Brinksmanship and the Church of Cut My Taxes

Andrew Sullivan posts devastating critique of the GOP strategy on the debt:

For the GOP to use the debt ceiling to put a gun to the head of the US and global economy until they get only massive spending cuts and no revenue enhancement is therefore the clearest sign yet of their abandonment of the last shreds of a conservative disposition. A conservative does not risk the entire economic system to score an ideological victory. That is what a fanatic does. And when that fanatical faction was responsible for huge spending binges in the recent past, for two off-budget wars costing $4.4 trillion, a new Medicare benefit, and tax revenues at a 50-year low relative to GDP and tax rates below the levels of Ronald Reagan, this insistence is lunacy, when it isn't gob-smackingly hypocritical. I say this as someone who was railing against too much spending when these people were throwing money away like it was confetti. "Deficits don't matter," remember?

It seems to me there are two options the president can take. The first is what you are told to do when a criminal or terrorist holds a gun to your head. You surrender.

The point of economic blackmail is that it works. If you have a scintilla of public responsibility and you hold public office, you cannot allow default. And so you give them everything they want. You announce this while declaring you abhor the package but have to back it for the sake of the national interest in preventing catastrophe. You detail and expose the Republican priorities far more aggressively than in the past. You blame the performance of the economy entirely on them from now on out. And you run on a platform of shared sacrifice - of revenue-enhancing tax reform and tax hikes for millionaires. Then you run against the Republicans as hard as you can.

The second option is to bypass them, invoke the 14th Amendment, and order the Treasury to keep paying its debts because an extraordinarily reckless faction wants to destroy the American economy in order to save it (and pin the subsequent double-dip recession on Obama). Bruce Bartlett outlines the mechanism here. He has some other ideas for coping here.

What you probably cannot do is negotiate with economic equivalent of terrorists. What Cantor and Boehner are doing is essentially letting the world know they have an economic WMD in their possession. And it will go off if you do not give them everything they want, with no negotiation possible. That's the nature of today's GOP. It needs to be destroyed before it can recover.

He's right.  It's just shocking to see the GOP and its leaders, like Boehner and Ryan, talking about default so nonchalantly.  But I'd just love to see the President invoke the 14th Amendment, pay the debt anyway, and then dare Congress to stop him.  I can't find a clip, but a guy was explaining that to Chris Matthews yesterday, and pointing out that probably even Congress would not have the standing necessary to challenge it in court, meaning impeachment would be the only remedy.  I'd just love to see that.  Congress impeaching a President for keeping our economy from collapsing.

Sanity, it seems, has gone on vacation.

UPDATE: My wife points my attention to this article, which explains the workings of the 14th Amendment argument.  Money quote:

Writing in the Financial Times in April, Former Reagan adviser and Treasury official Bruce Bartlett said the Obama administration could justify ignoring Congress to ensure the nation pays its debts.

"The president would be justified in taking extreme actions to protect against a debt default. In the event that congressional irresponsibility makes default impossible to avoid, he should order the secretary of the Treasury to simply disregard the debt limit and sell whatever securities are necessary to raise cash to pay the nation's debts. They are protected by the full faith and credit of the United States and preventing default is no less justified than using American military power to protect against an armed invasion without a congressional declaration of war," Bartlett wrote. "Under those circumstances, when default is the only possible alternative, I believe that the president and the Treasury secretary would be justified in taking extraordinary action to prevent it, even if it means violating the debt limit."

However, if Obama were to follow that route, it's still unclear how the courts would rule.

Grim and Saass point to the 1935 Perry v. U.S Supreme Court ruling, which determined that the language in the Fourteenth Amendment does apply to the national debt. What's more, they observe, according to the majority opinion on the case, no act of Congress can undermine promises of debt payment from the federal government.

"To say that the Congress may withdraw or ignore that pledge is to assume that the Constitution contemplates a vain promise; a pledge having no other sanction than the pleasure and convenience of the pledgor," wrote Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who presided over the case.

The plot thickens.  According to that interpretation, Congress is forbidden from doing exactly what they're doing now, i.e. holding a gun to the President's head over the debt.  Again, this seems like the sort of issue where the Supreme Court will just scream "Political question!" and run for the hills.  Or simply say that Congress lacks standing to bring a suit against the President.

Quitting is the Republican Way

First Sarah Palin resigned as Governor of Alaska, and now Eric Cantor and John Kyl quit Joe Biden's budget negotiations just as soon as it becomes painfully obvious that revenue increases are the only way out of this mess.  All class.

New GOP slogan: When the going gets tough, quit baby quit!

The Church of Cut My Taxes is still on the march.  President Obama should use this opening to push for an outright repeal of the Bush tax cuts.  Then, and this is crucial, don't flinch.

The Republicans want to bring a gun to the table, metaphorically speaking.  It's time the President brought some artillery of his own.

This is Tim Pawlenty's tax plan

Seriously:

Yeah, because the people at the top are hurting soooo much in this economy.  The Church of Cut My Taxes has a new acolyte.  One wonders if these people even live on the same planet as the rest of us.

The Bush Tax Cuts, 10 Years In

Slate's Annie Lowrey gives us an ode to a "colossal failure."  First, the list of promised benefits from ol' G.W. himself:

In 2001, the Bush administration inherited a few years' worth of budget surpluses, so it decided to cut income tax rates, double the child-care credit, and sharply reduce the levies on investment income. The economy then slowed, even entering a brief recession. As a form of stimulus, the administration doubled down, expanding and hastening the 2001 changes. Bush promised that the tax cuts would do a whole lot more than put money in people's pockets—which, in fact, they did. He said they would "starve the beast," forcing Congress to reduce the size and scope of government. He promised they would increase the prosperity of all Americans. He also vowed: "Tax relief will create new jobs. Tax relief will generate new wealth. And tax relief will open new opportunities."

Well, this is almost unfair.  We all know how the story ends, because I'm pretty sure no one is going to be celebrating the first decade of the 21st Century as a time of prosperity, new wealth, and new opportunities.  But let's let Lowrey tell it:

What about the president's claims? Take his pledge that the cuts would spur job growth. To be fair, we'll ignore employment changes during 2008, the year the Great Recession seized the economy. During the 2001 to 2007 business cycle, America's economy enjoyed 52 straight months of job growth. But it was sluggish—in fact, the slowest rate of jobs growth on record since World War II, and just one-fifth the pace of the 1990s.

Then there's wealth. Put simply, the aughts were a decade of income stagnation: The tax cuts failed to bolster most taxpayers' earnings, even before the recession hit. Median real wages actually dropped from 2003 to 2007. Household income from business-cycle peak to business-cycle peak declined for the first time since tracking started in 1967. As documented by my colleague Timothy Noah in his series "The United States of Inequality," this did not hold true for the nation's billionaires and millionaires. Garden-variety high-wage earners saw their income go up. And incomes for the top 1 percent skyrocketed. For some people, obviously, the cuts "generated new wealth," in the president's phrase. But overall, inequality got worse.

That leads to the third metric: Did the cuts "open new opportunities"? It's a vague phrase, but one way to measure it is to look at job growth—and there's nothing to see there. Another way would be to say that the cuts benefited "job creators" (to use the current en vogue phrase), like the nation's start-up businesses. But the number of private-sector jobs created by young companies fell during the Bush administration.

Unfortunately, the tax cuts never translated into robust economic growth, either. Indeed, the aughts saw the worst growth since World War II. From 2001 to 2007, annual GDP growth averaged just 2.4 percent per year, lower than in any other postwar business cycle. The contrast is starker still when judging against the previous decade. In real terms, GDP grew half as much from 2001 to 2010 as from 1991 to 2000.

And Lowrey doesn't even mention that when the tax cuts were passed, they were sold as being "temporary," with a sunset provision to force Congress to renew them or let them expire, a trick that was later used with the horribly-named PATRIOT Act.  Of course, then Republicans vowed to make it political suicide for anyone in either party to oppose the renewal of the Bush tax cuts, even for a Democratic president (so it seems, anyway) and the cuts became de facto permanent.  Thank the Church of Cut My Taxes for that.  But Lowrey's wrap-up is pretty damning in and of itself:

OK, a final attempt at celebration. Did the tax cuts stimulate the flagging economy in the early aughts? Sort of. Tax cuts give a mild boost to the economy, but not a big one. "After the tax rebates in 2001, 2003, and 2008, households [spent] between 25 and 67 cents more for each dollar of tax cut," William Gale of the Tax Policy Center writes. That makes tax cuts "a relatively weak way to help the economy compared to increases in government purchases, for which each dollar of increased deficit turns into an additional dollar of spending."

So, to recap: The Bush tax cuts were followed by low GDP growth, negative median wage growth, and little job growth. Even before the Great Recession, growth in the Bush business cycle was the weakest since World War II. And the cuts cost about $2.6 trillion between 2001 and 2010, according to the Economic Policy Institute—adding to a debt future generations of taxpayers will pay for, plus interest.

By Bush's own metrics, then, the tax cuts were a failure. But perhaps that is because Bush chose such absurd metrics and made such silly promises about tax cuts' economic omnipotence in the first place. To state the obvious, tax cuts are not magic. They can help a strong economy get stronger or help a weak economy pick up some steam. They also have a direct impact on the government budget. But they cannot goose employers into adding millions of jobs, pay for themselves, and arrest the growth of government, all while delivering everyone cupcakes. So perhaps the best we can say about the Bush tax cuts is that they did exactly what we should have expected them to do.

Really?  Tax cuts don't have superpowers?  Stop the presses!  We've got to tell the Republicans Church of Cut My Taxes.  They've been telling us all these wonderful, mystical things that tax cuts can do, and it turns out that even after a decade of sticking with them, they just haven't delivered.  They did, on the other hand, make the rich a lot richer while doing sweet exactly nothing to help the other 99% of income earners.

I particularly enjoy the irony that the supposed party of "small" government had their way for the better part of a decade, and yet actually expanded the bureaucracy more than any administration since Johnson, not to mention launching two hugely expensive wars.  But this time, they say, they really mean it.

Maybe we should all be a little more skeptical the next time the Church of Cut My Taxes tells us that more tax-cutting will save the economy/create jobs/shrink government/feed the hungry/save the whales/give us all a pony, etc.

GOP unseriousness on budget-cutting

Briefly, I have one major complaint with the strategy of Congressional Republicans with regard to the budget.  Senator McConnell and Speaker Boehner have basically said they will kill any proposal to raise the debt ceiling without something on the order of a trillion dollars (that's $1,000,000,000,000) in cuts.  But whenever you ask them or the rest of their party to get specific about where those cuts should come from (aside from just naming entitlement programs in general), they get very quiet.

Here's the thing, defense spending, debt service, and entitlement spending make up something like 3/4 of the federal budget.  Obviously, there's no choice on debt service.  Bring up the possibility of deep cuts to the DoD (as Secretary Gates has done) and suddenly the GOP starts hemming and hawing about how every dollar the Pentagon gets is sacrosanct.  And entitlement spending, as someone on MSNBC brilliantly phrased it yesterday, is a political dirty bomb.  Social Security has long been called (correctly) "the third rail of American politics."  As in, "touch it, and you die."  Add Medicare to that score now, as NY-26 demonstrates.  Voters are awfully quick to which ever party wants to interfere in their entitlement programs.  So basically, the Republicans are complaining about the debt being run up, blocking any measure to, I don't know, raise revenue, opposing efforts to cut defense spending, and essentially expecting President Obama to either go along with the ridiculously unpopular Ryan plan* to blow up Medicare, or find another way to commit political suicide by proposing deep entitlement cutbacks.  President Obama may be many things, but a political neophyte he is not, and I'm pretty sure he's not in a hurry to commit seppuku just to do the Republicans a favor.

Personally, I think serious thought has to be given to a few things.  1) Raising the retirement age.  People are living longer, period.  You don't need to be an actuary to figure that out.  Unfortunately, say the words "raise the retirement age" to most people, and you get immediate hostility.  But if anyone could sell it, it would be President Obama.  2) Raising the payroll tax cap to ensure the long-term viability of Medicare and Social Security.  3) Raising corporate and individual income taxes generally, or at the very least cutting out some loopholes and deductions.  Revenue must increase.  If the Republicans weren't committed to being the Church of Cut My Taxes, they might realize that.

My point: One party is being serious about the debt.  The other is not.  I think we all know which is which.

*A plan which also would require the debt ceiling to be raised by another five trillion dollars.  Fiscally responsible, my ass.

Tom Coburn takes on Grand Inquisitor Norquist

As I've said before, if the GOP is tilting toward becoming the Church of Cut My Taxes, surely Grover Norquist would be the most likely candidate for that church's Grand Inquisitorship.  Well, now Tom Coburn, of all people, has decided to publicly go after Cardinal Toquemada, er, Mr. Norquist.  Take it away, Brother Coburn!

"Which pledge is most important... the pledge to uphold your oath to the Constitution of the United States or a pledge from a special interest group who claims to speak for all American conservatives when, in fact, they really don't?" Coburn asked. "The fact is we have enormous urgent problems in front of us that have to be addressed and have to be addressed in a way that will get 60 votes in the Senate... and something that the president will sign."

"Where's the compromise that will save our country?" he asked. "This isn't about politics that is normal."

Dare I say, "Amen?"  And it gets better:

Both Coburn and Conrad declined to offer details of their plan but dropped a few possible clues: no middle-class tax hikes, closing offshore tax loopholes and some entitlement reforms

Obviously, this is far from a final proposal, let alone becoming law.  But it's truly encouraging to see some members of the Republican Party coming to grips with the reality that cuts alone won't solve the problem, and something has got to be done about increasing revenue.  I don't even care that Coburn is probably the most backward social conservative to be found in these United States.  Social issues can be fought over later, after the budget gets fixed, and the President needs allies in the GOP to make that happen, in order to counter know-nothing, dead-ender demagogues like Norquist.

Sullivan rejoices:

The Bush tax cuts were premised (falsely) on a large and growing surplus. I supported them as a way to prevent all that revenue being soaked up by the feds. But they were very quickly revealed as imprudent.

They were imprudent because the surplus wasn't real (it was largely a function of the tech bubble) and because the country was about to embark on two massively expensive global wars and a massive new domestic entitlement, Medicare D. They were only passed on the condition that if cicumstances evolved which revealed them to be imprudent, they would be sunsetted by now.

Like Coburn, I think we have a golden opportunity to raise necessary revenues without hiking tax rates, if we do this through tax reform. Norquist responds not by substantively defending his draconian supply-side mess of a budget proposal, but by claiming Coburn had broken a no-tax-increase pledge in 2004. Yes: 2004.

I remain a fan of Coburn's in this, if not in social policy. The real fiscal conservative is not playing ideological games right now, He's seeking a politically viable compromise on spending and taxes in which both parties will need to take their lumps. I see no other practical way to avoid the iceberg ahead.

More of this from the GOP, and I'll have to take back my complaint about the whole party becoming the Church of Cut My Taxes.  I doubt that Norquist and his ilk have lost that much power just yet, and they certainly won't go without a fight, but perhaps Tom Coburn can convince some of his colleagues to listen to reason and save the country.

As I said in the earlier post bashing Norquist, American politics used to be all about dealmaking.  Maybe this is the start of getting back to the tradition of compromise.

Of course, the tea partiers are the elephant in the room.  What happens, for instance, if pissed off Oklahoma tea-baggers decide to challenge Coburn in a primary?  That would be incredibly short-sighted politically, since Coburn's seat is his for as long as he wants it, but such action would certainly go a long way to stamping out hopes of a deal.  Similarly, the threats to challenge Boehner in a primary over his budget-shutdown-averting compromise with the President fill me with anxiety.  This is a time to make deals and be practical.  The tea party is, well, anything but practical.

So, whither the tea-baggers?

Grover Norquist, Grand Inquisitor of the Church of Cut My Taxes

Matt Yglesias posts on a very telling exchange between Alan Simpson and Grover Norquist at a deficit conference in Colorado.

[Alan] Simpson said he confronted anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist when the commission met and they exchanged words over the legacy of Ronald Reagan, claimed by both as their personal hero. When Reagan was president, he raised taxes 11 times, Simpson said, a bit of history that made Norquist squirm.

“I knew Ronald Reagan and you, Grover, are no Ronald Reagan,” Simpson said he told the president of Americans for Tax Reform, who famously said his goal was to make government small enough it could be drowned in a bathtub. Reagan didn’t raise taxes to give Norquist something to complain about, Simpson said. “He probably did it to make the country run.”

 Of course, Simpson is a smart man, and he knows full well that this conversation is proceeding from a false assumption.  Norquist doesn't want the country to run.  Period.  It's right there in his "bathtub" declaration (which I've always regarded as one of the more asinine things said in American history).  As for correcting Norquist on the actual record of the Reagan Administration, it should be painfully obvious that the current GOP doesn't really much care what Reagan actually did, only that they can use the graven image of St. Reagan to promote their current agenda, because we all know Reagan had more charisma than any of today's Republicans have.  I don't think anything proves that better than this piece from The Onion:

The GOP's humiliating blunder was discovered last weekend by RNC chairman Reince Priebus, who realized his party had been extolling "completely the wrong guy" after he watched the History Channel special Eisenhower: An American Portrait.

"When I heard about Eisenhower's presidential accomplishments—holding down the national debt, keeping inflation in check, and fighting for balanced budgets—it hit me that we'd clearly gotten their names mixed up at some point," Priebus told reporters. "I couldn't believe we'd been associating terms like 'visionary,' 'principled,' and 'bold' with President Reagan. That wasn't him at all—that was Ike."

That would be hilarious if it weren't historically accurate.  Pity that Reince Priebus would never admit it.

But the rest of Yglesias' piece is worth reading too.

I’m not sure if Norquist understands this or not, but in the current moment of institutional weakness for American liberalism, he’s the most powerful advocate we have. At the end of the day, the long-term level of taxation is determined by the level of money that’s spent. Every dollar the federal government spends will be repaid, with interest, out of taxes. And currently in Washington we have lots and lots of Democrats—from Barack Obama to Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet—arguing for reductions in scheduled spending. And the main thing standing in their way is Grover Norquist, his tax pledge, and his insistence that no Republican vote for any spending cutting bill that also includes some increases in revenue. So far, that’s denying cuts-oriented Democrats the working legislative majority they need to implement their agenda, and giving congress’ small number of hard-core progressives the ability to veto cuts in Social Security. 

I wouldn't be quite so cavalier as Matt wants to be in making this statement.  While it is true that I am gleefully mocking the GOP's ridiculous position on taxation with my Church of Cut My Taxes trope, the bottom line is that I still find it sad that one party is willing to think of increasing revenue from unsustainable and historically low levels, but doesn't have the guts to really make a push on that issue for fear of scaring the electorate, while the other party is willing to bring up the issue all day long while indulging the childish fantasy that more and more tax cuts will fix the deficit.  We have, in other words, a mature but timid party on one hand, and a fanatical cult of tax cuts desperately seeking converts on the other.  Ick.

Whatever happened to the spirit of compromise in American politics?  While it is true that some of these compromises where moral abominations (the 3/5ths Compromise, the Missouri Compromise, and the Compromise of 1850 all come to mind - but they all had to do with slavery), the history of 20th Century American politics is a history of deals and dealmakers.  FDR, Truman, Rayburn, Eisenhower, LBJ (who, as Senate Majority Leader, was arguably a better friend of Ike's Administration than Eisenhower's own party in Congress), Nixon, Reagan, O'Neill, even Clinton, Dole, and Gingrich (even if Newt had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the bargaining table) - all of these men were, ultimately, dealmakers.  Right now it seems like the Democrats are willing to make serious cuts, as long as there's some sort of revenue enhancers to make sure that the poor and middle-class don't absorb the whole burden.  But the Republicans aren't having any of it.

What do you expect from a party that cuts taxes on the rich while fighting two overseas wars?  Shared sacrifice is for suckers.

Alan Simpson, on the other hand, is a brave man.  He's advocating for tax increases, so it can't be long before he is excommunicated from the Republican Party, branded a RINO, and accused of being a liberal.  I'm sure Grover Norquist has a bell, book, and candle somewhere.*

So be it!

*Apropos of nothing in this post, is there anything which is more probative of the contrived, manufactured, and false nature of religious institutions than the concocting of elaborate rituals to declare that someone has fallen out of the deity's good graces and is henceforth banished from the flock?

Joe Klein lights up the Church of Cut My Taxes

Here's the truth no one on the right wants to talk about:

And so it's painful when reality intrudes. Here is the reality: the Republicans have spent the past 30 years creating deficits and the Democrats have spent the past 30 years closing them. The unimportance of deficits became an article of faith during the second Bush Administration: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney famously said. It has been rather hilarious for those of us with even a minimal grasp of recent history to watch these folks pull fierce 180-degree turns on the issue--and it is even more hilarious to watch them accuse Obama of hyper-partisanship after the dump-truck full of garbage they visited upon his head these past few years.

Indeed, the sheer hatred that Republicans have for Obama has led them to overreach, to latch onto Paul Ryan's well-outside-the-mainstream budget plan. They now face a presidential election where they are completely tied to the idea of destroying the most popular government program out there--Medicare. They are now tied to the incredibly cruel and witless notion that they're going to ask 90-year-olds to make free market choices, with vouchers constantly diminishing in value, in an extremely complicated health market. And most important, as the President said, they are now tied to a slick attempt to make middle class people pay more for Medicare while demanding lower taxes for the wealthy.

And so, the predictable screechings: It's class warfare (as if Ryan's plan isn't)! It's vague (actually, it's based on the findings of the bipartisan deficit reduction commission)! It's hyper-partisan (guffaw)!

Yes!  Does anyone remember that the 2001 Bush tax cuts were specifically sold as being temporary?  What happened to that?  What happened to the Clinton-era surplus that was going to pay off the national debt entirely?

Oh, that's right.  The Republican Party happened.  And now the Church of Cut My Taxes is insisting that even more tax cuts for the haves and even more cutbacks for the have-nots will fix it.  It is well past time we called this what it is: patent bullshit.  If tax cuts for the top 1% worked, they would have worked years ago.  They haven't, the budget is in crisis, and it is time to pay up.  Want more proof?  Have some:

Of course, the effective rate on the top 1% is actually around 23% because of things like itemized deductions that help the rich a lot more than the middle-class.  Not to mention that the payroll tax cap means that the payroll tax is essentially a regressive tax, because you pay a smaller and smaller percentage of your income as you get wealthier and wealthier.    And the top 1% are a lot better equipped to hire accountants and lawyers to make use of every single loophole in the tax code.

But one party is (finally!) willing to look at this and all other avenues to balance the budget.  Cuts need to be made, to be sure, but revenue simply has to increase.  The GOP just plugs their ears and screams "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" whenever the very idea of the well-off paying a bit more comes up.

After a decade of "deficits don't matter," why the hell should we listen to the Church of Cut My Taxes now?

Objectivism and the GOP (with footnotes!)

With due respect to Shel Silverstein, this seems like an appropriate image to start things off:

I promised to expound on Paul Ryan and the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and what I think are some of the serious problems with trying to run a country in accordance with Rand's views.*

For a while now, Andrew Sullivan has been doing a series of small pieces about Objectivism (he's not a fan), and this post with one of his readers' responses had some really good insights.  Specifically,

Rand believes in the perfectability of genius. To her, to be a genius is to be incapable of making an error.

They never overestimate their expertise in fields outside of their own ability, they are never uninformed or cling to outdated beliefs. This is why Rand's heroes never listen to other people. To be a genius is to be correct. If someone else is a genius, then they must agree with you. If they disagree with you, obviously they are not a genius and they must be ignored.

This echoes my own thoughts on Rand's philosophy.  When I was in high school, I read The Fountainhead and wrote an essay to the Rand cult (er, "Foundation") for their scholarship, figuring "What the hell?  I need money to pay for college."  Of course, being an idiot, I didn't bury my distaste for the novel or its main character, Howard Roark, very well.  Mind you, I didn't write what I actually thought and still think, which is that Roark is a terrorist, and the novel itself is the product of an infantile author damaged by her experience of the Bolshevik Revolution and much too enthusiastic about 1920's ideas about social Darwinism, the corrupt understanding of Friedrich Nietzsche promoted by Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth after he was overtaken first by madness and then by death**, and not a well-written one, either.  But I did write that it simply was not possible for Roark to possess all knowledge required to design a functioning building (electricity, plumbing, structural concerns, safety, etc.) by himself without any input from others, as Rand insisted.  In the book, Roark is not only capable of being completely infallible, but his design is so artistically brilliant that he blows up his own building when some inconsiderate jerk dares to alter his design.  And is acquitted in court.  Who can take such stuff seriously?

But this philosophy is extremely dangerous when applied to politics.  Rand divides the world, ultimately, into the worthy and the unworthy.  The worthy are the geniuses, who must all think alike, and must never, ever be questioned or imposed upon in any way by the unworthy.  They are captains of industry, gods among men, etc., etc.  Religion is evil because it wants these men to be ashamed of their success.***  The unworthy are mere insects to be squashed the moment they get in the way of Rand's heroes.  They are a barrier to the worthy reaching their full potential.  They are, fundamentally, less than human.

Terrible as I think this philosophy is, it's truly disastrous when people thinking this way get into power.  Why?  Because thinking that way, the Great Depression really wasn't that bad.  So the rich and powerful made unwise economic choices that crashed the global economy and lead to more than a decade of poverty and suffering and war****, but that's just the cost of doing business.  This kind of thinking simply does not and cannot acknowledge that Person B has every right to be upset when Person A swings his or her arm and impacts Person B's nose, no matter what the class or intellect of Persons A and B.  According to Rand, if Person A is a genius, than he can do whatever he or she wishes.  The wider Person A swings his arm, the more power he has, and the greater he becomes.  Mowing down swathes of people with his arm simply demonstrates his status as powerful.  Governments cannot stand on that proposition.  A line has to be drawn for arm-swinging, and governments and laws are instituted precisely for the purpose of regulating what happens when your arm intersects with my nose.

Rand perfectly explains Paul Ryan's budget plan.  It doesn't really balance the budget at all, but it sure does give lots of goodies to the rich and powerful, while making some very well-aimed slashes to the social safety net.*****  Who cares about the little people?  All that matters is that the worthy have ample room to succeed and be powerful.  Never mind that those captains of industry need someone to whom to sell their goods, and that market really won't be very large if the economy goes down the tubes because Paul Ryan and company were too busy making life comfortable for the wealthy.

In fact, one can almost look at the budget as the building in The Fountainhead.  The GOP are Roark.  They've built a pretty massive deficit under Reagan and George W. Bush (Clinton actually balanced the budget, remember) and now there's a Democratic president who dares to change their design.

Solution: Blow it up!


*Not to mention the hypocrisy of Ryan and the entire GOP for passing a massive entitlement expansion when they were in power (Medicare Part-D), and yet proudly declaring (or at least implying) that we should be entirely without entitlements at all now, and proposing a budget plan that effectively ends Medicare.

**Nietzsche's sister deliberately pandered to the Nazis, among other things.  No one who has seriously read Nietzsche could doubt that he would never have approved of anything the Nazi Party had in mind.

***For the record, I'll just briefly summarize that I think religion is bad because on a basic level it wants us all to die, and wants to bring about the end of the world and the coming of a celestial dictatorship (not to mention that I see no evidence to conclude that any gods exist) - but that is the subject of another post.  Stay tuned, I'm working on an essay on Christian eschatology to demonstrate what I mean.

****Is there any doubt that Hitler would never have risen to power in Germany without the depression wrecking the German economy?  Look at Nazi Party percentages in elections and rally attendance before and after 1929 and tell me I'm wrong.

*****I bet those folks with the idiotic "Keep government out of my Medicare!" signs at Tea Party rallies will just love it when they find out a non-inflation-adjusting voucher to buy private insurance is going to replace their precious non-government Medicare under Ryan's plan.

A short essay: The Absence of Reason

At this point, I've been blogging on the topic of the Republican Party being renamed the Church of Cut My Taxes for nearly a week, and I think I ought to expound a little further on what I mean to say by this.

In previous posts (here, here, here, and here), I've pointed out that the GOP position on taxation for nearly the last decade has been that tax cuts are necessary in all budgetary and economic circumstances.  When George W. Bush came into office, the economy was growing and the national budget was in surplus, working toward paying off the national debt.  President Bush campaigned on the idea that the surplus should be given back in the form of tax breaks.  Fine.  Of course, then the budget slipped into deficit, and the economy into a recession.  Then we were told by the Republicans that it would be disastrous to raise taxes in a recession (despite Reagan and Clinton both having done so with very successful results), and we got more tax cuts.  That "stimulus" didn't really work, and as a result we've gotten a continual meme from the GOP that ever more tax cuts are the only solution.  Not only that, but the implication is that when the current tax cuts don't work, it's because we didn't cut taxes enough and we'd better get about cutting them further.

This reasoning (or lack thereof) is completely circular and self-sustaining.  When tax cuts work, we need more tax cuts.  When they don't work, guess what, we need more tax cuts.  The suggestion of ever increasing taxes is anathema, and grounds for excommunication.  This is the way the fundamentalist religious mind operates.  That the GOP's fervor for tax cuts has become so dogmatic is really unsurprising, given the growing interconnectedness between the Party and religious extremists.  Hence, the Church of Cut My Taxes.  Even secular conservatives have fallen into religious thought in this respect.

The ultimate problem, I would argue, is absence of reason in general.  The acceptance of claims without evidence in one sphere of life leads to the acceptance of other such claims elsewhere.  Here we are in the year 2011, with science making new and breathtaking discoveries about every facet of the universe.  These discoveries are based on a scientific method of hypothesis and research of claims that are falsifiable.  A scientific theory that cannot at least in some imaginable scenario be proved false is no theory at all.  And yet at the same time, "faith," by which I mean the blind acceptance of a proposition without evidence, is promoted as a virtue.  Most especially, faith is directed at concepts which simply cannot be proved or disproved, like the existence of God or the supernatural.  That sort of faith is antithetical to reason and clear thinking.  And not without consequence.

To steal an analogy from Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, suppose that I tell you I have a fire-breathing dragon in my garage.  You'd probably be skeptical, since dragons are presumed not to exist (based on the evidence that no one has ever seen one), and you'd demand that I prove the existence of my dragon.  When you look in my garage and, lo and behold, there's no dragon, you're probably going to think you've been proven right, and that I have no dragon.  Ah, but did I mention my dragon is invisible?  And what about the fire?  Surely we should feel the heat from a fire-breathing dragon.  "No," I tell you.  "My dragon breathes heatless, invisible fire."  Then you could try to feel for my dragon, but I also forgot to mention that the dragon is intangible.  And so on.  In other words, I have an invisible, intangible dragon that breathes heatless fire.  But you cannot prove that the dragon doesn't exist, since I have defined my dragon in such a way that there isn't any method to prove or disprove that it does exist.

Of course, that is all nonsense.  As Sagan summarizes:

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?  If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?  Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.  Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.  What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.  The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head.

The English philosopher Bertrand Russell made exactly the same analogy with his famous teapot, and modern-day religious satires, such as the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn, likewise make fun of the absurdity of such thinking.  Is someone irrational for saying that they don't believe in dragons, unicorns, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster?  Absolutely not.  Yet express disbelief about a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, infallible, invisible, intangible deity and people of faith will accuse you of defective reasoning at best, and wickedness at worst.  President George H.W. Bush even voiced the opinion that atheists should not be considered equal citizens of the United States.  All this for refusing to accept on no evidence whatsoever a claim that is on precisely the same standing as the aforementioned dragon in my garage.

But I've wandered slightly off my chosen topic now.  My point is that this sort of irrational thought, the kind that religion requires above all else, leads to the acceptance of other claims on just as little evidence.  Some of this, of course, comes down to command theory.  If you believe in a deity, and you further believe that said deity has rules and laws, then obviously any violation of those laws cannot be tolerated.  The entire opposition to marriage and other rights for homosexuals, for instance, is entirely incoherent without the belief that God himself condemns homosexuality.  That position is still incoherent, but not in the mind of the believer.  What other reason is there to care whether two gay men who love each other want that relationship to be on the same footing as my relationship with my wife?  There is none.

But divine command is only the most obvious way in which minds become susceptible to unreason once it becomes customary to form beliefs based on faith and not evidence.  Take an extreme example - in this case, a racist.  The racist believes that, for instance, aryans are superior to any other races.  What evidence supports that position?  None whatsoever.  In fact, scientists have shown that there really isn't much genetic basis for "race" at all.  Still, the racist believes what he believes because he or she believes it, and for no other reason.

Now, I don't want to be misunderstood here, so I'll be very clear: being in favor of tax reductions and racism are not at all the same sort of belief, and I am not trying to draw a moral connection between the two.  But a person who dogmatically believes that more and more tax cuts are always necessary is taking that position on faith, especially when one looks at the evidence that the last two recessions in the '80s and '90s ended when taxes increased.  Of course, not all proponents of tax cuts believe so dogmatically.  Just as there is a time to increase taxes, there is a time when cutting taxes is appropriate.  A person who says that understands that a worthwhile position must be contingent - that is, it must be subject to change upon changing evidence and circumstances.  Otherwise it is merely dogma.  Most atheists, myself included, are even willing to grant that their unbelief is contingent.  Upon being shown conclusive proof that God exists, I would change my mind.  I just haven't yet seen such proof, and I doubt the possibility of it.

The key point is to understand that positions need to be falsifiable and contingent in order to have any meaning.  A pacifist who dogmatically states that "War is never the answer," is just as wrong as the person who claims that tax cuts are always the answer.  There are some international crises that can be resolved through no means apart from conflict, regrettable as that fact may be.  The Second World War springs immediately to mind.  That does not mean war is always the answer.  It depends, and disagreement is okay.  Most questions don't have a right or wrong answer, but the reasonable mind is willing to be convinced by evidence, even if that evidence is unpleasant.  So it should be with tax policy.

Minds may disagree about when it is appropriate to cut, increase, or maintain tax rates, but the person who says that one of those is the solution to every problem has disqualified himself from the discussion, because no argument - no matter how well supported - in favor of the opposite position would convince that person.  The dogmatic believer instead stubbornly refuses to hear the evidence contrary to his or her position and takes it as a matter of faith that of course their position must be the only justifiable one.

Next time you run into a tea partier who demands budget cuts to programs for the poor and middle-class while insisting that they are "taxed enough already," try asking them when they think a tax increase would be appropriate.  Wartime?  A national debt crisis?  Government revenue at the lowest percentage of GDP since the 1950s?  If they say yes to those things, well, that's what we're up against right at this moment.  But if they cannot imagine a state of affairs where their present belief is not applicable, then they are simply the dogmatic believer, rejecting evidence and reason for the self-satisfaction of faith.

Or, as I prefer to put it, just another congregant of the Church of Cut My Taxes.

Ryan's real target

Here's a more detailed takedown of Paul Ryan's fairytale plan, courtesy of Robert Greenstein at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

This is the same kind of garbage we've seen here in Wisconsin.  The budget falls into deficit, and rather than ask those who have more to pay a little more, or even asking everyone to carry the load a bit more, instead the GOP just demands draconian cuts to programs that either help everyone (like education) or those most in need of assistance.  As Greenstein puts it,

The plan of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, who co-chaired President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, established, as a basic principle, that deficit reduction should not increase poverty or inequality or hurt the disadvantaged. The Ryan plan, which the chairman unveiled in a news conference, speech, and Wall Street Journal op-ed today, charts a different course, turning its biggest cannons on these people.

Greenstein is even generous enough to provide methodology behind the numbers.  I won't waste space reprinting it here, but the piece is pretty thorough.

And remember that all of this is supported by economic projections that The Economist called "laughably overoptimistic."  Not that that matters to the Church of Cut My Taxes.

A query for Paul Ryan

Rep. Ryan, your party lambasted President Obama for proposing (and ultimately passing) a health care plan that, you claimed, "rationed" care.  How is it, then, that providing a $5000 voucher for health care is not "rationing?"  Just asking.

Even consistency must give way when the gods of the Church of Cut My Taxes demand sacrifice.  Andrew Sullivan has the same realization:

There are a few infallible, eternal truths that must be adhered to, like a papal bull, if one is to remain in good standing with the GOP - regardless of the circumstances. So cutting taxes is sacred if we are in a boom or a bust, if we have soaring debt and if we have a healthy surplus. The same with foreign policy, where the orthodoxy demands constant intervention abroad, a crude reliance on firepower as a measure of strength, and a public stance of us-or-them belligerence personified by Palin and phonily mimicked by Romney.

Dare I say, "Amen?"  Not that the Democrats are much better, considering how utterly cowed they have been by the GOP's rhetoric.  Where is the party leadership on this?  Where is the President?  Democrats should be fighting to get in front of every camera and microphone in Washington to point out the unseriousness of Ryan's proposals, and the devastating impact of his plan on the middle class.  Instead, they've allowed the GOP to steal the stage, and portray even a return to Clinton-era tax rates as unthinkable, and virtually un-American.  How contemptible.

Paul Ryan: Unserious on the economy

Rep. Paul Ryan wrote a piece in the WSJ today.  How's this for a great example of fantasy economics?

A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage's analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year. 

Nevermind that Heritage is a right-wing think-tank that will basically concoct data to fit the needs of any Republican plan.  Even if that weren't the case, those projections would be wildly optimistic to the point of being delusional.  Where the hell are these 2.5 million jobs coming from?  Thin air?  Moreover, what reason is there to believe that the GOP wants or cares about higher wages for everyone and not just the ultra-rich?  The last decade has seen the disparity between the wealthy and the middle-class spread to insane proportions, and all the while the GOP has defended that disparity as the cost of doing business.  Yet now we're supposed to just take on faith that Ryan and Friends care.  I'll believe that when I see something more realistic than made-up fairy tale projections.  Here's a piece from The Economist pretty unequivocally popping Ryan's balloon.  Money quote:

It's an assumption, in other words, that's unrealistic enough to be considered somewhat bizarre. Everyone puts a positive spin on their policy proposals. But fundamentally worthy policies shouldn't need to promise laughably overoptimistic outcomes to win support.

That sounds like politically correct for "whoever wrote this was high when they wrote it."  When even The Economist is unreservedly criticizing a proposal so swiftly, I'm inclined to question the seriousness of the proposer.  Andrew Sullivan, who yesterday expressed some optimism about Ryan's proposal, is disappointed to say the least.

The assumption, moreover, is that major income tax cuts will dramatically boost economic growth. So why then were the Clinton years - after he raised taxes - such a success, and the Reagan years when he raised taxes such a boom, and the Bush years, with huge tax cuts paid for by borrowing from the Chinese, such a disappointment?

That's exactly my point.  This dogmatic blather from the Republican Party that ever more tax cuts, and a healthy dose of soaking the poor and middle-class, can save our economy has got to stop.  Tax increases alone won't solve the problem, but they're part of the solution.  They worked for Reagan, and they worked for Clinton.  I don't understand why the GOP is so averse.  Do they not realize that an economic turnaround under their plan would be something they could take credit for going forward, not to mention that it would, I don't know, be good for the country?  Or are they so utterly committed to the Church of Cut My Taxes that they're willing to sacrifice our economy to their ideology?

Like I've said before, you can keep putting the screws to the non-wealthy on behalf of the uber-rich and large corporations, but ultimately it's the rest of the country that buys goods and services to keep businesses operating, simply because those groups make up the vast majority of the market.  That's not a call to class warfare.  That's simply reality.  I do wish the GOP, and Paul Ryan in particular, would give that some thought.

Gwen Moore, deficit hawk?

Read her editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and draw your own conclusions.  Personally, I like what she's saying.

But so far, Republicans are only cutting non-defense, discretionary funding, which accounts for somewhere around 14% of the budget. Mind you, 14% is a lot, and it includes funding for health centers, schools, transportation, medical research, veterans, housing and much more. But with this year's deficit projected above $1.5 trillion, even if we eliminated all of this, we won't balance our budget.

Right now, as a share of our economy, federal revenue is the lowest it has been since Harry Truman was president and federal spending is the highest it has been over the same time frame. This is unsustainable. And it is proof positive that we cannot balance our budget on spending cuts alone.

This is what I've been saying for quite some time now.  The areas where the Republicans in Congress want to cut simply can't balance the budget without looking elsewhere.  I saw a recent poll where Republican voters thought that foreign aid spending and funding for NPR made up 5% of the budget.  In reality, they represent something like .01%.  Sorry to say that you can't balance the budget just be eliminating "librul" programs.  But wait, there's Moore (ba boom tish):

Unfortunately, my friend Rep. Paul Ryan, won't consider any revenue raisers. Our tax code lets corporations and people with lawyers pay less than their fair share. Our tax code encourages companies to keep earnings off shore. Our tax code even has a provision that favors debt as a financing source. Now, let's remember, companies with too much debt were a cause of the financial crisis. Changing this provision from a pre-tax deduction to a tax credit would save $77 billion.

(Italics mine.)  And why is this the case, Congresswoman Moore?  Because, as I said yesterday, the current incarnation of the GOP might just as well be reconstituted as the Church of Cut My Taxes.  Thanks to the ever-changing rhetoric of the Bush Administration, which somehow managed to justify cutting taxes in every possible economic and budgetary climate (surplus, deficit, expansion, recession), one party in this country is now wholly committed - with nigh-religious fervor - to the proposition that no increase in government revenue is ever justifiable or necessary.  And bear in mind, before you throw out lines about "tax-and-spend" liberalism, that those Bush-era tax cuts took place within the context of massive expansion of government spending, particularly because of two hugely expensive wars (tax increases in wartime used to be considered patriotic - see, e.g., FDR) and a gargantuan entitlement boondoggle (Medicare Part D) rammed through a Republican-controlled Congress by the Republican leadership at the behest of the Republican White House.  Say what you want about "tax-and-spend," at least that system expands expenditures along with revenue.  21st Century Republicanism has consisted entirely of cutting revenue but spending more anyway.  How absurd is that?

The arithmetic is clear.  You simply cannot balance the budget without talking about defense spending, entitlement reform (there, I said it - and so did Congresswoman Moore, you'll notice if you read the article), and increased revenue.  One party, it seems, is willing to have a serious discussion about these things.  Hell, the Secretary of Defense wants to cut $80 billion in spending from his own department.  Unfortunately, the party in control of Congress seems to be too busy pandering to ignorant tea party-types (who actually believe we can balance the budget by cutting discretionary spending alone) to listen.

The Church of Cut My Taxes

Sullivan offers a pretty even-handed analysis of the leaked parts of Paul Ryan's budget proposal:

I think there needs to be some revenue increases as well - and a return to Clinton era rates for the super-rich. I'd also favor a gas tax to recoup the expense for the unfunded wars, and make that tax directly linked to the costs of war in the future. By the same principle, bank bonuses should become subject to a new tax, to help recoup the lost revenue caused by the banks' recklessness. This is called shared sacrifice. To balance the budget entirely on the backs of the poor will not and should not fly.

But this Ryan plan is an obvious first offer. The Dems, in my view, should neither dismiss nor demonize it. The fiscal crisis is real. But the Dems can suggest tax increases, like the ones above, as well as spending cuts, as the Tories have done in Britain. It's a win-win if that happens.

I'd agree.  Sure, government spending needs to be pared down, but revenue needs to increase as well, and making the entities responsible for the financial meltdown pay extra to me seems both fair and just.  But I also think the GOP has become so dogmatic on its stand of "don't you dare raise my taxes!" that it'll be a cold day in Hell before we see the kind of balanced proposal that would please Sullivan.  We didn't see it in Wisconsin, and I don't think we'll see it in Washington. 

Come to think of it, all-out opposition to any tax increase whatsoever has become such a ubiquitous issue for the Republicans that I dare say they ought to re-establish their party as a church, so they could claim 501(c)(3) non-profit tax-exempt status.  Call it the Church of Cut My Taxes, set up Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Grover Norquist as your Holy Trinity and there you go.  Or you could make it a sect of Christianity, i.e., The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Tax Cuts, and print bumper-stickers with clever sayings like "What would Jesus Do?  Cut My Taxes!"

I know this sounds like an absurd idea, but the GOP is already so wrapped up in religion as it is. The only proof you need of that statement is the association with the GOP by, among others, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and a thousand and one PACs and non-profits that euphemistically and cynically put the word "family" in their names as a substitute for more appropriate descriptives like "Christian sectarian," "reconstructivist," "anti-gay," "anti-choice," and "anti-muslim."  So just add tax cuts to the list of dogmas of a given faith, and reconstitute the GOP as a religion in and of itself.  And think of the profits!  It worked for a brilliant entrepreneur (massive sarcasm alert) like L. Ron Hubbard, so why not Republicans?