“Corporations are people, my friend!” And because corporations are people, people must be corporations. So, “my friend,” Mitt Romney is a corporation too! Because we have all been duped into thinking that Romney is a “person” just like you and me, he must also be a corporation, just like you and me.
The word corporation means “any group of persons united or regarded as united in one body,” which Romney think must mean just like him, because he has one body, not two, last he checked. But perhaps he forgot another definition of corporation, “an association of individuals, created by law or under authority of law, having a continuous existence independent of the existences of its members, and powers and liabilities distinct from those of its members,” which sounds kind of unlike a person.
Perhaps if Mitt Romney becomes a corporation he could run indefinitely for office, because he’ll never die. And, by the way, do corporations have to wait until 35 to be eligible to be the president?
Before I return to the irregularly scheduled political commentary, I must write about life and why there have been no posts in two weeks. There has been no shortage of things to write about. Debt. Riots. Recall elections. Dead soldiers. Fascinating subjects, all. And yet, I haven’t written about the manufactured debt ceiling crisis, solved in the last minutes of the eleventh hour. I haven’t written about why London is rioting. I haven’t written about why Israel is setting up tent cities. I haven’t written about recall elections in Wisconsin. And I haven’t said anything about the helicopter that was shot down in Afghanistan with a few dozen soldiers aboard.
At the end of July I went camping, complete with all the hectic plans involved in planning a trip. There were five of us, coming from four different cities. Just to make planning things easy, of course. I had no camping equipment, just to make things easy. So, coming in two different vehicles, one coming south, and one (me) coming north, we both got lost finding the campground. I knew what I was looking for, but a combination of Google, Google Maps, and my GPS got me good and confused – which proves my saying that you have to be smarter than the GPS. In the end, we two vehicles found what we were looking for around the same time, which is what we’d planned, given a five hour difference in departure time.
After two nights camping we spent several nights vacationing in Santa Barbara in my family home.. We saw downtown at night, and I’m reminded why I never walk downtown on a weekend night. I spent an afternoon visiting with second cousins whom I’d never met, then recommenced showing my friends Santa Barbara. We saw museums, two beaches, a Greek Festival, went Contra Dancing, and saw the beginning of the biggest annual event in Santa Barbara: Fiesta. Before Fiesta there was a dress rehearsal practice downtown – which was not part of our plan when we went downtown – and there was a dress rehearsal later at the mission, which was kind of hard to avoid because it’s a hundred yards from the house. We spent our last night watching Fiesta, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors to Santa Barbara every year.
Immediately after my friends left I packed my bag and drove a few hours to visit my brother and sister-in-law. My brother had a convocation for Physician’s Assistant school, which gave reason for my mom to visit, and for me to visit. Naturally, the first thing my brother asks after saying hello is questioning me about the debt deal which had just passed. We had a long conversation about debt and government, and I don’t think we quite agree but perhaps we understand each other. In some way or another, conversation about debt leads to conversation about 9/11 and conspiracy theory, so we watched “In Plane Sight,” about 9/11.
As soon as we picked my mom up from the airport the conversation shifted to the Affordable Care Act. Will it bankrupt us? How can we insure people? How can we ensure that people have insurance? Wouldn’t big companies just cut jobs rather than pay insurance, since it’s cheaper to do that? We already require hospitals to accept every visitor to the Emergency Room; the Affordable Care Act is designed to reduce how much it will cost hospitals to treat those many million uninsured people.
I stayed a day longer with my brother and sister-in-law than I’d planned, and left when they went to work and school. I also went to school, back to my alma mater high school. I went to say hello to Sergio, who works in the dining hall. Perhaps I shouldn’t have left when I did, because my poor car got a flat tire (an experience I am not used to). I sat there, looking at my deflating tire, just looking and thinking. I knew I couldn’t drive on it, and I knew I didn’t want to replace it. I got the spare, and a new tire. It took four stops instead of one to return to Santa Barbara.
And with that, I return to my irregular programming.
I hope you’ve had your head in the sand for the last several weeks, but if you haven’t you’ve probably heard that congress hasn’t been able to raise the debt ceiling and the United States might default on its debt right around August 2nd. “As Washington scrambles Sunday to avert default, the deficit of trust among leaders in Congress is becoming almost more important than the debt numbers themselves.” Speaker John Boehner is now suggesting that the same $3 trillion dollar deal take place in two increments. His “goal is to show his conservative rank and file that he has locked in savings at each step, but the process is so tilted against Democrats it risks blowing up in the Republicans’ face — with huge unknown consequences for both parties and the nation.”
Both parties are playing political games, with Republicans trying to force a second raising of the debt limit – unpopular and suddenly akin to treason in the Republican base – before the 2012 election, while Democrats are pushing the next vote beyond 2012 and trying to run the government and economy in longer than a three-month vote cycle.
The dual-track approach is, in the end, a roll of the dice on Boehner’s part, primarily because it does not guarantee that the debt ceiling will be increased enough to last the government through the 2012 election cycle. Obama has said he won’t sign such a bill, and Democratic leadership affirmed on Saturday that they would not support it either….
Even Boehner’s own party seemed skeptical that his plan could work.
While both parties play political games, those in charge of the economy have an actual task to accomplish.
“It’s unthinkable that this country will not meet its obligations on time. It’s just unthinkable we’d ever do that. It’s not going to happen,” [Treasury Secretary] Geithner said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
But the unthinkable is clearly being thought about. On Friday, Geithner met with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudley to discuss “the implications for the U.S. economy if Congress fails to act.“
Both parties are playing games, but last time I checked the plurality of people would blame Republicans if the debt ceiling is not increased; the result of which is that the economy would collapse. Some in congress – particularly the vocal Bernie Sanders – know that both parties are playing games, and are tired of it.
Some people think that’s not so good [that Pell Grants nutrition programs, and others may not be there. If you think it’s a good idea that we enforce clean air and clean water provisions so that our kids can be healthy, those provisions may not be there because there will be major cuts in environmental protection], but at least our Republican friends are saying we need revenue and we’re going to get $1 trillion in revenue. But wait a minute. If you read the proposal, there are very, very clear provisions making sure that we are going to make massive cuts in programs for working families, for the elderly, for the children. Those cuts are written in black and white. What about the revenue? Well, it’s kind of vague. The projection is that we would rise over a 10-year period $100 billion in revenue. Where is that going to come? Is it necessarily going to come from the wealthiest people in this economy? Is it going to come from large corporations who are enjoying huge tax breaks? That is not clear at all. I want middle-class families to understand that when we talk about increased revenues, do you know where that comes from? It may come from cutbacks in the home mortgage interest deduction program, which is so very important to millions and millions of families. It may mean that if you have a health care program today, that health care program may be taxed. That’s a way to raise revenue. It may be that there will be increased taxes on your retirement programs, your I.R.A.’s, your 401(k)’s. But we don’t have the details for that. All we have is some kind of vague promise that we’re going to raise $1 trillion over the next 10 years, no enforcement mechanism and no clarity as to where that revenue will come from.
Meanwhile, despite polls showing that Republicans are to blame in the negotiations and will be blamed if negotiations fail, Boehner is still pushing the short-term incremental deal Democrats have said they won’t accept. If it’s not possible for a bipartisan plan to work Boehner said “I and my Republican colleagues in the House are prepared to move on our own;” how he plans to do that when Democrats have a majority in the Senate and control the executive branch will be fascinating. At least he recognizes that “it may be pretty hard to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” His “last offer is still out there,” which is the $800 billion in revenue and massive spending cuts that Bernie Sanders elaborated on.
Norway is what we think of as a good country: the Legatum Prosperity Index places Norway as the top country in prosperity; Happiness and the Human Development Index also places Norway as the happiest country. Numerous other measures of happiness also rank Norway as the best, or one of the best, places. However, that does not stop yesterday, when attacks by a single person killed almost a hundred people in Norway. Violence does not create peace, and sometimes in peace there is violence.
While police are studying the suspect (there is only one), the media is laying blame and creating an atmosphere of guilty-and-we-know-why. Some things are likely to be accurate, such as,
It was revealed that the 32-year-old former member of the country’s conservative Progress Party – who had become ever more extreme in his hatred of Muslims, left wingers and the country’s political establishment – had ordered six tonnes of fertiliser in May to be used in the bombing. While police continued to interrogate Breivik, who was charged with the mass killings, evidence of his increasingly far right world view emerged from an article he had posted on several Scandinavian websites, including Nordisk – a site frequented by neo-Nazis, far right radicals and Islamophobes since 2009.
Other information is mere speculation. Was he inspired by Al-Qaeda? Or because 400 Norwegian troops are in Afghanistan? “Meanwhile, the Sun’s headline this morning (23-July-2011) screams ‘NORWAY’S 9/11’, and above the headline in red capitals ‘AL-QAEDA’ MASSACRE. It seems Murdoch’s Sun has already made up its mind.”
The way international terrorism is portrayed in the media leaves a lot to be desired. For example, why do the media refer to a group as Islamic or Islamist even when that group is operating in a Muslim country and targeting fellow Muslims, thus leaving the impression that the victims are non-Muslim? Why not simply use the name they give to themselves? A few months ago I gave a talk to sixth formers in a school in which I mentioned that more Muslims have been victims of al-Qaeda inspired terrorism than non-Muslims; there was astonishment at this fact.
Never mind that the suspect is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian with connections to the far-right political parties.
Norway, as already mentioned, is a land of peace. Peace is not only an intangible, happy, feeling, or a lack of war. It’s also a way of life. “From what I saw, there is — or was — no more open and trusting place left in the West, if not the world….People often leave the keys in their cars — and their cars running — while doing chores elsewhere.” There are, and have been, such places in America. They disappear by the wayside as the groves give way to housing developments that turn into foreclosed property. It makes me wonder what will happen in Norway.
Cut what again? Cap which leak? Balance? You try balancing this.
Megan McArdle theorizes on which things might happen if the US defaults. While that is an unlikely prospect, government functions in a reactionary manner, waiting until things have gone wrong before trying to fix them. Will any of these things go wrong if there’s no deal on August 2nd?
Let’s say that we refuse to raise the ceiling. Does the prioritization listed above [military payrolls, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid] mean that we don’t need to cut politically untouchable programs?
No. Let’s think through what would happen if we tried to use this plan:
- You just cut the IRS and all the accountants at Treasury, which means that the actual revenue you have to spend is $0.
- The nation’s nuclear arsenal is no longer being watched or maintained
- The doors of federal prisons have been thrown open, because none of the guards will work without being paid, and the vendors will not deliver food, medical supplies, electricity,etc.
- The border control stations are entirely unmanned, so anyone who can buy a plane ticket, or stroll across the Mexican border, is entering the country. All the illegal immigrants currently in detention are released, since we don’t have the money to put them on a plane, and we cannot actually simply leave them in a cell without electricity, sanitation, or food to see what happens.
- All of our troops stationed abroad quickly run out of electricity or fuel. Many of them are sitting in a desert with billions worth of equipment, and no way to get themselves or their equipment back to the US.
- Our embassies are no longer operating, which will make things difficult for foreign travellers
- No federal emergency assistance, or help fighting things like wildfires or floods. Sorry, tornado people! Sorry, wildfire victims! Try to live in the northeast next time!
- Housing projects shut down, and Section 8 vouchers are not paid. Families hit the streets.
- The money your local school district was expecting at the October 1 commencement of the 2012 fiscal year does not materialize, making it unclear who’s going to be teaching your kids without a special property tax assessment.
- The market for guaranteed student loans plunges into chaos. Hope your kid wasn’t going to college this year!
- The mortgage market evaporates. Hope you didn’t need to buy or sell a house!
- The FDIC and the PBGC suddenly don’t have a government backstop for their funds, which has all sorts of interesting implications for your bank account.
- The TSA shuts down. Yay! But don’t worry about terrorist attacks, you TSA-lovers, because air traffic control shut down too. Hope you don’t have a vacation planned in August, much less any work travel.
- Unemployment money is no longer going to the states, which means that pretty soon, it won’t be going to the unemployed people.
These are just the very immediate, very theatrical outcomes. Obviously, over any longer term, you’d have issues from bankrupt vendors stopping work funded with federal highway money, forgone maintenance on things like levees and government buildings, and so forth. Averting any of these things would require at least small cuts in Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid spending, or military payrolls.Now, maybe you look forward to these outcomes. There are certainly some on this list that I would be okay with. But because I am not delusional, and I did not fall off of a turnip truck last night, I recognize that the American public does not agree with me, and that if any of these things happen, they will freak out and besiege their local representatives. And as we can see from the examples in the New York Times article, when faced with demanding constituents, the new face of the GOP is not quite as steely-minded on the subject of spending as we have been told.
None of this is likely to happen on August 2nd. If there will ever be a deal – and there will be – Obama is willing to peremptorily raise the debt ceiling on a short-term basis, which he can do just by saying so at this point, because congressional leadership is OK with it. Also, our leaders – the ones who are real leaders, not just representatives – aren’t as foolish as we think they are. They know the consequences of not raising the debt limit, and if it’s in their interest to raise it – and it is in the interest of most leaders – it will be raised. It may even be improved. Or perhaps that’s too hopeful?
Congressional Republicans have a simple, unambiguous – though rarely said – goal in the talks and votes on the debt.
the GOP believe they can destroy the US and global economy and from the wreckage ensure Obama is not re-elected. That is their sole true guiding principle. They terrify me.
Andrew Sullivan’s view, which is very good, is that
Obama has essentially won the argument but not yet the fight. Today’s ABC News poll shows that 62 percent believe we need a mixture of tax hikes and spending cuts to deal with the debt, compared with only 32 percent wanting spending cuts alone. By far the most popular specific measure for tackling the debt is ending the Bush tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 a year – with a whopping 72 percent support. Its only near rivals are more Medicare and social security means-testing for wealthy retirees. 77 percent think the GOP has been too unwilling to compromise, compared with 58 percent who say the same of Obama. If this were a boxing match in the world of ideas, it would already have been won.
I’ve become tired about writing about a flotilla to Israel that might or might not happen, since I’ve been writing about it since March. It’s like banging my head against a wall every few days, and the wall isn’t budging. So what’s up with the flotilla? The only ship to make it out of Greek harbors – nice political maneuvering, Israel – was stopped, and boarded, in international waters by Israel today.
Despite all my contemplations, and writings, about the matter, I cannot easily judge who was right in their actions. Much like last year. Israel stopped a ship in international waters (against international law), but the ship’s destination was clear. The expectation of this has been building for months, and Israel worked well with Greece (not usually an Israeli friend) to use every means to prevent the arrival of several hundred people – many of them Jewish – making a statement about policy in Israel. Perhaps the activists (which the media uses as a dirty word, though it is anything but) succeeded in their cause. Did you notice that there was a flotilla trying to sail to Gaza? It’s much more likely that you noticed, because all of months of expectation – the ‘flotilla’ ( now a single ship) that set sail was supposed to sail six weeks ago – led to more news coverage.
Why do I object to Israel’s policy? It’s not because I’m anti-Israel; it’s because I’m pro-peace. I don’t believe you create peace by perpetrating violence. Were the activists, whom I have supported, perpetrating violence? I think they were bringing attention to the oppression of Gaza – and oppression is a form of violence. Does Israel believe the activists were violent? Probably. Does Israel believe it is creating peace through oppression and prevention of statement? Probably.
However, Peace, like war, must be waged. Although I support Israel – to paraphrase Shakespeare, I love Israel so much I would not part with a single inch of it – my conception of Israel is different from how Israel (the government) envisions itself, and is also different from your conception of Israel. I think, and some retired commanders of the Israeli Defense Forces agree with me, that Israel legitimately exists, and the in 1948, 1956, and 1967 Israel had legitimacy. There has not been a war since in which Israel has had legitimacy,which comes from the international community (not just the United States) and that includes the daily oppression and occasional bombing of Gaza.
Land, and the borders of countries which rest on land, are not immutable. History works in such a way that one nation conquers another, and claims land, a claim which, over time, is sometimes validated and sometimes invalidated. While Wales, and the requisite Gaelic, are returning as a culture, it is part of Great Britain. Which, in turn, was founded because of marriage, not conquest of land. In the United States, there are the Jamestown Indians, of Washington State, which were never an oppressed tribe (or a tribe at all), and are quite prosperous. Then there are the Chumash Indians, or California, who were servants to the Spaniards and the white men, but now make a killing running a casino. When South Sudan became the world’s newest country last week, were you disappointed, and thinking that continued oppression on the basis of religion was the right thing between the Sudanese? Or did you feel joy for the South Sudanese, who felt hope? It is reasonable on the basis of history to expect that land in Israel will not remain unaltered.
When we call for peace in the Middle East, which stems from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it is not a call for the end of Israel. It is a call for peace, and the Germans were right that peace requires ‘living space;’ it’s equally clear that the Germans went the wrong way about that claim. The creation of war does not bring about peace. When activists, those dreaded people who use action to advocate peace, bring to our attention that the Palestinians, too, need ‘living space’ it is not without merit. Room to live give us successful examples such as the Chumash and Jamestown Indians, peace in Ireland, and the hope the Republic of South Sudan is experiencing.
The Economy, Stupid is a great text-based game that simulates four years of a mythical medium-sized country, with you in control. Perhaps more non-mythical elected representatives should play the game, because you get to discover what happens to the economy when the global economy is good and bad, what happens when you raise taxes and lower taxes, what happens when you raise and lower benefits to the unemployed and retired, and what happens when you fund or defund the public sector.
The Economy, Stupid, is a simulation, true, but certain realistic things happen. Guess what happens when you reach a maximum debt level, and are forced to balance the budget (as opposed to slowly decreasing the level of debt and lowering debt under the maximum level)? You guessed right: unemployment increases drastically, approval ratings drop drastically, less money enters the economy because you have been forced to balance the budget by cutting funding and raising taxes at the same time to create a positive budget.
Does this future world sound familiar to you? The United States reached it’s debt level at $14.29 trillion on May 16, but the US Treasury is using “extraordinary measures” to prevent default until August 2. Congress has been debating how to fix the debt since June, with the Republicans suggesting drastic changes to Medicare and Social Security – big changes that the Democrats signaled “they would allow for some changes to the retirement insurance program, provided they be on the delivery-side as opposed to the beneficiary side,” which nonetheless would have little impact on improving the debt. Democrats are asking for an end to subsidies to large companies, while ” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said the lower chamber will not approve” any measure involving tax increases.
No wonder Obama is frustrated. He doesn’t get mad often, and like all calm people, when he gets mad it is a spectacular sight. On Wednesday he told the Republicans “’It cannot all be on us,’” arguing that Republicans need to give on the revenue side of things as Democrats are willing to do so on spending cuts.” Which, of course, they are loathe to do. Obama said in the meeting, to his credit “‘I have reached the point where I say enough,'” according to Reuters. ‘Would Ronald Reagan be sitting here? I’ve reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this.'”
Nate Silver, who created a name for himself with extremely accurate predictions of the 2008 elections, and other things since (such as the Emmy’s, and sports players), has quite a bit to say on Republicans in federal office, and Republicans generally.
However, all but 7 Republicans in the House of Representatives, or 97 percent of them, have signed the pledge of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform stating that any net tax increases are unacceptable. One might have believed this to be simply a negotiating position. But the proposal that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell floated yesterday, which would give up on striking a deal and instead rely on some procedural gymnastics to burden Mr. Obama with having to raise the debt ceiling, suggests otherwise. Republicans in the House really may be of the view that a deal with a 3:1 or 4:1 or 5:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases is worse than none at all.
If we do take the Republicans’ no-new-taxes position literally, it isn’t surprising that the negotiations have broken down. Consider that, according to the Gallup poll, Republican voters want the deal to consist of 26 percent tax increases, and Democratic voters 46 percent — a gap of 20 percentage points. If Republicans in the House insist upon zero tax increases, there is a larger ideological gap between House Republicans and Republican voters than there is between Republican voters and Democratic ones.
There is also a large gap between the GOP establishment and the Tea Partyers who crashed the party party last November and quickly found they had to be part of the establishment. Steve Bell, Steve Bell is former Staff Director of the Senate Budget Committee, and now Senior Director on Economic Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center – writes about the debt negotiations. “Chairman [of the House Financial Services Committee, Spencer] Bacchus hardly qualifies as a RINO nor is he considered a renegade Republican. His remarks, therefore, may well hint that the many senior members of the House Republican caucus are beginning both to tire of the ideological rigidity of some of their “Tea Party” members and to believe that it is time to stop playing games with the debt limit negotiations.”
NPR continues the discussion about the split within the Republican Party.
The split between Obama and Republicans is nothing compared to the gap between GOP leaders and their Tea Party fueled rank and file. Top congressional leaders appear to have essentially painted themselves into a corner between Obama on one side and the just-say-no bloc of House Republicans on the other.
That the warnings [of Republican leaders that it’s time to compromise] seem to be going unheeded is leaving many people with a sinking feeling.
For those with a good memory, including the Republicans, NPR is good enough to remind us that Mitch McConnell, Republican minority leader in the Senate, knows well that the government shutdown in 1995 produced bad results for Republicans in the following election. History has a tendency to repeat itself. Senator Lindsey Graham also knows just how dangerous political tactics are.
“Our problem is we made a big deal about this for three months. How many Republicans have been on TV saying, ‘I’m not going to raise the debt limit.’ You know, Mitch [McConnell] says, ‘I’m not going to raise the debt limit unless we talk about Medicare.’ And I’ve said I’m not going to raise the debt limit until we do something about spending and entitlements.’ So we’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves,” Graham told reporters after a GOP caucus lunch.
“We shouldn’t have said that if we didn’t mean it.”
Part of the confusion, according to a Reuters article, is that Republicans don’t know who’s in charge. They are all Chiefs with no Indians, thinking that they each know best and represent the party leadership; at the same time they are all Indians and no Chiefs, not quite sure of who the leader is or whether they are being represented to the negotiations. It all makes for a lot of clamoring. Representative Pete Sessions thinks there will be no deal until August(!); Speaker of the House Boehner is being advised by other representatives that a default won’t be a bad thing. Eight Republican presidential candidates – not all of whom hold office – said they won’t back any increase in the debt ceiling.
Democrats and Republicans, the Department of the Treasury, and the IMF, all have their own interests in mind. Some are more willing to compromise than others. Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary, doesn’t have a lot of room to compromise. He does his job, and he wants to keep his job; he has his own interests in mind. He joins a long list of people who understand the economy, or at least know how it can be manipulated, in saying that “consequences would be catastrophic” if the US defaults. Much as in The Economy, Stupid, “interest rates [would spike] on U.S. debt and the government [would have] to decide who it won’t pay, from senior citizens to the unemployed, to government contractors and whole branches of government. Many economists fear it would spark a new recession.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, the only Independent in the Senate, has a penchant for giving powerful speeches. This time he didn’t give an eight-hour filibuster speech – a fascinating story, but he managed to say important things in ten minutes.
Our right-wing friends in the House of Representatives have given us an option. What they have said is end Medicare as we know it and force elderly people, many of whom don’t have the money, to pay substantially more for their health care. So when you’re 70 under their plan and you get sick and you don’t have a whole lot of income, we don’t know what happens to you. They forget to tell us that if their plan was passed you’re going to have to pay a heck of a lot more for the prescription drugs you’re getting today. They we’re going to throw millions of kids off health insurance. If your mom or dad is in a nursing home and that nursing home bill is paid significantly by Medicaid and Medicaid isn’t paying anymore, they forgot to tell us what happens to your mom or dad in that nursing home. What happens?
And what happens today if you are unemployed and you’re not able to get unemployment extension? What happens if you are a middle-class family desperately trying to send their kids to college and you make savage cuts to Pell grants and you can’t go to college? What does it mean for the nation if we are not bringing forth young people that have the education that they need? They forgot to tell us that. And if you are one of the growing number of senior citizens in this country who are going hungry, they want to cut nutrition programs. And on and on it goes. Every program that has any significance to working families, the sick, the elderly, the children, the poor, they are going to cut in the midst of a recession when real unemployment is already at 15 percent and the middle class is disappearing and poverty is increasing. That’s their idea.
Shouldn’t the wealthiest Americans and the most profitable corporations contribute to deficit reduction rather than just the elderly and the sick and working families? They say no. They’re going to defend the richest people in this country — millionaires and billionaires — and make sure they don’t pay a nickel more in taxes. We’re going to make sure there is no tax reform so we can continue to lose $100 billion every single year because wealthy people and corporations stash their money in tax havens in the Cayman Islands or Bermuda, and that’s just fine. We’ll protect those tax breaks while we savage programs for working families.
No one is to blame, yet. There are a little more than five days to July 22, when a deal needs be reached “to get it through Congress in time.” However, several polls have already been conducted about who people would blame, if the US defaults.
In a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University from July 5-11, when asked to whom they would assign responsibility should the limit not be raised, 48 percent of respondents chose the congressional Republicans; 34 percent said they would blame the Obama administration.
These results echo a Pew Research Center poll conducted from June 16-19 which asked the same question as the Quinnipiac poll. According to that survey, 42 percent of respondents said they would blame Republicans in Congress if the debt ceiling were not raised; 33 percent chose the Obama Administration.
The findings highlight the political repercussions that the GOP could confront should default occur.
We’ve been told before that post-apocalyptic economies are coming our way soon (and while it’s true that our economy sucks, we’re not quite post-apocalyptic yet). I imagine we heard that in 1995. And we sort of heard that in 2000, with the dreaded Y2K. We heard it when the tech bubble collapsed. When the housing market collapsed completed its collapse in 2008, we got close. We’ll never know what happened, because after the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 777 points congress agreed to past the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which it had failed to pass days earlier. And so, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi has suggested that maybe Republicans need to see the market fail again before they try to fix it, with the commonplace act of raising the debt ceiling.
The polls suggest that people will blame the Republicans, and that’s likely, because at the moment people are likely to blame whoever they voted into office for not fixing things. But Republicans aren’t always the ones that are blamed. In 2010 it was the Democrats; in 2008, and previously in 2006, it was the Republicans. TARP passed, but it seems to have made people understandably, but unjustifiably, mad.
Wall Street is too abstract and the financial games that brought on the Great Recession almost impossible for most Americans to grasp. But the government bailout of the Street was a specific act almost everyone could instinctively understand — and to most Americans it seemed perversely wrong.
That’s what Robert Reich, professor at UC Berkeley and former adviser to Bill Clinton says about the economy.
A recent paper by Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler surveyed how many recipients of government benefits don’t really believe they have received any benefits. She found that over 44 percent of Social Security recipients say they “have not used a government social program.” More than half of families receiving government-backed student loans said the same thing, as did 60 percent of those who get the home mortgage interest deduction, 43 percent of unemployment insurance beneficiaries, and almost 30 percent of recipients of Social Security Disability.
Government is such an everyday part of life that people don’t recognize it. We need it. We can work in positive integers and have a government too.
I hope that you agree that I have some sense of politics, such as either-or, all-me, give-and-take, and the purpose and lack of purpose of some of our institutions. However, while I think I have political sense, I never thought I had any business sense. Business never made sense to me, because I cannot fathom a world where the primary goal is profit, and short-term interests reign supreme. Not everyone is lacking in business sense, though, and not all businesses are boring places for their customers. From my friend Felicia, writing about cupcakeries,
that is what this bakery is really about- while its business objective may be to sell a lot of cupcakes, it really needs to sell the idea of fun. Some customers may dash in just to grab a treat and go, but there needs to be an environment that welcomes customers with more time on their hands to sit around and stay a while. This particular bakery has board games all over the place, a good way to encourage customers to see the shop as a hangout spot rather than a version of a fast food joint. Keeping a customer in a store longer is generally good idea given the chance for add-on purchases, unless that extra time is spent waiting in line for a ridiculous amount of time (in which case the customer will be antsy. Very antsy). But in this case it also increases the likelihood of positive association with the bakery’s brand. Remembering a bakery for its yummy treats is one thing, but remembering a bakery for its treats PLUS the experience you had while there is a whole other trick.
I’ve been in businesses like this, where the pleasant atmosphere is part of what you pay for, even though you don’t pay extra, and you can sit there and pay for nothing at all. It is a welcoming sort of world, where I’ve played games of chess and scrabble and listened to music and done nothing at all. Business as usual can be about atmosphere, not profit, and still prosper all the while, because it makes people happy.
News of the World no longer exists, but Rupert Murdoch still knows how to make money.
Over the past four years Murdoch’s U.S.-based News Corp. has made money on income taxes. Having earned $10.4 billion in profits, News Corp. would have been expected to pay $3.6 billion at the 35 percent corporate tax rate. Instead, it actually collected $4.8 billion in income tax refunds, all or nearly all from the U.S. government.
That is from Reuters, a generally reliable source when it comes to facts. The article describes how Murdoch profits off the tax system.
One [way] is the aggressive use of intra-company transactions that globally allocate costs to locations that impose taxes — and profits to areas where profits can be earned tax-free.
For that Murdoch can thank laws and treaties that treat multinational corporations much more generously than working stiffs, such as those who make up the audience for his New York Post and for his British tabloids with bare-breasted women. Working stiffs have their taxes taken out of their pay before they get it, while Murdoch gets to profit now and pay taxes by-and-by.
News Corp. has 152 subsidiaries in tax havens, including 62 in the British Virgin Islands and 33 in the Caymans. Among the hundred largest U.S. companies, only Citigroup and Morgan Stanley have more tax haven subsidiaries than News Corp., a 2009 U.S. Government Accountability Office study found.
News Corp. had nearly $7 billion permanently invested offshore in 2009, money on which it does not have to pay taxes unless it brings the money back to the United States. Meanwhile, it can use that money as collateral for loans in the United States, where interest paid is a tax-deductible expense.
Smart people who have morals dream of doing what Murdoch actually does, which is make money off himself. You also might have heard recently that the US is approaching default on its debt, which is not usually a big deal and the magical debt ceiling is raised again. This time, people who think like Murdoch does have a plan; it’s the same plan that caused zero job growth over the last decade. Rational people who were not in a daze over the last decade point out that
this notion that eliminating tax loopholes and peeling back the overly generous tax breaks for wealthiest 2% will hurt job creation is nothing but a fantasy. There has never been a shred of evidence that links the kind of tax revenue increases being proposed to the creation, or lack thereof, of jobs. In fact, the result of the Bush tax breaks was some of the lowest job creation in our nation’s history, along with an explosion of our national debt that we are still trying to climb out from under. Yet John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor and the rest of the GOP brain trust that so happily endorsed the Bush policies that created much of this mess, are now trying to suggest that these same policies are our only way to salvation and jobs? Really, you can’t make this stuff up!
The Dole Blog 