I continue to believe that the best thing that could happen relative to the governmental crisis impending with regard to laws that are both expiring in their effects and just beginning to have long term effects would be to let it all happen and start from scratch. But with each side trying to vilify the other subtly...and sometimes not so subtly...that seems unlikely. The real question is, what has changed since the lame duck session of 2010. The Republicans claim to have softened their position from intransigence on the subject of tax cuts for the rich to flexibility on that point. But if you listen to their specific descriptions of that flexibility, it becomes apparent that it is a chimerical mirage that they are trying to sell as substance. All of them from McBoehnell (John Boehner and Mitch McConnell) to the party soldiers like Jeb Hensarling are talking about "raising revenue" but the question that remains after each of them speaks is, how can they call it revenue raising when they won't consider raising marginal tax rates and they will accede to reducing "loop holes" only if marginal tax rates are reduced. What that means in simple language is, not only have they not become more flexible, they are even more intransigent in their demands about lowering tax rates...and by the way, that means the tax rates of the rich too. And if they get their way, the hole dug by the Bush tax cuts in the first place...the very thing that got us into this fiscal condition...will just get deeper unless they get the spending cuts they demand, which would devastate the people in our country who are most vulnerable economically.
Listen carefully the next time you hear one of them addressing us through C-span or on the news and you will see what I mean. The Republican mantra continues to be that no compromise is possible without the leadership of President Obama. But the only direction in which the Republicans are willing to be led is the direction in which they want to go. That's no compromise that they're selling. It is the same demand for the kind of capitulation that they succeeded in wringing out of the Democratic majority and foisting on the American people in the lame duck session of 2010: Obama bad, us good, so give us what we want or we'll take it. That's why I believe that the best way for the Democrats to proceed is to let it all happen and start from scratch when the next congress begins. All bills on the floor of congress expire with the session, and if the first thing the Democrats do is change the filibuster rules in The Senate, and the second is to pass a tax cut for those earning under, say, $200,000, the Republicans will have no choice but to vote for it or to explain themselves, and that would be a good thing for posterity. When they begin spouting that sophistry about the rich creating the jobs that sustain us all, the debate can be directed at the statistical and empirical evidence that such is not the case. That debate has never been had in isolation...in a fashion that exposes the real essence of their argument without the distraction of other issues like debt ceilings and entitlements. (By the way, if anyone tries to inject Social Security into the debate about how to pay down the national debt, refer them to the first section of title two of the 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act in which the trust fund for Social Security was established and the funds in it were sequestered from the rest of the general fund. It is plainly stated that the only funds in the trust fund are those already extant as of that date and the payroll taxes that are to be received thereafter, and that those funds are for the purpose of paying benefits only and thus, there is no relationship between Social Security and the national debt.)
The pressures of time will require that, only after resolution of the middle class tax cut has been voted on can the issue of budget cuts be debated and their will be no distractions on that issue either. The real nature of the Republican motive will become clear. Between the passage of the sequestration bill last year at the time of the last fiscal cliff and the success of the nearly sixty year effort to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act when Bill Clinton signed it, the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) has been after the New Deal, banking constraints and Social Security with a vengeance. Thus, when discussion of repeal of things like "Obamacare" arises, the Democrats will have a misdirection of their own to throw out: repeal of Dodd-Frank Act and replacement of The Act with the repealed a reprised Glass-Steagall Act just as it was written in the first place. We went about fifty years under Glass-Steagall without a depression, and within twenty years of its repeal we had a financial industry so rampant and out of control that we had another one. It is time to point out the philosophical nexus between the Rcc's blind fealty to the financial industry and the rich at the expense of the rest of us. Supply-side economics must die...and now's the time to do it.
Your friend,
Mike
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