Okay, let’s get one thing out of the way at the start: very few people enjoy paying taxes. To that I can only add my own personal observation that the people who seem to complain the loudest about taxes are the ones who can most afford to pay them. They have an excellent means of making their complaints heard, too – it’s called the Republican Party. In fact, in service to those who would pay not a single dime more than the historic low rates they’re paying today, the G.O.P. is creating a default crisis out of whole cloth by linking the authorization of additional borrowing to the conclusion of a draconian budget agreement that will gut the essential social programs they have always sought to defund, privatize, etc.
The two things, of course, have nothing to do with one another in the real world. Raising the debt ceiling is merely addressing financial commitments that have already been agreed upon. It is something the Republicans have gladly passed many times before under their own presidents, as well as under Democrats. They have seized upon it because it offers an opportunity to, in effect, put the entire nation up against a wall until we give up on the idea of not spending our elderly years in penury. (That’s sooooo 1960’s of us.) The Republicans see an opportunity here to realize what they could never accomplish during George W. Bush’s tenure – privatization of Medicare, pirating Social Security, and locking in massive tax cuts from now until perdition. And they sense, perhaps correctly, that the Democrats don’t have enough fight in them to stop it.
I will gladly crib Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison, and Dean Baker on this – Social Security is not – repeat, not – part of any budgetary problem. It is fully self-funding for the next 25 years with no changes whatsoever. How many programs can make that claim? The G.O.P. and spineless Democrats merely want to pirate the fund to pay for extending Bush tax cuts for the richest people in the country. Regarding Medicare and Medicaid, they are single-payer systems dedicated to the elderly, poor, disabled, and stricken amongst us. The rest of us – those who are relatively young, fit, and almost never need a doctor – are reserved for the profit of private insurers. Single payers systems only pay for themselves when everyone – sick and well, old and young, rich and poor – participates in them. If we want to solve the funding problem, we need to decide whether we can continue to afford contriving a profitable market for companies like BlueCross.
In short, the deficit hawks in the Republican caucuses are blackmailing us into funding tax breaks for wealthy people – including the fuckers who caused the financial crisis – by crippling our already inadequate social safety net. I say, call their bluff. This is ground worth fighting for.
luv u,
jp
World War II, flattening its dissidents, outlasting its main rivals … until we managed to elect a man so incompetent he could, to borrow a phrase, destroy the empire merely by strolling through it. I’m sure to the nation’s imperial board of trustees, George W. seemed a relatively safe bet, particularly with such seemingly reliable minders as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld keeping an eye on the store. That miscalculation is proving very costly. Just as our attack on Vietnam bled us dry (to say nothing of what it did to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians), this past decade of war – coupled with an amazingly irresponsible policy of deep war-time tax cuts – has helped to hobble our economy, perhaps beyond recovery.
leader that al Qaeda had ever known. This was a victory for all who have served since 9/11. One soldier summed it up well. “The message,” he said, “is we don’t forget. You will be held accountable, no matter how long it takes.”
This was the magic of the marketplace passage that’s been previewed over the past few days. Obama promised to get the IMF and World Bank working to “modernize and stabilize the economies of Tunisia and Egypt.” What he didn’t say was that the mass protests in Egypt he referenced earlier were fueled, in part, by neoliberal reforms of the type he’s describing. All I can say is that the revolutionaries in Egypt and Tunisia had better be on their guard, because plugging their economies into the Washington consensus only means striving to be another Honduras.
Of course, the United States – despite our late-to-the-party expressions of sympathy for the Egyptian people – is squarely on the wrong side of this divide, as is practically every government in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, and Israel. As a key component of U.S. foreign policy in the middle east, we have been sluicing billions of dollars into the Egyptian regime since the Camp David Accords were signed more than thirty years ago, 29+ of which have been presided over by Mubarak. Much of this has been military aid, the principal purpose of which is to ensure continued non-interference and tacit complicity in Israel’s policy of occupation and assimilation of the West Bank and its denial of national rights for the Palestinians. This aid has given Mubarak the space to run his country with no hint of opposition, in a constant state of emergency. Unsurprising that he would argue for his continued rule by suggesting some dire fate may prove the only alternative.
Sad thing is, Obama seems ready to assist them in this. His somewhat schizophrenic SOTU lurched from major investments to multi-year spending freezes. Domestic spending kept level for five years? Sounds like McCain. What would the impact of that be on all of these domestic initiatives he’s mentioning in the same breath? We shall see how that shakes out. Of course, the CBO came out with dire estimates regarding both the federal budget and Social Security practically while Obama was speaking. The primary culprit? The tax cut deal, which is blowing the predictable hole in the Federal budget and starving Social Security of its payroll tax funding. Guess how they’re going to try to fill that hole. Ask Paul Ryan.
That’s all good, but it’s just a step in the right direction. Gay Americans are still second-class citizens, barred from full civil rights as of this moment. As of now, there is an institutional necessity to allow gays to join the military – with an all-volunteer force like ours, we cannot wage two (or perhaps three) simultaneous wars without providing incentives to talented people of every persuasion to participate. The trouble is, when they return to civilian life (those who don’t choose to make the military a permanent career), they find themselves unable to marry, to raise a family, or to hold certain types of positions in some states. Not a dissimilar situation to that of the late 1940s, early 1950s, when black soldiers returned to the segregated south and a nearly equally racist north. My guess is that it’s just a matter of time before the crumbling edifice of discrimination against gays falls entirely to pieces.
I’m not a practicing Christian, nor am I big on organized religion in general, but if there’s one thing valuable about the Christmas season it’s the sense of possibility it can engender in people – not so much the expectation of personal gain, but more the notion that things can be better, that in the midst of an unforgiving universe, we can be fair and decent to one another. So in a way these letters show that, even in the midst of an unrelenting consumer culture, these kids are more focused on those ideals than might be expected. So even though Santa may not be coming for many of them, they are very good little girls and boys indeed.
shepherd this deal through the House. It seems likely that most Republicans will support it, so he hardly needs the entire Democratic caucus. In any case, the capitulation happened a long time ago. At this point, the main thing is making certain that unemployed workers get the help they need. I don’t care how we get there, particularly, so long as they don’t give away the store… and reserve the right to start fighting again fresh on January 1.