The fiscal cliff and the filibuster: Lawrence O’Donnell gets it wrong

1/10/2013 10:40 AM

Again, I have to listen to someone saying that Republicans broke Norquist’s pledge? Again I have to read ‘dump the filibuster’ posts on facebook? There’s Gingrich claiming that shutting down the government in 1995 (like the GOP is again threatening to do) is why Clinton decided to work with the Republicans, and that’s why Gingrich deserves credit for the only balanced budgets in recent memory. And then there’s Lawrence O’Donnelll gloating last week on his ‘Last Word’ show about how the Republicans haven’t voted for a tax increase since Bush the Rational’s administration, but they have now…wrong.

Let’s go over this one more time.

When Obama got into office, he and the Democratic Congress followed through on his campaign pledge: not only did taxes not go up on the middle class, they started to go down. Don’t ask a Republican about this, he’ll lie. Read the record, read the news from then.

The first tax increase on income since Bush the Rational left office is the 3.8% tax on capital gains that was included in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to fund some of it. This is why the wealthy funded so many SuperPACs trying to get it repealed. That tax went into effect 10 days ago. And remember, NOT ONE REPUBLICAN voted for that Act. Not one. 

All the income taxes that were going to go BACK up as part of the ‘fiscal cliff’ deal were the Bush/Cheney tax cuts from 2001. Rules in the Senate then used a PAYGO rule that could only be overridden by a 60-vote majority. These rules mandated that budget bills cause no net deficit over the scoring time window of ten years. But they allowed using expected on-budget surpluses in the calculation, like the CBO’s 10-year $3.1 trillion estimate in 2001.

Long story short, the Republicans an expiration date into the tax cut bill, returning the rates to their original levels just before the end of the ten-year window. With that small addition, they could pass it un the Senate’s reconciliation rules, which kept discussion to 20 hours, and prevented filibustering by the minority party, the Democrats.

They ran pretty much the same act in 2003, with Cheney breaking a 50-50 tie vote in the Senate, after reconciliation rules made the bill un-filibuster-able and aligned the expiration date on those dividend and capital gains tax cuts with the 2001 tax cuts.

So, in 2010, all of these tax rates were going back UP to where these rates were when Bush took office. Except that Obama and a Democratic lame-duck session decided to extended them all for two years, just to get another year of Unemployment Insurance for all the people that Bush the Dimmer had put out of work, and that his minions refused to provide employment for during the 2009-2011 Congressional cycle.

Fast-forward to 2012, post-election. Again, the tax cuts are about to expire. Only now, there’s the added ‘fiscal cliff’ of sequestration, a mandated across-the-board cut on everything in the federal budget. Between higher taxes for everyone and less output by the federal government, guaranteed recession in 2013.

  

Since the economy has been held hostage by the TeaBagger majority in the House, there is still massive unemployment. But the 2012 election definitely went against them by every measure, and Obama, having run on tax increases on the wealthy, follows through. The TeaBaggers drag their feet, and the date the tax cuts expire passes. 

This is VERY IMPORTANT.  

Because when McConnell gets almost all the Senate Republicans to vote to extend the middle class tax cuts, and Boehner gets almost all the House Democrats and a few of his moderate(?) Republicans to vote to extend the middle class tax cuts, no one breaks the pledge to Norquist. NO ONE votes to increase taxes on the wealthy. 

Because a tax increase on the wealthy was never on the table. 

The Bush/Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy simply expired, as those Republicans wrote them, to avoid all the House and Senate budget rules that would have prevented them from ever passing if estimates of budget surpluses and the costs of the cuts had been even close to accurate back at the beginning of the reign of Bush the Dimmer. 

Sure, Republicans planned to make them permanent. After ten years, no one would notice, right? But first they needed bigger majorities in Congress, and new budget rules. Instead, they got Obama and lost all of Congress from 2007 to 2011.

So no Republican voted to increase taxes, O’Donnell. Ten yard penalty for inaccurate gloating.

Which brings us to now, and the threatened shutdown.

The TeaBaggers are claiming tax increases are off the table, since we passed them. (We didn’t.) So now they’re threatening to shut down the government again, like they threatened in 2011, by not raising the debt ceiling. In 2011, this cost the US its super-duper credit rating, lowering it to ‘almost superduper’, but still, we took a hit because of these clowns.

And now Gingrich, a history professor, is rewriting history to cheer them on. His majority in the House in 1995-‘96 twice brought the US government to a stop, by sending Bill Clinton a balanced budget, balanced by making massive cuts and eliminating large parts of the government. Clinton vetoed them twice, and the citizens, seeing the Republicans show their hand on what to cut for the first (and ONLY) time in recent history, immediately sided with Clinton. When he instead proposed a budget that included tax increases, to levels we are now largely back at, and Americans approved, Republicans saw the writing on the wall. A bare few in the House voted with the Democrats against the Republican leadership, and the Democratic Senate followed. Between these increases in taxes and the dot.com boom, Clinton then had several years of surpluses.

Gingrich now tries to claim credit for getting Clinton to work with Republicans. The reality is that his incompetence gave Clinton the huge surge in popularity polls need to overcome Gingrich’s speakership, which ended soon after with his own party ousting him over ethics(!) violations, soon replacing him with Denny Hastert. 

You may have heard this name recently, regarding “the Hastert Rule”, which Republicans use: no bill comes to the floor for discussion unless the Republicans can pass it without any Democratic votes. So much for “across the aisle” or “bi-partisanship”.   

THIS is the big change that happened in the tax cut debate, Lawrence. This is the rule Speaker (and Republican) John Boehner broke, for the first time since Gingrich let that Clinton budget pass back in 1996. This is the real change worth noticing. And saving the nation almost cost Boehner his speakership.

Because, on the day those middle-class tax cuts were made permanent, Boehner had to ask himself the same thing so many Americans should ask themselves every day:

“Am I an American, or am I a Republican?”

Because, as Boehner showed, and as the TeaBaggers who voted against his continuing speakership demonstrated, you can’t be both.

1/10/2013 11:57 AM

     

Stiglitz grieves, as do I

1/7/2013 10:22 PM

Even though the brain’s burning all day, I write late at night, because if I sat down at the start of the day, and wrote as I thought about stuff, I’d blow through the day without getting anything else done. No exercise, no meals, no laundry…believe me, I’ve seen it in others. The personal hygiene issues alone put me off the idea. But I need to write. So I’m trying to keep it to one thing, once a day. We’ll see how this goes.

So I took the weekend off. Time to get back to it.

I was listening to an interview of Joseph Stiglitz on Fresh Air's podcast. It’s from a little while back, but you can listen to it, it’s only about 20 minutes. Near the end, he says something I’ve heard in other contexts, maybe even from him (on a Daily Show interview?) As a professor at Columbia (in addition to being the 2001 Nobel winner for Economics) he sees the financial industry suck up a huge percentage of the brightest students, looking for the big payday. Others have wondered what progress in how many fields might have already been made, or might be made in the future, if these minds were applied to the classic fields, or even the new internet industries, instead of working to create the next great credit card fee, the next version of mark-to-market pricing (remember Enron?), the next algorithm to anticipate currency differences and create arbitrage transactions at the rate of, not millions, but billions of  times a second.

A fair thought, I thought.

But then I thought a little more. While the average CEO in the US is now making well over 400 times what the line worker is making at his company, the average financial services CEO’s income is outstripping that of CEOs in other industries, and the starting level salary for the positions those bright Columbia graduates get in Finance is far above those of their student cohort entering any other fields.

Why? Why so much more? It’s not that they are so much brighter than the other ‘A’ students that turn the industry down. And it’s not the quality of work they do. Have you noticed the complete collapse of the American Banking, Finance and Reinsurance industries, after doing this for a couple of decades? No? That’s only because the lowly public-service cohort from Columbia and all us other left-behinds had to bail out those industries, for well north of three trillion dollars in public funds (I said “Trillion”, because I’m including the free loans from the Fed.)

I wonder if it’s not precisely to prevent progress in other industries. 

Because they want to keep the game the way it is. Not just legislatively, by lobbying to prevent any oversight or reinstatement of effective regulations like Glass-Steagal, but also competitively, by preventing innovations that would threaten their current investments. By sucking up as many technical field prospects and converting them to the uselessness of fine-tuning customer fleecing methods, there are fewer high-end scientists and engineers to develop the battery that stores energy forever, or the actually-safe fusion reactor. And while the inspired will still be out there, not chasing the dollar but driven by their vision, there will be fewer engineers, fewer researchers, fewer scientists to do the support work that every dream needs to become reality. Which means fewer variables for the predictive algorithms they're using in the Financial Industry.

“A few years at GoldmanSachs, and then I’ll get back to that spray-on solar paneling with the money I make there” soon becomes “But I need this year’s Maserati” and a spouse’s “Can we go to somewhere in Spain this weekend?” and the kids have to go to…well, wherever they breed those horrible products like the Rom-nauts and Meg Whitman’s bully boy of a son. Plan B becomes the only plan, burying a great idea, a dream, a different future for America, or at least forestalling it for a few more years while the Exxon dividends and the Eli Lilly stock splits keep on coming.

I grieve a bit. Not just for the success with which the Financial Industry has become 40% of the profit-making in America, without a single idea useful to anyone but the industry. But also for all the ideas that have died, because of all the bright minds, all the creativity, all the dreams, that have been diverted or shut down by money, nothing more than money, dangled in front of the students that are the future of  America.

Maybe that's why America is working so hard to get students into debt....but that's for another screed on another day.

1/7/2013 11:10 PM

 

What "Full Faith and Credit" Isn't

This'll be quick because I'm doing it from my tablet, and these things weren't meant for typing.
Every time I hear "full faith and credit" in discussing the debt limit, whether it's Rachel or Lawrence or the Big O himself, I want to throw a brick at the screen. Because that phrase, from article IV, sxn I of the Constitution, is about states' responsibilities to recognize the actions of other states. Like convictions, and contracts, including marriage contracts. Get married in one state, you're still married when you go to another. This is why DOMA was passed, not just to get the feds off the hook on benefits to gay couples, but (unconstitutionally) to void this part of the Constitution when it comes to same-sex marriage contracts.

So remember, "full faith and credit" is in the news, and may be a deciding point at the Supreme Court this year during the Prop 8 review...but it doesn't have a damned thing to do with the deficit, the debt, the fiscal cliff or the debt ceiling. And when someone uses it that way, you'll know you know more than they do about the subject...and probably many more.

How Gun Safety Legislation Will Be Implemented

Yea, yea, no fucking way. Too many guns out there, what’s the point, the GOP is owned and operated by the NRA, the South will rise again, yea, I got all that.

I got 20 first-graders, shot dead, en masse, in their classrooms, in less than ten minutes. Did I mention that the coroner says EVERY one of them was shot multiple times? That means the power of several .223 rounds, traveling less than 40 feet, slammed into each of those tiny bodies, and transmitted an enormous amount of that power in shock waves than turned the insides of those little bodies to jelly, inflating them like little Macy’s Day floats before the explosive pressure forced that jelly out whatever vent it could find. Entry wound, exit wound, eyeballs, ears, use your imagination if you dare.

The first responders, the coroners, the police on scene, are all going to need therapy for…well, forever.

While all the gun-protectors, the NRA, the NMA, the GOP, have leapt to the protection of an individual’s right to bear tactical shoulder-fired missiles, much less semi-auto rifles like the one used to kill these children, the president has empaneled a commission, with Fiscal-Deal-Log-Jam-Breakin’ Vice-President Biden in charge, to draft policies and model legislation to propose to the nation.  

A commission. Which, as we all know, is where good intentions go to die.

Except.

Except how long’s it been since Gabby Giffords was gunned down along with a dozen others? Since the Colorado theater massacre? Since Newtown? Not many days. And there will be another. You can practically set your watch by it.

And when there is, that’s when the Commission can hand its proposals to the Senate, to the House, and DARE them not to do something, while the stories and video of that next assault blares from every media outlet (except FOX, of course). Even the most shameful of the shameless GOP will be forced to deal, and pass, if not the proposed legislation, then a version in that direction.

And this can be repeated every time there’s another, because there are so many guns, and so many people that just know the world is against them (hi there, Limbaugh listeners!) that we know this’ll keep happening. Just hopefully, slowly, less frequently.

And if the GOP balks, at any point, statistics says one of the parents of one of those twenty little children, who has seen the pictures of his or her child’s body after that shooting, will drop those photos on the NRA, the GOP, the Congress of the United States, the press.

No one will be able to avert their eyes. 

And no one will be able to stop that legislation.

A Park is Like the NRA’s Response to Newtown

I got some In’n’Out in Culver City, day before yesterday, after a movie. I wanted to sit in the park across Venice Blvd from there and read a book I’m slogging through. But the park hasn’t got any benches anymore. Not a one, in a park that covers an entire block, except where a theater stands at one end. I ended up sitting on the driest edge of the damp rim around the fountain in front of the theater. Gotta read, and gotta eat my carryout while it’s hot. But not one damned bench. Annoyed.

Twenty first-graders gunned down in their class rooms. Six teachers and administrators dead trying to protect them. Two other children, one in the first grade classroom that wasn’t entered, and a third-grader in another wing, were second cousins I’ve never met, children of a guy my age whose dad is my mom’s cousin. A guy who came to my dad’s funeral two years ago at Arlington cemetery, my dad who died at a ripe age. At eighty-seven, not seven.

The NRA’s solution to the problem of people walking around America with semi-automatic assault rifles with 15-, 20-, 30-round clips? We need to arm teachers. Because we need to defend our schools.

What the hell do these two things have to do with one another?

They both demonstrate solutions that avoid dealing with the problem.

The park has no benches, even though it is between several restaurants, a live theater, a movie multiplex, a classic hotel and a Trader Joes’s. Why? Because no one wants the homeless sleeping on the benches. And removing benches, making open space in the city useless to anyone, is cheaper than actually dealing with homelessness. And there are only so many benches, but there are so many homeless. Maybe Culver City will get lucky and someone will offer to buy the property to build more housing that’s too expensive, or more shops that are the same as all the rest, and it’ll be a two-fer: money to cover the shortfall that every city has in the post-Prop13 era, and no place to keep the homeless out of. Win-Win.

Same thing at the schools. Why deal with the 300 million guns that are available to use any way a loonie, a drunk, an angry husband or a divorced father or a fired employee or a bankrupted homeowner or a TeaBagger in ObamaLand wants to? (Ask the Secret Service about that last group.) Why not just have parents live in fear every day their kid goes to school?   Why not scare the bejeezus out of children every day as they pass through metal detectors, wands, past armed guards with automatic weapons. Guards who, of course, will be paid so much, trained so well, screened so extensively, that they would never take the school hostage because their wife just left them, and took the kids, too.

Why deal with the problem? It’s expensive, it takes time, and it’s different. It changes things, and it means that what has been done before, to cause the problem and to avoid the problem, is, as a matter of fact, THE REAL PROBLEM.

My comfort in a park, or schools held hostage, are both problems that rarely occur in other civilized nations, at least not in my travels. No other nation makes parks that can’t be used. Nor schools that must be defended. Except in Talibanistan (see my 1/1 post). But the NRA thinks making teachers into soldiers and schools into cold war bunkers is the way to go.

I’m sure they’d solve my park problem by just shooting the homeless.