When it's OK to raise taxes.

Q: When is it OK for a conservative to propose raising taxes?

A: When it involves raising taxes on Ameica's poorest citizens to facilitate the lowering of taxes on the wealthiest.

George Will writes approvingly of the tax "reform" plans of GOP representative Dave Camp:

[GOP congressman Dave Camp's] aim is "fundamental" tax reform, understood the usual way - broadening the base (eliminating loopholes) to make lower rates possible. He would like a top rate of 25 percent - three points lower than Ronald Reagan achieved in 1986...

Many conservatives, including Camp, believe that although most Americans should be paying lower taxes, more Americans should be paying taxes. The fact that 46.7 million earners pay no income tax creates moral hazard - incentives for perverse behavior: Free-riding people have scant incentive to restrain the growth of government they are not paying for with income taxes.

...In addition to the one-third of the 143 million tax returns filed by individual earners for 2007 that showed no tax liability, additional millions of households have incomes low enough to exempt them from filing tax returns.

It couldn't be plainer than that. The GOP is not the anti-tax party it makes itself out to be. It's the tax burden shifting party, and the thing that most distresses them about the working poor is not the difficulty they have making ends meet, or gaining access to health care, or paying for college for their kids. No, the thing that most distresses conservatives about the working poor is that they pay no income tax.

If Democrats had a clue... any clue at all, they would make an issue of this sort of thing.

Tactical Obstructionism

A couple of weeks ago, the Senate's passing of both the Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal and the START treaty ratification was in serious doubt. Simply lining up 60 votes in favor of cloture, to allow a vote on both propsals, seemed a Herculean task whose outcome was by no means assured. And yet, in the past two days both measures made it through the Senate. The former by a vote of 65 to 31 and the latter by a vote of 72 to 26.

So why, in the end, was it so difficult to acheive cloture on bills that received overwhelming support in the senate (far more votes than the cloture battle would suggest)?

My interpretation (and this goes especially for the START treaty vote) is that the GOP is playing a game whereby they intend to make the president expend as much time, effort and political capital as possible to pass any legislation at all, even legislation that the GOP supports and that a good number of Republicans fully intend to vote for when it does come to the floor.

Is this a winning strategy or will it ultimately cost the GOP what little goodwill they have from the American people? I think it still remains to be seen. I do believe that the GOP is playing with fire, though, and may well get burned. After all, I suspect that the impression of the GOP that the American public is going to come away with from these last few weeks of the so-called "lame duck" session is this: the GOP is the party that simultaneously backed Obama into a corner and forced him to agree to give huge tax breaks to millionaires and then turned around and argued that we can't afford to provide needed health care for the policemen, firefighters, paramedics and ordinary citizens whose long-term health was compromised when they rushed to the scene of the 9/11 attacks and dug through dusty rubble and breathed in toxic air to rescue survivors.

I've got a pretty strong feeling that the same conservative pundits who loudly crow about congress' low approval numbers will prove notably silent on this issue in the coming months as an obstructionist Republican House of Representatives gains the ire and contempt of the very same people who voted them in, frustrated as they were by the glacial pace of our current economic recovery.

Senate Republicans cut 1st responder health care by 3.1 Billion

Senate Republicans have agreed to the passage of a bill intended to help cover the medical bills of the heroes who worked to rescue survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but only if 3.1 billion dollars was first stripped from the bill.

These are the same guys who had no problem spending some $200 billion every year for the last seven years supporting the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. But apparently, finding $7.4 billion to cover the medical expenses of wounded rescuers is just too expensive.

Imitatio Latvia

Iceland experienced a bank-sector driven financial collapse and seemingly insurmountable debt load. It responded by screwing wealthy investors and defaulted on its debts. The country experienced a 10% drop in employment, but has been recovering since Q1, 2010. Latvia did not default on its debts, experienced a 20% drop in emplyment and has been recovering since Q1, 2010.

Guess which model financial columnists are urging Ireland to emulate?

It's absurd advice of course, but then with per capita obligations of about 1/2 million US dollars, Ireland probably has no choice but follow the Icleandic model eventually. I suspect that the financial press it simply trying to help investors squeeze Ireland for all they can before the inevitable default.

Things The Tax Cut Could Have Paid For

Another entry for our continuing feature "Things The Tax Cut Could Have Paid For." According to the Huffington Post, Republican lawmakers have blocked a bill that would have proclaimed child marriage to be a human rights violation:

The bill would ensure that child marriage is recognized as a human rights violation, and develop comprehensive strategies to prevent such marriages around the world. The legislation seemed likely to garner strong bipartisan support in Congress, and in the Senate, it did. But last night, the bill was voted down in the House by Republicans who argued the bill is too costly and could lead to increased abortions -- gripes the measure's supporters say have no basis in reality and are just excuses to kill the popular bill.

The CBO estimates the cost of implementing the bill at about $60 million over 5 years, whereas the GOP is estimating the cost at $108 million. Nonetheless, the cost of this bill comes in somewhere between 1/70th and 1/100th the cost of the upper income tax cuts the GOP demanded.

Berming For You

Remember when the BP oil spill was being touted as "Barack Obama's Katrina"? Despite the fact that Coast Guard vessels were on site working the spill from day one, and the Federal government mobilized heavily to contain the disaster, partisan critics of the Obama Administration insisted that not enough was being done to prevent oil from reaching Lousiana shores. And because it is an article of faith among the news media that every instance of Republican incompetence, corruption or greed must be counterbalanced by a corresponding incidence of Democratic incompetence, corruption or greed much of the new media and the chattering classes seemed perfectly happy to g along with the idea that the BP oil spill was, indeed, "Barack Obama's Katrina." Of course, to sucessfully argue this point it was necessary to show that there were effective countermeasures available that the administration, either through sloth or incompetence, was failing to implement.

Enter Lousiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Always ready to savage the government for doing too much useless volcano monitoring, Jindall took to the airwaves to denounce the administration for not doing enough useful berm building. Berms, we were told over and over again, were the immediate, desperately needed, effective solution to the oil spill problem that the Administration was, for inexplicable reasons, failing to implement. There was only one little problem with this urgent claim: the experts disagreed. The building of berms, they told us, was an expensive way to accomplish very little. But never mind. All we heard from Jindall, the right-wing talks shows and much of the media was berms, berms, berms... and so under pressure from local legislators and the relentless, right-wing message machine, the Obama administration relented and pressured the Army Corps of Engineers to approve Jindal's dubious project.

Well a post-spill report is out examining the effectiveness of the berms and guess what... the experts were right. The berms were very expensive at over $200 million dollars and counting, but ended up collecting almost no oil.

By October, about 10 miles of berms had been built several miles from the gulf coastline at a cost of $220 million, with construction paid for entirely by BP.

Louisiana officials estimate that the berms stopped 1,000 barrels of oil from the spill. By contrast, more than 800,000 barrels were captured at the wellhead, and roughly 270,000 barrels were burned off by Coast Guard vessels. Skimming operations recovered at least 34 million gallons of oil-water mixture.

“$220 million for a spill response measure that trapped not much more than 1,000 barrels of oil is not a compelling cost-benefit tradeoff,” the commission staff wrote.

On the plus size, Louisiana did manage to get free funding for miles and miles of berms that might potentially help stop coastline erosion. But this was certainly not the way the project was sold to the American people.

(This post also apears on Stinque).

Things The American People Are Sick Of...

...according to Jim DeMint.

It's a new post of mine up on Stinque. Go check it out.