Month: November 2010

Moore Award Nominee

"So when [Alabama Congressman Jo] Bonner launches a very public, very unnecessary attack on a black Democrat from Harlem, it's worth keeping in mind the effect it's likely to have on more than a few voters back home," – Steve Kornacki, suggesting that the grandstanding of the GOP's ranking member on the ethics committee was fueled by racism and not Rangel's eleven ethics violations.

Tax Cuts Forever! Spending Cuts? TBD

Hugh Hewitt is almost prancing he's so chuffed:

Memo to the GOP: You won.  A huge victory.  Act like it, and start telling the Democrats that losers don't make the rules.  And that begins with the Bush tax cuts which ought to have been made permanent when they were passed and are going to be made permanent now.

A growth agenda looks out as far as the eye can see and tells investment the U.S. will be a low tax country with stable rates that will solve its deficit problem with spending cuts and economic growth, not punishing taxes.  Putting that long-term tax policy in place is job number one, and the detailed and deep spending cuts job number two.

I find Hewitt fascinating because he really does represent what now passes for conservatism: its resistance to history, reality or responsibility. What is irrelevant to such an ideology: the fact that there's no evidence that the Bush tax cuts caused any growth at all; the fact that they were passed by a president who won fewer votes than his opponent; and the fact that the only way they could have passed, given their budgetary consequences, was with a sunset provision.

For the true fanatic, yesterday's most extreme rhetorical maneuver is today's new normal. Toujours l'audace!

Against A Payroll Tax Holiday

Bruce Bartlett hates the idea. It seemed like a decent one to me, until I read:

What are the odds that Republicans will ever allow this one-year tax holiday to expire?

They wrote the Bush tax cuts with explicit expiration dates and then when it came time for the law they wrote to take effect exactly as they wrote it, they said any failure to extend them permanently would constitute the biggest tax increase in history. Sadly, Obama allowed himself to fall into the Republican trap, but that's another story. My point is that if allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire is the biggest tax increase in history, one that Republicans claim would decimate a still-fragile economy, then surely expiration of a payroll tax holiday would also constitute a massive tax increase on the working people of America. And what are the odds that the economy won't still be fragile a year from now? Zero, I would say.

Bitter Ezra

Ezra Klein still thinks Simpson-Bowles failed:

The point of the Simpson-Bowles commission wasn't full employment for budget wonks. It was consensus. Instead, the Simpson-Bowles commission has led to a further fracturing: The progressives have gone toward Schakowsky, wonkish types have moved toward Rivlin and the BPC, and the center-right has been cautiously supportive of Simpson-Bowles. Some are spinning all this as a different sort of victory. In this telling, Simpson-Bowles has kicked off a healthy discussion. And maybe it is. But it's a failure given the original goals of the project. Far from showing that we can all agree, it's proved that we can't.

Ezra sounds like me on the Iraq surge – and indeed it is important to note that the deficit commission was designed to create consensus, not fracture it. But instant consensus was never going to happen, and the process has already aired vital data. If it merely gets across to most Americans that the medicine for our current impasse cannot be an earmark ban, it's done something. If Obama can grasp it and make fiscal reform his own, it will have done something remarkable. Besides, as Reihan notes:

(3) My sense is that the team behind the Bowles-Simpson co-chairs’ mark understood that it would a lightning rod.

(4) I’m not sure that the Bowles-Simpson conversation hasn’t shown us that the center and the right can agree on many important aspects of how we can address the fiscal imbalance. And that just might be all we need.

As Reihan notes, it has also flushed out the real liberals: Pelosi and Schakowsky, who really do represent liberal fiscal irresponsibility almost as reckless as the Republicans'.

Pitching A Carbon Tax

Matt Yglesias has a plan to finesse the Democratic position:

I think climate hawks are making a dangerous mistake by not engaging more deeply with deficit hawks. One thing that both the Simpson-Bowles and Domenici-Rivlin proposals make clear is that some conservatives now are prepared to concede the need for higher taxes. But they want a hefty chunk of that revenue to come from regressive sources, and they want at least some progressive votes for it. Now, as Paul Krugman argues regressive taxes aren’t as bad as many people think.

But the fact of the matter is that a VAT as proposed by Domenici-Rivlin is always going to be a very hard sell for the left. This, tough, is where climate hawks can come to the rescue of the cherished ambitions of the center-right. Swap out a VAT and swap in a tax on climate pollution, and we become a constituency that’s not just “willing” to swallow the tax but eager to do so. Putting a price on climate pollution isn’t the only thing to be done in an environmental policy, but getting it done would be a huge step forward.

The Palins And Faggots, Ctd

A reader writes:

I think the people "defending" Willow's slur are missing the point. I think the problem, and what we should be criticizing, is Sarah Palin's lack of response to this.

Not because Willow said something stupid and cruel, but because Willow participated in and contributed to the culture that's driving so many gay teens to suicide. It's bad enough that Palin's kids would say something like that, and it's easy to criticize her parenting abilities when her offspring jump so quickly to cruelty. But the larger issue is that not only has Palin raised children who would say something this stupid and cruel, but that she won't refudiate it.

And it's not that she'd need to publicly scold her daughter; she should take this as an opportunity to talk about how this sort of childish cruelty isn't actually very childish, that small acts of bullying add up to a culture of hatred that's literally killing kids. And that, while we don't need to litigate a teenager on national television for a stupid thing she said, parents do need to talk to their children and make it clear that small acts like this can have a more extreme outcome than you intend.

So I don't think we should rake Willow herself over the coals for this, but neither can we use "childishness" as her defense. The problem here is with Sarah Palin, not Willow, and with her refusal to take this moment to speak compassionately towards the gay teens who contemplate suicide because kids like Willow are so quick to call someone a faggot. But, of course, this would require Palin to speak publicly out of compassion instead of self-interest, and that's clearly never going to happen.

From Palin's Facebook page from February 1, for the record:

Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the “N-word” or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities – and the people who love them – is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking. […]

As my friend in North Andover says, “This isn’t about politics; it’s about decency. I am not speaking as a political figure but as a parent and as an everyday American wanting my child to grow up in a country free from mindless prejudice and discrimination, free from gratuitous insults of people who are ostensibly smart enough to know better…

So far from Palin: dead silence.