By conserfative, I mean one of those less-than-wealthy wingnut loyalists who stand up for the poor put-upon aristocrats of wealth in moronic support of policies that further enrich the fatcats and beggar the conserfatives. These moronic loyalists think of themselves as independent and clear-thinking, when in fact they yearn for a strongman and are the easiest sheeple to pull the wool over.
Just to clear that up, if it needed it...
It really shouldn't surprise anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the House teabaggers have zero sincere interest in a deal to forestall the sequester. John Boehner (R-no) is on record as having gotten 98% of what he wanted in the original deal, and even allowing for a bit of hyperbole in that number, he knows he's not going to get a better deal, especially now that President Obama has found his spine.
Instead, what Boehner wants to do is shift the blame for the cuts onto Obama and the Democrats. He and his party of mercenary bastards really do believe that perception is reality. Thus the only thing that matters to him in the sequestration fight is to win the battle of perception.
Never mind whether these cuts hurt people. Republicans don't care about anyone who's vulnerable.
Never mind whether these cuts hurt the economy. Republicans have shown for years that the size of the economic pie doesn't matter to them. They in fact support economic inequality as a desirable goal, not merely a side effect of their desire to drown the government in the bathtub. When the economy hurts the middle class (and the forgotten poor), it also hurts the wealthy, but the wealthy recover their losses and attain even greater plutocratic power over the rest of us. And that's what Republicans support.
Never mind whether these cuts hurt the military, even. Since the voters no longer trust Republicans more than Democrats on the military, blame-shifting this is the GOP's way of trying to get that trust back. Obviously, an undeserving way.
Fortunately, Boehner seems to be failing to convince Americans that his lies are true. This must come as a surprise to him, since he and the Republicans have been so often successful at that in the past.
Update (3/1): Yep:
Amid clamoring from his more conservative members, Mr. Boehner eventually reaffirmed his own conservative principles, abandoning even the pretense of reaching a bipartisan solution on the spending cuts. He argued that the president had gotten his desired tax increases in the earlier showdown. And he promised no more one-on-one negotiating sessions meetings with Mr. Obama.
The truth would kill their chance of election:
[I]f we add up Mr. Ryan’s specific proposals, we have $4.3 trillion in tax cuts, partially offset by around $1.7 trillion in spending cuts — with the tax cuts, surprise, disproportionately benefiting the top 1 percent, while the spending cuts would primarily come at the expense of low-income families. Over all, the effect would be to increase the deficit by around two and a half trillion dollars.
Yet Mr. Ryan claims to be a deficit hawk.Once they've increased the deficit yet again (see the maladministration of Duhbya and Darth), they'll be back for yet another round of budget-busting tax cuts for the very, very wealthy. And the wingnut morons who vote Republican while living in the shrinking middle class will be fooled again.
I've been too busy canvassing for Elizabeth Warren to post anything, but...
Here's a backgrounder on Warren that I had a moment to read today.
Mixon, the Houston professor, who often had lunch with Warren and became an early mentor, recalled how Warren made an impassioned speech not long after she was hired about her belief in the “middle-class values” of hard work and honesty.The wingnuts and other fans of Scott-free Brown (R-McDreamy) will miss that paragraph. After all, it shows Warren as authentic, and they can't get that into their addle-pated thoughts.
How can one man speak for 25 minutes and not be wrong about anything, while dozens of so-called leaders can't get a sentence out of their mouths without bullshitting?
The puzzle remains why so many otherwise sane middle class Americans still shill for the wealthy, even the very, very wealthy who do nothing more than skim off the cream:
[W]ho are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.They must watch a lot of stupidity-inducing Fox. A lot...
Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.’s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door.
Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England’s director for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he waspishly noted, “If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.”
Republicans gave it all to the rich. All of it. Not the slightly rich, the very very very rich. Trillions of dollars. They still have it, spoils of their completely successful class war against the rest of us.
The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. "Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years," says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. "All the gains went to the top percentage points."The rich didn't use it for anything the Republicans promised. They didn't create jobs. They didn't invest in anything hard, only in the Wall Street casino. They didn't even trickle it down on us.
The stimulus argument was lousy economics. The previous two decades, after all, had demonstrated that "trickle-down" tax cuts don't juice the economy – they create bubbles and balloon deficits. Proponents pointed to Reagan's original tax cut in 1981, claiming it had spurred economic growth. But that is nothing more than "urban legend," [David] Stockman says. The economy "did recover after 1982," he says, "but mainly because the Federal Reserve defeated inflation."When money is involved, every single Republican legislative action for many years has had as its purpose the enrichment of the already rich. They want plutocracy.
The deal privileged gambling on stocks over working for a living: The tax rate the richest pay on their long-term capital gains was slashed by 25 percent, while their rate on dividends fell by almost 60 percent. The move not only fueled speculation of Wall Street, it further widened the considerable gap between rich and poor. "It was a very destructive combination to have a national economic policy that stimulated debt-financed capital gains and then taxed the windfall at the lowest rate imaginable," says Stockman. "That contributed, clearly, to the growing imbalance in household income and wealth."
As with the offshore profits, the banks used the money to line the pockets of executives and investors – while doing little to speed the recovery of Main Street. "We gave an enormous subsidy to these financial institutions, and they have not returned it to the American people," said Warren. "The administration could have said, 'All right, take this and multiply it throughout the economy.' But Paulson never made that a condition of taking the money."
Herman Cain wants your taxes to go up so that the wealthy - who already have everything - can pay less:
The key point is that each of the nines is a tax that would more or less fully fall on middle-income families, who in addition to paying 9 percent of their income in taxes would find their living costs 9 percent higher and their wages 9 percent lower. That’s a 27 percent tax, way above the average federal taxes now paid by middle-income households.
They made too many wage concessions:
In 1988, the income of an average American taxpayer was $33,400, adjusted for inflation. Fast forward 20 years, and not much had changed: The average income was still just $33,000 in 2008, according to IRS data.Say this for the teabaggers: They know they're getting screwed. But they blame exactly the wrong people.
Meanwhile, the richest 1% of Americans -- those making $380,000 or more -- have seen their incomes grow 33% over the last 20 years, leaving average Americans in the dust.
Eric Cantor (R-pander to business, school the President) puts responsibility-free corporate fraternity above all responsibility to America.
Obama told the business leaders. “Ask yourselves what you can do to hire more American workers, what you can do to support the American economy and invest in this nation.”
“That’s not how it works,” Cantor said.
Republicans want to bring back the old deal, the 1929 deal:
Among other changes, the Ryan Roadmap proposes:The GOP wants you to be all alone and on your own. If you deserved help, you wouldn't need it, not even if you were actually paying for it.
- Raising taxes only on those Americans making between
$20,000 and $200,000, while slashing taxes in half
for the wealthiest Americans. The middle class would
pay higher average tax rates than millionaires – an
unprecedented reversal of progressive U.S. tax policy.- Eliminating taxation of corporate income and replacing
it with a consumption tax that would disproportionately
hit middle-class Americans.- Placing the entire burden of deficit reduction on
spending cuts. The Ryan Roadmap prioritizes dismantling
social insurance programs, not balancing
the budget.- Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with inadequate
vouchers to purchase health insurance in a broken
marketplace.- Privatizing Social Security for wealthy Americans
and ending Social Security’s role as universal social
insurance with benefits tied to lifetime earnings.
The hefty tax hikes on the middle class included in theRepublicans use the deficit as a way to perpetually cut taxes on the wealthy. If there were no deficit, you middle class peons might actually expect something from your government. And they can't have you expecting that!
plan do not go toward deficit reduction. Nor does the
Roadmap’s overall revenue plan improve the long-term
fiscal outlook. The plan actually reduces federal revenue
relative to either current law or current policy.
How much has trickled down? Hardly any of it.
What we got by electing Ronald Reagan: We confirmed and made much more extreme previous policy choices by Congress and Jimmy Carter that put investment interests ahead of national interests and certainly ahead of the interests of the middle class.
The mainly Bushist record of going oh for the aughts in job creation is the result of thirty years of Washington consensus that the investment class's financial interests are far more important than even the middle class's employment. Our elite leaders didn't set out to stop job creation. They just didn't care enough to make policy that put it ahead of rewarding the creation of fraudulent investment vehicles.
