here are two.
Dan Wasserman on Mitt and Harvard.
Then there is Calvin Trillin.
The Republican National Committee Selects a Campaign Slogan
Our slogan’s been chosen.
We think it’s a hit.
We’ll shout from the rafters,
“We settle for Mitt!”
There is the dog on the roof, the liking to fire people, etc. etc. etc.
But he is going to be the nominee for the Republicans and we need to find out what we can take seriously. Greg Sargent writing in the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog took at stab at it today.
A few days ago, Mitt Romney chatted with a bunch of firefighters, who told him about their struggles in the Obama economy. As Romney recalled it: “I asked the firefighters I was meeting with, about 15 or them, how many had had to take another job to make ends meet, and almost every one of them had.”
Of course, firefighters are public sector workers. And Romney has said that public sector workers are getting paid too much, not that they’re getting paid too little. As Jonathan Chait puts it:
Romney’s position is that these fine public servants are luxuriating in excessive pay, a fact that, unlike swelling income inequality, constitutes a major source of unfairness in American life. (“We will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve,” he said last week.)
This is actually a policy flashpoint between the two parties. Public employment has cratered in recent years, with public sector jobs continuing to decline even as private sector jobs rebound, exerting a continued drag on the sluggish recovery. Obama’s position is that the federal government ought to provide aid to state governments to rehire some of the laid-off teachers, cops, and firefighters. Republicans oppose this. Romney seems to have forgotten that the firefighters he came face-to-face with are one category of Americans whose economic pain he’s supposed to be in favor of.
Steve Benen takes this further, adding that the episode and the attendant contradiction reveal the failure of Romney’s “transactional politics.” Romney is looking to take things away from public sector workers, students who rely on Pell Grants, those who rely on entitlements and government programs that might be cut, and the like:
His is an agenda of austerity, a sharp reduction in public investments, and hostility towards government activism in general. In a transactional sense, Romney has to hope most voters aren’t looking to make a traditional electoral trade, because he doesn’t intend to give them anything.
What we can take seriously is that Mitt doesn’t care about anyone who isn’t rich. We can take seriously that he and today’s Republican Party want to take women back to the 1950’s and even further. We need to wake up to the fact that today’s Republican Party offers the 99% nothing. We need to take Mitt at his word and vote for him at our peril.
Mourning Facts
Did you know that Facts has died? On April 19, the Chicago Tribune published an obituary for Facts brilliantly conceived and written by Rex W. Huppke.
Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012
In memoriam: After years of health problems, Facts has finally died.
Over the centuries, Facts became such a prevalent part of most people’s lives that Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once said: “Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.”
To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.
Facts held on for several days after that assault — brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason — before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372.
It’s very depressing,” said Mary Poovey, a professor of English at New York University and author of “A History of the Modern Fact.” “I think the thing Americans ought to miss most about facts is the lack of agreement that there are facts. This means we will never reach consensus about anything. Tax policies, presidential candidates. We’ll never agree on anything.”
Facts was born in ancient Greece, the brainchild of famed philosopher Aristotle. Poovey said that in its youth, Facts was viewed as “universal principles that everybody agrees on” or “shared assumptions.”
But in the late 16th century, English philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon took Facts under his wing and began to develop a new way of thinking.
“There was a shift of the word ‘fact’ to refer to empirical observations,” Poovey said.
Facts became concrete observations based on evidence. It was growing up.
Through the 19th and 20th centuries, Facts reached adulthood as the world underwent a shift toward proving things true through the principles of physics and mathematical modeling. There was respect for scientists as arbiters of the truth, and Facts itself reached the peak of its power.
But those halcyon days would not last.
Yes, anything can be stated and if done so with enough authority it is believed to be factual. There is, in my opinion, a failure to distinguish between fact and opinion. It is a fact that I am sitting at my computer on Aril 27 at 6:11 am typing these words. It is my opinion that the budget plan proposed by Paul Ryan is bad for the economy.
Facts was wounded repeatedly throughout the recent GOP primary campaign, near fatally when Michele Bachmann claimed a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease causes mental retardation. In December, Facts was briefly hospitalized after MSNBC’s erroneous report that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign was using an expression once used by the Ku Klux Klan.
But friends and relatives of Facts said Rep. West’s claim that dozens of Democratic politicians are communists was simply too much for the aging concept to overcome.
As the world mourned Wednesday, some were unwilling to believe Facts was actually gone.
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Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion.
Services are alleged to be private. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that mourners make a donation to their favorite super PAC.
Representative West can be proud: He is responsible for finally killing Facts. But we all helped.
Fear of polls
It doesn’t matter whether you support Romney or Obama. When a new poll is released you start to parse it. Who did the poll? Are they a Democratic or Republican leaning pollster? How is it different from the last poll you saw? What do the pundits say? Does the result make me happy or anxious?
This morning RealClear Politics had these numbers:
Average: Obama +3.2
Electoral College: Obama 227 Romney 170 (270 needed to win)
Intrade: Obama 60.4 Romeny 38.2
Nate Silver, my poll guru, had some advice the other day. If you are a political junkie, read the whole article, but here are some of the highlights for me.
1. Be patient. Many of the poll-watching habits you learned for the primaries you will need to unlearn for the general election.
In the primaries, it is often worth paying a tremendous amount of attention to how recently a poll was conducted. Because voter opinion shifts rapidly in primaries, a poll that is even two or three days old might have substantially less information value than one that was released today.
That just isn’t true in the general election, when there are fewer swing voters, the candidates are better known, and voter preferences are more rigid. Instead, polls have a much stronger tendency to revert to the mean, and what is perceived to be “momentum” is often just statistical noise. In October, it might be worth sweating just a little bit if there seems to be a two- or three-percentage point shift against your preferred candidate. Right now, it probably isn’t; a poll released on April 20 isn’t going to be much better in the long-run than one released on April 10.
2. Take the poll average. This ought to be obvious, but you should generally be looking for a trend to show up in several different polls from several different polling firms before you start to view it as newsworthy.
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5. Pay attention to likely voters versus registered voters. It is worth looking at whether the poll is conducted among registered voters, likely voters or all adults.
In the past eight presidential election cycles or so, the Republican candidate has done a net of about two percentage points better on average in likely voter polls than in registered voter polls.
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6. Keep paying attention to Mr. Obama’s approval ratings. In the early stages of general election campaigns, a president’s approval ratings have often been at least as accurate a guide to his eventual performance as the head-to-head numbers. Thus, for at least the next couple of months, I would pay as much attention to Mr. Obama’s approval ratings as his head-to-head polls against Mr. Romney.
It is probably slightly better to look at Mr. Obama’s net approval rating — his approval less his disapproval — than the approval rating alone.
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11. Read the polls in the context of the news. Polls don’t just shift on their own; they change because people are reacting to changes in their circumstances and to different news events.
Political reporters have beats and deadlines and need to turn stories around every day. But most of the day-to-day squabbles that the campaigns have don’t matter to most voters. If there is a shift in the polls, it is much more likely to be real rather than illusory if it follows something like an Israeli air strike on Iran or a stock market crash than something like this or this.
The other caution is that even when major news events do shift the polls, they sometimes have a half-life with the effects fading over time. These events may produce long-term and permanent effects on how voters see the candidates, but they often overshoot the mark in the close term. Recent examples include the uptrend in Mr. Obama’s approval ratings after the death of Osama bin Laden or the downtrend following the debt ceiling negotiations, both of which persisted for some weeks but then faded.
My conclusion: This is going to be close election. Closer than in my opinion it should be.
Mittens the mean
Whether you are going to vote for him or not, Mitt Romney has kinda a nice but clueless rich guy image. Don’t let that fool you. Joan Vennochi reminds us of his history here in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts is where Romney first showed his appetite for running over any candidate who stands between him and political office. Here, it happened to be women.
When Romney decided to run against Ted Kennedy in 1994, Republican Janet Jeghelian, a former talk radio host, was in the race. Once Romney jumped in, he and the state GOP kept her off the primary ballot.
Jeghelian wasn’t a strong candidate, but she was a prescient one. After she was forced out, she predicted he would waffle on abortion rights. It took awhile, but he did.
Seven years later, Romney muscled out acting Governor Jane Swift, who had his pledge that he would not challenge her for the nomination. But fresh from running the winter Olympics, Romney jumped in, and without so much as a courtesy phone call, pushed out the politically weak Swift.
Realizing the delicacy of kicking aside the Bay State’s first female chief executive, Romney recruited another woman, Kerry Healey, to run as his lieutenant governor and vouch for his pro-choice credentials. Once elected, he relegated Healey to back channel roles, but she remains loyal and supports his presidential bid.
These tactics should be familiar to Rick Santorum and the other Republican candidates only there he did it with his super Pac and advertising.
Joan’s point is that all of this leads to a lack of trust which hurts him particularly among women. And while he has flip-flopped on a number of issues two matter to women. The first is his support of abortion rights during his Massachusetts Senate campaign. And he has done a major flop on Massachusetts health care reform.
As Shannon O’Brien, the Democrat he defeated in 2002, points out, “The choice issue is just one glaring reason why women can’t trust Mr. Romney. The broader, more profound issue is about what he will do to protect and preserve family health care across the country. Where he had such promise as governor, setting the stage for using Massachusetts as a national model, now he’s saying he didn’t mean it, never said it, doesn’t want it. That’s the biggest flip-flop-flip that women should be concerned about.’’
Massachusetts Democrats are gleefully reminding voters of Romney’s singular role in health care reform. He pushed for the individual mandate. He personally escorted the first woman who signed up for Romneycare. At his request, his official State House portrait, which hangs in the reception area of the governor’s office, includes the artist’s rendition of Romney’s wife, Ann, and a stack of papers representing the state’s health care law.
Will he have his portrait replaced next?
Men and women run against each other with regularity these days. Look at President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. The point is that Mitt doesn’t seem to care about the niceties. He could have run in a primary against both Swift and Jeghelian and maybe he would have won. Maybe it is just coincidence that the two candidates he ran over were women and we will never know whether he would have jumped in if they had been men. I think he just would have competed in the primary and blasted his opponent with negative advertising.
So all of you fellow Obama supporters take heed: this is not a nice guy and brace yourself for a negative campaign and he tries desperately to recapture the women’s vote he needs to win. Luckily, I don’t think he can flip again on either abortion or health care as that flip will cost him his Republican support.
We can only hope he stays perplexed.
Paying a Fair Share or the Buffett Rule
I’ve gotten several email recently from the President, from Elizabeth Warren and from other progressive organizations about the Senate vote on the Buffett rule. Since I’m pretty sure that Senator John Kerry will vote for the bill and Senator Scott Brown will vote against it, I haven’t called, emailed or written either of them about it.
I have, however, wondered what the bill actually does. So thank you to Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in the Washington Post this morning for his explanation. The big vote everyone is talking about is actually a bill introduced by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island. He explained the bill to Ezra who explains it to us.
In other words: The “Paying a Fair Share Act” doesn’t mean someone making $1,500,000 will pay at least the same percentage of his income in taxes as the average middle-class family. It means he would pay a somewhat higher marginal rate on the income he earns over $1 million — in this case, on the excess $500,000.
Moreover, that higher marginal rate would only reach 30 percent on income over $2 million. Between $1 million and $2 million, the Buffett rule phases in so as to avoid a sharp “tax cliff” at the million-dollar mark.
But would it still raise money to help ease the deficit?
Another misconception: The proposal doesn’t raise $47 billion over 10 years. Or, rather, it does, but only if you use the “current law baseline” that assumes the full expiration of the Bush tax cuts. No one really uses that baseline. If you look at Paul Ryan’s budget, for instance, its appendix tables use a “current policy baseline,” which assumes, among other things, that the Bush tax cuts are extended.
Compared with that baseline, the Paying a Fair Share Act actually raises about $160 billion. Still not enough to solve our deficit problems on its own, but nothing to sneeze at.
So as usual it is a little more complicated than the President makes it sound, but still a good thing to support.
Creating Jobs: which party does better
The Republicans will campaign on the idea that lowing taxes on the wealthy (I think Romney wants to keep the Bush tax cuts and even cut more) creates jobs because the money the wealthy do not pay in taxes goes to create jobs. Fay Paxton has looked at the history of job creation and posted an analysis on Winning Progressive. Her conclusion: Democrats create more jobs. These charts describe private sector job creation.
Yes, the first months of the Obama Administration were rough, but as the chart shows, we started bleeding jobs under George W. Bush.
Ronald Reagan wins among Republicans, but he wasn’t afraid of raising taxes.
So what about federal public sector jobs? The Republicans always claim that the Democrats are the party of big government. Is this true? Paxton says
Republicans talk about being conservatives who believe in small government and reducing the federal workforce. The numbers don’t bear out their claims. In a press conference, House Speaker John Boehner said, “In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs.” The Republicans even advanced legislation calling for a reduction of 200,000 federal employees.
Here’s the truth:
According to the Office of Personnel Management, it is true that the federal workforce increased by 237,000 employees. What Boehner does not tell…150,000 of the employees added to the roles were uniformed military personnel, no doubt to accommodate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 237,000 figure also includes temporary Census workers.
Despite claims of huge government expansion, historically, Democratic presidents reduced the size of the federal government workforce. The federal employment numbers, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the department charged with tracking the number of employees, the data shows the following:
Paxton summarizes
If we combine the totals for all federal employees, including the military:
Reagan began office with a total of 4,982,000 employees and ended his term with 5,292,000 employees. While President Obama took office with a federal employee roster of 4,430,000 employees (fewer than Reagan). At the end of 2010 President Obama’s federal workforce numbered 4,443,000; that’s 849,000 fewer employees than Reagan, the advocate of small government! Add to this the fact that President Reagan governed during peacetime, while President Obama inherited two wars.
So the figures don’t lie: Democrats do a much better at creating new private sector jobs and reducing the size of the federal government.
Ryan’s Budget and the 2012 Election
Dan Wasserman sums up the Ryan Budget.
President Obama called the Ryan Budget “Social Darwinism” quoting that wise Republican, Newt Gingrich. Mitt Romney called it “marvelous”. Paul Krugman calls it “Pink Slime Economics”
And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.
And we’re talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?
None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)
This budget fight and the election to come are about what we want the country to be. The Republicans have that much right. Will we become a country with the rich hiding in gated communities and getting richer or will we a a country where everyone has a chance to succeed, where the less fortunate get help, and where there is a robust middle class? Democracies thrive in countries with an educated middle class. Look at the driving forces behind the Arab Spring. The choices this election will be clear.
The budget fight is also about whether or not a deficit is important right now. Yes, we can’t continue to grow the deficit indefinitely, but it seems to this non-economist, that the way to deal with the deficit is not through draconian cuts to the domestic budget, but spend on things that result in jobs. When people work they pay taxes and the deficit can begin to come down. But cutting food stamps, unemployment insurance, job retaining programs, aid to education, are all key to growing jobs or helping those who can’t find them.
Andrew Rosenthal put it better in today’s New York Times.
He ticked off some of the budget’s most near-sighted assaults: financial aid cuts to nearly 10 million college students; 1,600 fewer medical grants; 4,000 fewer scientific research grants. Starting in 2014, it would cut around 200,000 children from the Head Start program and 2 million mothers and their young children from a food assistance program. “We wouldn’t have the capacity to enforce the laws that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink or the food that we eat,” he said.
Medicaid would be gutted, Medicare would be turned into a voucher program – but the Republicans would still cut taxes by $4.6 trillion over the next decade. The cuts, as usual, would mostly benefit the wealthy.
Mr. Obama noted that the stated purpose of the Republican budget is to reduce the federal budget deficit, but he called it a Trojan horse and “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” The real purpose is to cripple government. And he said, because it guts “the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last – education and training, research and development, our infrastructure – it is a prescription for decline.”
The Republican response to Mr. Obama – that the nation is in a debt crisis and the president doesn’t get it – just made his point for him. We don’t have a debt crisis. We have a medium- to long-term budget problem, driven largely by rising health costs combined with an aging population. Health care reform is an honest attempt to deal with that. Letting the Bush tax cuts expire, starting with the high-end ones, would be an honest attempt to deal with that. Then there’s our lack of jobs, lack of income growth, diminishing prospects and dwindling opportunities.
And we shouldn’t forget that George W. Bush told us we didn’t need to raise taxes to pay for the war in Iraq because it would pay for itself through oil revenue. He cut taxes for the 1% instead and created a deficit. This probably wouldn’t have been so catastrophic except that the economy collapsed in 2008. Here is a link to a nice chart.
So the Ryan Budget will be at the heart of the election this fall – especially if Paul Ryan is Romney’s VP. It will be interesting.
FortLeft 