Obama on Tuesday (via The Washington Post):
“Folks go around saying ‘Obamacare.’ That’s right — I care,” the president said at a fundraising luncheon in Dallas on Tuesday. He added of Republicans: “That’s their main agenda? That’s your plank? Is making sure 30 million people don’t have health insurance?”
Indeed. But Obama just scratches the surface. The Republican agenda includes elimination of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, the insurance and security components of social security, public education, student loan and financial aid programs, abortion, environmental protections, food protections, safety standards, and, of course, unions.
Oh yeah…and the middle class.
Taken altogether, the Republican “utopia” seems like something out of a Mad Max movie.
” … House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said, … ‘If you tax capital more, you get less capital. If you tax job creators more, you get fewer jobs …. That’s the seed corn for the economy, which gets invested in entrepreneurs and startups and small businesses.’
“But Ask.com founder and Oakland, Calif., venture capitalist Garrett Gruener said changes in marginal tax rates make ‘zero difference’ about his investments. ‘The kind of investing I’ve done for the last 25 years isn’t based on how a few points of the income-tax rates change,’ said Gruener …. But ‘Republicans have managed to convince 98 percent of the people that they are affected by how 2 percent of the population is taxed.’
“And Kate Sofis, executive director of … a San Francisco-based organization that represents 230 small manufacturers, said if there is a connection between raising taxes and inhibiting small-business investment, ‘we haven’t seen it.'”
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....ire07.html
Roger Rabbit Commentary: When you have millionaires saying, “tax us more” — because they want the economy and social system under which they’ve prospered to survive — that takes the wind out of the GOP’s no-taxes-no-way-no-how sails.
The Obama Care/ Obama Cares line he’s used before. But I like the fighting spirit.
They’re not the Repubican’s they’re the neo-feudalists. They want to be lords of the manor. Hell, maybe they already are.
“We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view, all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.”
Will and Ariel Durant
The Lessons Of History
@4 I suppose one way of looking at it is progressive taxation accomplishes peacefully what revolutionariess used to do violently.
@5
That and taxation does without destroying real wealth, buildings and crops don’t burn.
John Dean’s book Broken Government is very instructive on these budget matters that have been dogging congress since the 90’s — when Republicans took over congress.
I would change Reagan’s famous quote to: Republicans are not the solution, they are the problem.
After reading the book, I think a good case could be made that the Republican party is a seditious organization whose intent is to subvert and destroy the country.
If you did, however, successfully make that case in federal court, it would surely be overturned on appeal to some Republican appointed toady of a judge.
re 4: Great quote. I bought that book for a dollar at a library book sale in Issaquah a few years ago. The Durant’s seemed to be fairly conservative to me, also.
The object of Republican pandering to the emotions of people who know something is wrong with the country but they are not sure of the how and why are what fills the ranks of the Teabagger movement.
The Republicans want to de-fang the Occupier movement before the Teabaggers see that they have more in common with the Occupiers than with the Koch funded tomfoolery of the Teabaggers.
If that happens, watch out Republicans.
@8
I actually got the quote from else where. I need to get a copy of the book.
What strikes me about the quote is that it’s not biased or personalized, it’s speaking of historical inevitability.
re 10: It’s a short book. A lifetime of study left the Durant’s with few lessons.
The Repugs agenda sounds remarkably like what Obummer and the Dems have been going for the last three years. Tell me again….who won that last presidential election?
The U.S. Economy: Whence and Whither
One of the things I try to do on this blog is educate readers (no, not you, puddy; you’re uneducable) on economics, which is a favorite topic of mine, partly because I find economics fascinating and partly because economics lies at the heart of politics.
This comment brings to your attention a “big picture” article by David Leonhardt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose resume includes stints at Business Week and Washington Post; he’s currently the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief. It’s a long article, and I encourage you to read it in entirety, but I’ll try to summarize it here.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44835200
He begins by saying, “Economists often distinguish between cyclical trends and secular trends — which is to say, between short-term fluctuations and long-term changes in the basic structure of the economy,” and then points out the 1930s were “cyclically, the worst decade of the 20th century, and yet, secularly, one of the best” when the U.S. “was vastly increasing its productive capacity” despite the severe cyclical downturn of the Great Depression. During the 1930s, railroads became faster and roads became smoother and wider, refrigerators and washing machines became mass-market products, and televisons and nylon stockings were invented. At that time, also, high school education became universal, raising the skill level of the American workforce.
By contrast, America’s education and workforce skill levels today are stagnant: “The United States is the only rich country in the world that has not substantially increased the share of young adults with the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree over the past three decades.” In other words, at a time when we should be investing more in human capital, we’re making college education more expensive and less accessible to our future workforce.
Leonhardt also says we’re misallocating capital. “In particular,” he writes, “three giant industries — finance, health care and housing — now include large amounts of unproductive capacity.” The U.S. spends 50% more on health care than any other country, without better results; instead, “a significant portion of medical spending is wasted … on approaches that do not make people healthier [and] on insurance-company bureaucracy.”
In finance, citing Paul Volcker, he points to a huge industry that doesn’t lift living standards but merely plays a zero-sum arbitrage game that enriches a few people while doing nothing to benefit anyone else: “Wall Street has captured a growing share of the world’s economic pie — thereby increasing inequality — without doing much to expand the pie. It may even have shrunk the pie, given that a new International Monetary Fund analysis found that higher inequality leads to slower economic growth.”
These industries, economists argue, aren’t using resources productively because they don’t deliver “fundamental value” — e.g., faster transportation or new knowledge.
The U.S. economy has entered a now-decade-long-with-no-end-in-sight period of stagnation in which the rates of new business formation and job increases at existing businesses have been falling.
So what will it take to get the American economy growing again? “Maybe some American scientist in a laboratory somewhere is about to make a breakthrough. Maybe an entrepreneur is on the verge of creating a great new product. Maybe the recent health care and financial-regulation laws will squeeze the bloat.”
Roger Rabbit Commentary: This article is worthy of your attention because it was written by one of America’s most astute economic journalists, and also because it is concise and penetrating.
Notice that Leonhardt doesn’t identify taxes or regulations as significant causes of our economic malaise. The real culprits, he says, are too much consumption of cheap goods from China (encouraged by China’s manipulation of currency valuations), a system that subsidizes unneeded housing and useless health procedures; and the rise and dominance of a financial industry that pushes money in circles in zero-sum musical chairs games that add nothing to productivity. Health care reform and financial regulation, he indicates, are useful and will help future economic growth by squeezing “bloat” out of these overfed industries.
It’s food for thought, and if he’s right, his thinking can help inform our policy choices going forward.
And what is the Republican plan for America’s recovery? The centerpieces of their 2012 election strategy is to repeal health care reform and financial regulation. If Leonhardt is right, a Republican victory in 2012 will be a disastrous outcome for America.
Regulators are moving toward reining in the high-speed computerized trading that is whipsawing financial markets.
Republicans, of course, oppose regulation. They would let these guys continue as they are, until they’ve driven other investors out of the markets and/or crashed the markets.
It’s hard to see how Republican philosophy is anything but a destructive influence on our economy.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44834151