Giving the Republicans another crack at it

Perhaps while Barack Obama and Harry Reid were congratulating themselves over their achievement of capitulation to Republican insanity striking a budget deal, they forgot that there's another battle coming:

Congressional Republicans are vowing that before they will agree to raise the current $14.25 trillion federal debt ceiling — a step that will become necessary in as little as five weeks — President Obama and Senate Democrats will have to agree to far deeper spending cuts for next year and beyond than those contained in the six-month budget deal agreed to late Friday night that cut $38 billion and averted a government shutdown.

Republicans have also signaled that they will again demand fundamental changes in policy on health care, the environment, abortion rights and more, as the price of their support for raising the debt ceiling.

Because ensuring that the poor and the elderly die off instead of costing billionaires a few more bucks a year in taxes, trying to prevent future generations from having to try to survive in an uninhabitable world, and most importantly of all, bitchslapping the sluts, are the only priorities right now for a Republican party that has turned into a pack of rabid dogs.

Of course Congressional Republicans are still pretending that the years 2001-2008 never existed; you know, those years when George W. Bush cut taxes and started two wars without paying for them. But hey, if you have Democrats who refuse to fight back, you can get away with saying shit like this:

“We want to see real structural, cultural-type changes tied to this debt ceiling. We’re not interested in a one-off kind of savings, or anything small,” said Representative Mick Mulvaney, a first-term Republican from South Carolina. “There has got to be game-changing kinds of changes to get us to vote for it.”

He dismissed warnings about default as “just posturing,” and said Democrats should bear the responsibility for passing any measure to increase the borrowing limit.

“It’s their debt,” he said. “Make them do it. That’s my attitude.”

It's a miracle that the New York Times actually responds to this with actual facts, given that in today's media, provable facts and utter horseshit are given equal credibility:

Of the nearly $14.2 trillion in debt, roughly $5 trillion is money the government has borrowed from other accounts, mostly from Social Security revenues, according to federal figures. Several major policies from the past decade when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress — tax cuts, a Medicare prescription-drug benefit and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — account for more than $3.2 trillion.

The recession cost more than $800 billion in lost revenues from businesses and individuals and in automatic spending for safety-net programs like unemployment compensation. Mr. Obama’s stimulus spending and tax cuts added about $600 billion through the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Got that?

Bush administration contribution to the debt: $5 trillion.

Obama administration contribution to the debt: $600 billion.

And yet, you know as well as I do that if you ask your wingnut friends, they'll tell you that this is ALL OBAMA'S DEBT, that George Bush balanced the budget. Of course they have to wipe Bill Clinton out of existence in order to compress two decades like that, but then consensus reality never mattered to the right anyway.

So what does all this mean for thee and me?

Once the limit is reached, the Treasury Department would not be able to borrow as it does routinely to finance federal operations and roll over existing debt; ultimately it would be unable to pay off maturing debt, putting the United States government — the global standard-setter for creditworthiness — into default.

The repercussions in that event would be as much economic as political, rippling from the bond market into the lives of ordinary citizens through higher interest rates and financial uncertainty of the sort that the economy is only now overcoming, more than three years after the onset of the last recession.

But that's the whole point, isn't it? Put the economy back into recession, blame Barack Obama, and take over the Senate and the executive branch, so that it can become a Republican dream world of oligarchs living in gated mansions, stuffing themselves silly while the rest of us dumpster-dive?

Here's what the Republicans in Congress don't understand: The oligarchs; the Lloyd Blankfeins and the Jamie Dimons and the Koch brothers and the rest of their ilk don't regard the Republican legislators doing their bidding as their peers in the oligarchy either. Do you believe for one minute that when completely unfettered corporate power is the rule of law in this country, that these Captains of Industry are going to welcome the likes of John Boehner and Scott Walker and Paul Ryan to their groaning table? Hardly. They'll be out there dumpster diving with the rest of us.

Maybe we can turn them into Soylent Green.

Barack Obama's childhood baggage is worse than I thought

In Newsweek this week, Jacob Weisberg has a column on the problem Barack Obama's seeming aloofness is causing with his ability to appear to connect with Americans worried about jobs and the future. It's tempting to dismiss Weisberg out of hand, until you remember that not so long ago, thinking you might have a beer with the president was a qualification for office, and even now, thinking you might be able to FUCK the president seems to make Sarah Palin qualified for the office in the eyes of an alarming number of people.

Weisberg says that Obama's childhood made him self-sufficient to the point of seemingly not needing anyone:

Obama's self-interpretation is so persuasive that it has largely preempted other interpretations. Telling his story in relation to his missing father, the son explains how in finding his identity he grew from anger and cynicism to deep social commitment. The lack of deep attachments in his life, however, is a different issue. To speculate, it may have more to do with his relationship with his mother. When Barry Obama was 10, his mother sent him from Indonesia back to live with her parents in Hawaii. She returned there after her second marriage ended, but when she went back to Indonesia a few years later, her teenage son chose to stay in Hawaii. This loving but physically distant relationship seems to have left Obama self-reliant to an unusual degree.

For a politician, emotional self-sufficiency is both asset and liability. On the positive side, it supports Obama's rationalism, his level-headedness in crisis, and his dispassionate decision making. On the negative, it can read as cold, aloof, or arrogant. It's healthy that Obama doesn't need the roar of the crowd for validation. It's a problem that the crowd seems to need more from him than he is able to provide.

There is one group that Obama seems to have a pathological need to please, and my ten-cent completely speculative and therefore worth what you paid for it psychoanalysis has to do with something he may have had to deal with during that time living with his grandparents -- winning over people who may have had to get over some of their own issues to raise their biracial grandson. The reason I keep having the sense of Obama having to ingratiate himself with people who may have had pre-existing issues is twofold: One reason is the infamous "typical white people" remark, in which he clumsily admitted that even his own grandmother had a visceral reaction to black people she didn't know -- a remark that had the chattering classes screeching for days. The other reason is the manifestation we see today of someone with a deep-seated need to ingratiate himself with people not inclined to do so, in this case, Republicans.

Because while Obama has shown himself to be willing to throw everyone otherwise inclined to have his back -- gays, working class people, the netroots, the black community -- under the bus without a second thought, the ONE group whose support he desperately wants and doesn't realize he can never have, is Republicans and those Republicans With D's After Their Names known as Blue Dogs.

And that is why, in the middle of a recession, when it's the ABSOLUTE WORST thing you can do for the economy, he's capitulating to Republicans and proposing a spending freeze on the very programs that serve the middle and working class:

President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.

The officials said the proposal would be a major component both of Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address on Wednesday and of the budget he will send to Congress on Monday for the fiscal year that begins in October.

The freeze would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, including air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks.

But it would exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The payoff in budget savings would be small relative to the deficit: The estimated $250 billion in savings over 10 years would be less than 3 percent of the roughly $9 trillion in additional deficits the government is expected to accumulate over that time.

The initiative holds political risks as well as potential benefits. Because Mr. Obama plans to exempt military spending while leaving many popular domestic programs vulnerable, his move is certain to further anger liberals in his party and senior Democrats in Congress, who are already upset by the possible collapse of health care legislation and the troop buildup in Afghanistan, among other things.

Fiscally conservative Democrats in the House and Senate have urged Mr. Obama to support a freeze, and it would suggest to voters, Wall Street and other nations that the president is willing to make tough decisions at a time when the deficit and the national debt, in the view of many economists, have reached levels that undermine the nation’s long-term prosperity. Perceptions that government spending is out of control have contributed to Mr. Obama’s loss of support among independent voters, and concern about the government’s fiscal health could put upward pressure on the interest rates the United States has to pay to borrow money from investors and nations, especially China, that have been financing Washington’s budget deficit.

Republicans were quick to mock the freeze proposal. “Given Washington Democrats’ unprecedented spending binge, this is like announcing you’re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio.

Robert Reich explains why this is such a terrible idea:

A spending freeze will make it even harder to get jobs back because government is the last spender around. Consumers have pulled back, investors won’t do much until they know consumers are out there, and exports are minuscule.

Jobs may be coming back a bit in the next months but the country has lost so many (not to mention all those who have entered the workforce over the last two years and still can’t land a job) that it will be many years before the middle class can relax. Furthermore, this recession isn’t like other recessions in recent memory. It has more to do with problems deep in the structure of the American economy than with the ups and downs of the business cycle.

Like Clinton’s, Obama’s package of middle-class benefits is small potatoes. They’re worthwhile but they pale relative to the size and scale of the challenge America’s middle class is now facing. Obama can no longer afford to come up with lists of nice things to do. At the least, he’s got to do two very big and important things: 1) Enact a second stimulus. It should mainly focus on bailing out state and local governments that are now cutting services and raising taxes, and squeezing the middle class. This would be the best way to reinvigorate the economy quickly. 2) Help distressed homeowners by allowing them to include their mortgage debt in personal bankruptcy -- which will give them far more bargaining leverage with mortgage lenders. (Wall Street hates this.)

Yet instead of moving in this direction, Obama is moving in the opposite one. His three-year freeze on a large portion of discretionary spending will make it impossible for him to do much of anything for the middle class that’s important.

Perhaps Rahm Emanuel told him this is the way for the justifiably endangered Evan Bayh to keep his Senate seat. Perhaps this is what Tim Geithner wants. But I suspect that it's deeper than that. I suspect that it's a more selective -- and more futile version of the same disease that plagues Bill Clinton -- a desperate need for approval. The difference is that at least Bill Clinton's need to be loved by everyone means that at least some of his supporters were appeased some of the time. Barack Obama only cares about the approval of those who will never, ever, as long as he lives, approve of him.

While wounded soldiers languish in mouse-infested VA clinics....

...the Crawford Caligula presents a budget that contains $32.7 BILLION -- that's BILLION, folks -- in tax cuts for the Walton heirs ALONE, in the form of complete elimination of the estate tax.

The link to this article by Matt Taibbi comes to us courtesy of the definitely brilliant Cernig:

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

Some other notable estimate estate tax breaks, versus corresponding cuts:

• Cox family (Cox cable TV) receives $9.7 billion tax break while education would get $1.5 billion in cuts
  
• Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores) receives $826.5 million tax break while Community Service Block Grants would be eliminated, a $630 million cut
  
• Ernest Gallo family (shitty wines) receives a $468.4 million cut while LIHEAP (heating oil to poor) would get a $420 million cut
  

And so on and so on. Sanders additionally pointed out that the family of former Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, who received a $400 million retirement package, would receive about $164 million in tax breaks.

Compare that to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which Bush proposes be completely eliminated, at a savings of $108 million over ten years. The program sent one bag of groceries per month to 480,000 seniors, mothers and newborn children.

Now I know that there are people who have been caught up in a Kafkaesque mess as a result of the estate tax. Our own resident wingnut troll, Barry, has posted at his own blog about someone he knows who ended up with a taxable estate because of the value of a house she inherited that was also unsaleable for various reasons. So the woman was stuck with five figures in estate taxes that she was unable to pay because the inheritance that she needed to pay the taxes was in the form of a house she couldn't sell. But it seems to me that a situation like that one, where there is an illiquid inherited asset that is not easily converted to a liquid one for tax purposes, could be dealt with in estate tax law, rather than eliminating the tax entirely so that Lee Raymond's family pays $164 million less in taxes.