If you good folks have been paying attention to Washington this week, you learned some very important things. You learned that the Republicans and the parasitic Tea Party aren't serious about cutting spending, and you learned that President Obama isn't serious about much of anything.Obama, being Obama, decided as a presidential candidate that he wanted to have exactly the wrong debate. He decided that he wanted to make permanent the insidious and unaffordable Bush tax cuts for everybody making under $250,000. Missing the point is one of the things that this president is truly gifted at, as opposed to the GOP, which just lies a lot.
Demagoguing the rich is always smart liberal politics, but in engaging in them, he sidestepped some uncomfortable truths, specifically that none of the Bush tax cuts should be extended. When you're nearly two trillion dollars in the hole each and every year, giving away money probably isn't the wisest way to rectify the situation.
Supply-siders, being exceptionally dumb and oblivious to history, suggest otherwise. They believe that giant tax cuts will grow the economy to the point that nothing else matters. They believe this despite the fact that it has never happened in American history, and no country in human history has ever just grown its way out of both a deep recession and a $14 trillion dollar debt.
The President, believing as he does in fairy tales, wanted a "second stimulus" that he knew could never pass Congress, particularly in this political atmosphere. He's also genetically incapable of standing up to the chronically wrong Republicans, so he folded his new spending priorities into a two-year extension of the tax cuts.
The result? Well, according to the New York Times, you get a deal that's going to cost about $900 billion over two years, absolutely none of it paid for. Oh, and no one in the U.S government retains any credibility on the budget whatsoever.
This deal, which most Teapublicans couldn't be more pleased with because they not only get to keep their beloved tax cuts, but they also get to make them the central issue in the 2012 presidential campaign, exposes them as lying hucksters. They signed off on an unfunded package that costs $100 billion more than the first stimulus that they just spent two years howling about. Sure, they'll keep talking about reducing spending, but reasonable people everywhere will know that they're lying.
For his trouble, Obama got to prove that he's a president so nutless that you have to go all the way back to James Buchanan to find a proper and fair model to hold the incumbent against. So long as he can continue to (unsuccessfully) suck up to the middle class and continue spending money the Treasury ran out of decades ago, he'll give the goddamned GOP whatever they want, the consequences be damned.
Don't think for a second that the American people are any better than their political class. If anything, they're worse. For evidence of that, look no further than this focus group brought to you by, of all people, Sean Hannity.
Before I go any further, I should introduce you to the moderator, Frank Luntz. Mr. Luntz is a hack of a Republican focus group spin doctor. He's the guy who brought you the phrase "death tax." When it was properly known as the estate tax, nobody cared about it because most Americans don't have estates to speak of. But everybody dies, so when you call it that, morons get outraged. And Frank Luntz knows better than anyone that a truly astonishing percentage of Americans are morons. This proven by the fact that virtually no one pays the tax, regardless of what it's called. Remember, politicians don't think that you're idiots - They know that you are.
I love that tape with all of my black little heart. It's highly unusual for Hannity to not be the most ignorant prick on his own show. Also, I always thought that if you stuffed that much stupid into a mere six minutes the very fabric of time itself would rip apart. Everybody involved in this focus group, both right and left, is almost violently uninformed.
There are few things I love more than shitheels talking about the flat tax, which I think is fine in theory. The problem is that when you explain the particulars of it, everybody starts hating it right quick.
For a flat tax to work, you would have to eliminate deductions outright. All of them. That means that the middle and upper classes lose their sacred cows; like mortgage, political and charitable contribution deductability. If retain the deductions, the tax is no longer flat, and therefore unworkable. It also means that the lower and middle classes aer paying more in taxes than they are now, because goodies like the earned income and child tax credits are gone.
To administer the tax properly, you need to make sure that people aren't hiding income, particularly by working under the table or offshoring it. That means that you need to do it as a sales or value added tax (VAT). How many Americans do you suppose want to pay an extra, say 18% (although I suspect that number is very low for the purposes of government revenue, which is the only reason taxes exist at all) on things like food, children's clothing, diapers and school supplies? The correct answer to that question is "none". Problematically, the more items you exclude from the tax, the higher the tax has to be. By the time you exempt everybody's necessities, you have a tax closer to 30% than 18%.
Liberals are going to hate the tax because it disproportionately whacks the lower and middle classes. Poor and middle class Americans are for likely to spend all of their income than the rich are. 30% of $15-50,000 is a much bigger chunk than 30% of the 2-10% of the annual income that you can reasonably expect millionaires and billionaires to spend.
Conservatives are going to hate it because it would necessarily apply to things like dividends and capital gains, if you don't use the VAT model. It would also have to apply to corporations at the manufacturing, investment, R&D and marketing levels. Remember, the more you exempt, the higher the tax has to be, and individual taxpayers will never stand for corporations paying no taxes at all.
Finally, Republicans and Democrats would forever lose their political trick of promising to cut someone's taxes every election cycle. If you start cutting a flat tax, you have exactly the same budgeting problems you have now.
If the American people want to see what it's like to be really taxed, give 'em a flat tax that actually works the way it's supposed to.
Mostly, the focus group focused on nothing of any importance. They missed the point completely, focusing on a stupid throwaway line about "hostage-takers" and arguing about who pays the highest taxes in the room, which is idiotic because Frank Luntz does. Whether the Obama-GOP deal was good or bad - supposedly the fucking point of the focus group - was addressed not at all. I loved it because it was great TV and because it proved a larger point to me: That most people don't even know what the problems are, let alone how to begin solving them.
I'm having an almost identical debate over at my friend Skippy-san's place. I'm being confronted over there with the fact that I'm Canadian by a guy who doesn't like my facts. It's actually more than a little cute.
The thing that I found so precious and hilarious of all was Mr. Luntz decrying "the level of discourse." People who have studied big-time politics for awhile know that our boy Frank is one of the architects of the level of discourse in American politics. He's one of the main guys that came up with phrases like "death tax" that gave everybody a bad case of the stupids in the first place.
I grew up thinking that I'd never see a great power dissolve into bankruptcy and irrelevance. Then the Soviet Union went kablooey. Now the United States is proudly doing the same thing, only in slow motion and with better TV.
These are definitely what the Chinese would call "interesting times", and we get to live in them.
Feeling lucky yet?
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