Month: December 2010

Tax Cuts & Liberalism

Kevin Drum:

Looking at American politics from a 100,000-foot level, conservatives have won. Programmatic liberalism is essentially dead for a good long time, and small bore stuff is probably the best we can hope for over the next 10-20 years — though social liberalism will continue to make steady advances. I reserve judgment on whose fault that is.

David Dayen responds:

It’s certainly dead in a situation where tax rates are permanently at 2001 levels. To me, that’s the choice. If the debt ceiling rise was included in this deal, ensuring that one bargaining chip for spending cuts came off the table, I’d have a much easier time agreeing to this, mindful of the near-term need for stimulus. As it isn’t, I have problems with mortgaging the future for a short-term gain I find ephemeral.

Bai on an Obama Primary

The New York Times’ Matt Bai has long displayed an intense dislike of the American Left, particularly the online progressive movement. His column at the Times, “Political Times,” is an opinion column masked to look like straight news analysis. Almost everything he writes is filtered through his own normative prism. As such it’s no surprise that today’s piece, “Murmurs of Primary Challenger to Obama,” is laden with distortions. The most obvious is the notion that there are serious talks to run a primary challenger against President Obama. While there is discontent on the left and a small number of progressive writers have floated the idea, it’s hard to describe this as something that is moving towards reality, at least worthy of reporting by one of the Times top political, ahem, reporters.

Things get more interesting when Bai mentions the key issues which he sees liberals as raising when it comes to primarying Obama. He writes:

All of this would have seemed unthinkable in 2008, when Mr. Obama’s red-white-and-blue visage seemed omnipresent on campuses and along city streets, a symbol to many of liberalism reborn. That, of course, was before the abandonment of “card-check” legislation for unions and of the so-called public option in health care, the escalation in Afghanistan and the formation of the deficit-reduction commission.

Note Bai’s issue choice and tone. First, there hasn’t been a single labor union which has cited the lack of movement on the Employee Free Choice Act – or any other issue – as grounds for challenging the President. Yet Bai leads with labor reform, couched in scare quotes, as the first issue liberals are citing as grounds for a primary. Of the three published pieces Bai cites calling for a primary, neither Michael Lerner, nor Robert Kuttner, nor Clarence Jones mention labor reform broadly or Employee Free Choice specifically as reasons to primary the President.

Second, note the “so-called” part of his reference to the public option. It wasn’t so-called. That’s what it was. Again, though, while there is disappointment widely and outright anger in some places, I don’t see the particular presence or absence of the public option from health care reform legislation as a driving force in discussions on the left of a primary challenge.

No doubt the zeitgeist in liberal spheres is one of disappointment and anger. It’s also evident that the President is angry with the progressive left for raising their criticisms, as yesterday’s White House press conference clearly demonstrated. There’s been more tension between the administration and the base than I would hope for, but Bai doesn’t do anyone a service by elevating what are at best tangential policy differences in the quiet conversations about a Democratic primary. Of course, that’s Bai’s point. He’s seeking to exaggerate the volume of these conversations and frame them in such a way as to make it really simple for Village elites to punch the left.

I don’t doubt that more progressives will float the idea of primarying the President. It’s a natural part of the conversation when a sitting President is headed to a re-election campaign. But there isn’t a single organization who has moved towards a primary. There isn’t a single Democratic politician who has expressed interest or willingness in running, let alone a draft movement directed at any individual to run against Obama from the left. Maybe these things will change in the future. For now, there is obviously dissatisfaction but nothing near the level of formative campaigning that Bai implies, making me think the sole purpose of Bai’s piece is to be a vehicle for his intense dislike of the left.

Fiscally Doomed


Felix Salmon:

If you were structuring a tax code from scratch, it would look nothing like this. But the problem is that tax hikes seem to be politically impossible no matter which party is in power. And since any revamp of the tax code would involve tax hikes somewhere, I fear we’re fiscally doomed.

There has to be a conversation about the tax code that includes arguments by Democrats for making corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes. Unless and until Democrats are willing to forcefully make this argument to the public, we will continue to be incapable of doing what is fiscally necessary, viz. raising taxes on the wealthy.

On Wikileaks

I think Digby has written the best piece on why Wikileaks is important and what stance progressives should hold towards it. This passage is of note:

It’s true that much of what’s been revealed in the last year has pertained to US foreign policy, but the US is the world’s superpower, spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined, has more global interests and more connections. It’s natural that it would be a primary subject for such revelations. But that doesn’t mean that Wikileaks is only interested in the US or is working on behalf of others to bring it down. Remember, it’s certain Americans who have felt compelled to reveal these secrets about out country. Why the messenger should be shot is beyond me.

Also:

People feel very strongly about this on all sides and that’s fine. But I do think that there is one thing we should all agree on: the appalling open calls for Julian Assange’s assassination are barbaric authoritarianism at its worst. (The obvious attempt to smear him as a sexual predator for alleged condom failure fall into the same category.) The man put some documents on the internet and there is a vigorous global debate going on about it. If there was ever a case for public servants and the media (which should all clearly be on the side of Wikileaks, in my opinion) to be circumspect in their language it’s in this case. I’m astonished that these calls for murder are so casually accepted. (But then, we are living in a country in which torture is accepted, so I’m probably foolish to keep clinging to these silly notions about civilized, democratic behavior.)

PFC Manning is known to have leaked documents to Assange. He has been arrested and faces court martial and a very long jail term if convicted.  Wikileaks is just a messenger and not the only one (eg., the Guardian provided the New York Times with this round of documents the US paper of record has reported on). Given that the leaks are in no ways exclusively damaging to the US, but most other major governments of the world, it’s really hard for me to get the hysteria around Wikileaks as being particularly anti-American. Throw in that there are as of yet no documented cases of people being hurt or killed as a result of the leaks and I think this is not much more than powerful people (mostly governments) coming together to defend themselves from facing public scrutiny. That the reaction from Western governments and the Chinese government is functionally the same is both disturbing and telling of the commonalities between threatened elite power structures, regardless of what governmental system they exist in.

The Cost of Tax Cuts

Separate from the partisan ideological debate over what should be done in response to the pending scheduled expiration of Bush’s tax cuts, there’s a real argument to be had about how expensive these cuts would be if they were extended. Paul Krugman, in a column where he goes somewhat from critic to coach of the President, writes this about the short-term costs of a blanket extension of these tax cuts.

But while raising taxes when unemployment is high is a bad thing, there are worse things. And a cold, hard look at the consequences of giving in to the G.O.P. now suggests that saying no, and letting the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule, is the lesser of two evils.

Bear in mind that Republicans want to make those tax cuts permanent. They might agree to a two- or three-year extension — but only because they believe that this would set up the conditions for a permanent extension later. And they may well be right: if tax-cut blackmail works now, why shouldn’t it work again later?

America, however, cannot afford to make those cuts permanent. We’re talking about almost $4 trillion in lost revenue just over the next decade; over the next 75 years, the revenue loss would be more than three times the entire projected Social Security shortfall. So giving in to Republican demands would mean risking a major fiscal crisis — a crisis that could be resolved only by making savage cuts in federal spending.

And we’re not talking about government programs nobody cares about: the only way to cut spending enough to pay for the Bush tax cuts in the long run would be to dismantle large parts of Social Security and Medicare.

Keeping the tax cut expiration debate squarely in the realm of the political is a mistake. There’s no way to win this argument without talking about the actual economic impact these cuts will have down the road. At a time where there is a mania about deficit reduction, what the Republicans are pushing for truly represents a break with fiscal reality. As Krugman points out, the only way to pay for what the Republicans want is to thoroughly crush the social safety network…to pay for tax cuts for millionaires.

What’s most frustrating about how this debate has played out, again as Krugman notes, is that the GOP is blackmailing the President and Democrats in Congress. No more, no less. The response should come on multiple levels: as I said above, laying out the case for the fiscal irresponsibility of extending tax cuts to millionaires, a partisan assault framing for 2012 (which is where it has mostly been done so far), and a moral argument about pushing for handouts to Paris Hilton at a time when millions are about to lose their unemployment benefits.

Unfortunately, it’s late in the game. Though there is still nearly a full month before the cuts expire on schedule, there doesn’t seem to be a desire to have the fight that needs to be had. Maybe there really is too much at stake to deal in the details now, but I’m just hard pressed to believe that neither economics nor ideology have anything to play in the resolution of this legislative fight.

Pulling No Punches

I was recently visiting with my grandmother, who is an avid consumer of political news. She watches Ed Schultz and other MSNBC shows, reads some political blogs (mostly what I link to), and is highly frustrated by the lack of progress on the economy and the continued beating Democrats are taking at the hands of Republicans. One question she asked me was, “Does President Obama read Paul Krugman’s column?” While I assume Krugman’s pieces are in the daily news clips the President receives, I can’t state with any certainty that Krugman’s increasingly critical columns are really on the President’s radar.

But pieces like Krugman’s column today must surely set off alarm bells in the White House. The NY Times columnist pulls no punches, taking on the President’s decision to freeze the pay of federal workers and extent an olive branch to Republicans, which they return by pledging not to let anything move in the Senate until taxes are voted on (last night they subsequently blocked even tax cuts from moving forward). Krugman writes:

It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right.

Krugman might be describing these things in his column, but the Republicans in Congress are doing it out in public, through the legislative process. So while there is inevitably going to be frustration at the public criticism Krugman is leveling against the President, it’s just words in a column. The real offense comes from Republicans, who will continue to treat this administration and the legislative priorities of Congress – priorities which are driven by the needs of a country in economic crisis.

I would hope that people in the administration put this in front of the President. I would hope it makes him mad. But I hope that his anger gets directed at the real target, Republicans, and not at Krugman, who is merely holding up a mirror to the administration.

Playing Two Different Games

Politico’s Mike Allen:

Gibbs, to Meredith Vieira, on ‘Today’: ‘The president believes that somewhere in all of this, we can find common ground. … The American people … didn’t vote in November for gridlock.’

The entire GOP Senate caucus:

Senate Republicans intend to block action on virtually all Democratic-backed legislation unrelated to tax cuts and government spending in the current postelection session of Congress, officials said Tuesday, adding that the leadership has quietly collected signatures on a letter pledging to carry out the strategy.

CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante said officials had confirmed the letter was being circulated among Senate Republicans.

If carried out, it would doom Democratic-backed attempts to end the Pentagon’s practice of discharging openly gay members of the military service and give legal status to young illegal immigrants who join the military or attend college.

It’s clear that the White House and the Senate Republicans have two diametrically opposed opinions of what the election meant in November. Oftentimes you hear talk of the brilliance of American voters, who will vote one party into the White House and the other party into one or both chambers of Congress. This recipe makes gridlock fundamentally likely and easy. Unfortunately it seems to be what the GOP wants to take away from the voters is that they should get to do whatever they want, regardless of its human cost. Blocking anything from happening is their mission now and will continue to be for the next two years. Pretending otherwise is going to be a very dangerous from a tactical standpoint.