The car with the star

Just an amazing song by a legend. No commentary required.

Moderate White Supremacy

Haley Barbour has come under some fire for some comments--old and new--about race, the Citizens Council, and the Civil Rights movement. The most problematic of his recent statements was a suggestion that the Citizens Council movement was primarily targeted against the KKK, and helped maintain racial peace in Yazoo, Mississippi.[1]

You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.

Now it's true that the Citizens Councils didn't like the KKK, and they did organize against them. But the bulk of their activities were organized against the NAACP and other organizations that they saw as interfering in the noble southern traditions of apartheid and anxious assertions of racial supremacy. And all of their activities were aimed at preserving white supremacy, both in law and in community belief. Whereas Barbour sees them only fighting the Klan, and ignores them trying to keep the white community's boot on the neck of blacks, Matthew Yglesias has a more revealing take:

In Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s most white people were white supremacists. And within the large and powerful white supremacist community, there was a split between more moderate and more radical factions. The moderates pursued a strategy of economic coercion and the radicals pursued a strategy of violence. There was also a small minority of white proponents of racial equality. In Barbour’s home town of Yazoo City, Mississippi the moderate faction of white supremacists had the upper hand. And Barbour thinks the strength of moderate white supremacists helped create a beneficial political atmosphere in his hometown.

Hell we could call this triangulation, but really it's the classic strategy for those who want to achieve/maintain desired policies in an inhospitable climate. It is the same strategy employed by racial egalitarians in the Civil War/Reconstruction period, who sought to separate out a sphere of social equality from the spheres of political and civic equality. They recognized that they could only make gains in the latter if they forswore equality in the former.

From a 1965 NY Times article, a nice taste of this divide between moderates and extremists.

Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson made his strongest public statement against racial extremism, during an introductory speech for Senator James O. Eastland, who recently has been accussed by ultra-conservatives of 'going soft' on segregation. Referring to racial extremists, Governor Johnson said 'We're not going to be the pushing boy for that element ever again. We were not only the architects but helped build the dog house we now find ourselves in.'... Johnson, who won election on an uncompromising racist platform, asserted he would continue to fight for segregation, but through legal channels. 'Rather than accept the interpretation of laws by some bureaucrats,' he said, 'we prefer to go to the courts for their interpretation.'

I especially love that Johnson both ran on an uncompromising racist platform and still is able to refer to extremists as "that element." While the center of gravity has moved rightward on a whole series of issues, it has definitely moved to the liberal position on matters of race. 



[1] His watermelon comment is probably the most offensive in one way, but it's also weirdly ambiguous. On the one hand it is a classic racist trope. It was said, however, as a somewhat jocular warning to an aide who persisted in using racist language during an 1982 election campaign. It's possible that what upset Barbour about his aide's comments were that they were overheard. Of course, his own comments were also reported. Racist language and sentiment are a deeply ingrained part of the social and political discourse in many areas and communities of the country, south and non-south. Much of this is tied to actual policy positions, in the sense of not just believing blacks inferior and undesirable but in the belief that government and private power should be employed to sustain and strengthen white supremacy. But not all of it, and possibly not even most of it. Barbour's comments have always struck me as the latter: racist language, possibly reflecting underlying racist beliefs, but constrained by a belief in a citizenship regime that does not actively discriminate or sustain racial hierarchies. I felt similarly when Harry Reid's 'negro' comment came out. Certainly doesn't excuse it, and one should hold public officials especially to a standard in which the power of language and the reality of racism in government and society are recognized. But different than Trent Lott's comments that the country would have been better off had Strom Thurmond been elected President in 1948, which are really hard to understand except as an endorsement of public and private power being deployed to maintain white supremacy. Also, the fact that Barbour, in trying to upbraid an aide for racist language, couldn't help himself but to get in a racist joke, seems sufficiently sophomoric to raise broader questions about his judgment. But sophomoric has definitely been his M.O. throughout his career, and probably explains some of his electoral appeal.

Goddamn Christmas.

I've always felt that the true Christmas spirit was captured by the Pogues' Fairytale of New York, by the Ramones' Christmas song (see below) and by the story of the gift of the Magi. Christmas for me is a fighting time, a time to reflect on relationships with people whom you love only slightly more than you resent. The Gift of the Magi fits in because, well, what the hell is wrong with those people anyways. Yes coordination does remove some of the romantic surprise, but there are considerable gains in efficiency to be made. (Also, in the version I remember, dude sells his car so that he can buy his girlfriend a comb, while she sells her hair so she can buy him some shit for his car. There seems to be an asymmetry embedded in some sexism.) So merry fucking Christmas:




The Ramones: Merry Christmas, I don't want to fight tonight.

Damned if things aren't always the same.

From the 1962 report Education and the Disadvantaged American, published by the National Education Association:

"The problem of the the disadvantaged arises because their cultures are not compatible with modern life."

This has been boilerplate for progressives since at least the 1890s, and the underlying premise-- that the "poor did not need money but changes in their values and lifestyle" (Jeffrey 1972, p.10)--is what you get when you combine the comforting rational that the poor are poor because that is their lot in life (see human history, from the beginnings of agriculture to sometime around 1800) with the discovery of culture in the early colonial period. That is to say, it is an argument with a long pedigree. It is embraced by progressives because it allows both an opportunity for improvement (as opposed to mudsill economics theories), and because it excuses all sorts of busy-bodying and dramatic moralizing on their part.

Julie Jeffrey nicely summarizes the mid-century progressive stance on the poor and education:

"Educators delighted in describing this environment of poor children. Brought up in broken families, deprived of normal family communication, attention and all the toys and physical objects found in any middle class household, the deprived child was damaged by the time he reached school." (Jeffrey 1972, p.10).

I particularly like the use of the word "delighted."

Anyway, I've always found efforts at flipping this script to be appealing, and when well done, highly satisfying. Hardcore and punk rock were very good at this, and I think this helps explain their enduring appeal, why, despite being a tired, tired man, I still love Suicidal Tendencies.

There were at least two ways to flip the script. The first, much more common in British punk, was to point out that forcing children to attend schools designed in accordance with the beliefs held by progressives[1] as to what made for a productive worker also imposed an obligation upon the state once the inevitable happened and yesterday's vision of a productive worker turned out to be a 'structurally' unemployed adult with non-transferable skills in a boss' labor market. Which is really the basis for the classic, "Do They Owe Us a Living? (Of Course They Fucking Do").

The other way, more common in American punk, was to point out that the ideals and values that were being taught in these institutions were deeply incapacitating. We were their John Stuarts to their James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, guinea pigs in the creation of their particular vision of the productive and upstanding citizen. And that brings us to today's classic, "Institutionalized."

In both versions, the message is pretty clear: Run Rabbit Run.




[1] Not just progressive, but really the UK conservatives have generally tended to believe that most social problems could be solved with more spanking. This could be done in school, at home, or by any decent person on the street who felt that an uppity child needed a good thrashing.

Jeffrey, Julie 1972. "Education for Children of the Poor: A Study of the Origins and Implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965." PhD Thesis, Rice University.

Always read David Leonhard

 NYTimes: In Tax Cuts, the Options Run Short 

His main point is that the democrats have once again painted themselves in a corner. If they can't convince two republicans in the senate to support the extension of the under-$250,000 tax cuts, or some sort of compromise, the the GOP can let all the cuts expire and pass retroactive legislation extending them all permanently once they have the house majority in January. Then the burden would be on the Senate or Obama to reject or veto the extension, expiring all the cuts.

This would be a huge political blow, one that almost all democrats of influence want to avoid (Obama pledged to not raise taxes on those making less than $250,000), and so the real question is how big the Democratic retreat will be to avoid being in this position.  Or, what can they negotiate for to allow them to give the GOP all they want without totally losing faith.

My bet? Tie it to DADT repeal and unemployment extension. But no one cares about the unemployed anymore so I wouldn't be surprised if the democratic "win" would be to extend all the cuts temporarily for 3 years, so it wouldn't be an election year issue (the GOP will push for a 2 year or permanent extension. They'll float 3 years as a compromise.)

So I'm betting the Democrats are not so totally divorced from their base and economic conditions that they won't do their best to get unemployed benefit extension through. Obama's pay freeze announcement gives me very little confidence here; all I've got to go on is the audacity of hope.

The Tea Party; Taibbi; Ticked Off

Steve Benen highlights the following exchange between Matt Taibbi, David Gergen and Gary Hart, and argues that "the Gergen/Hart argument is that their numbers lend them credibility. But isn't that a pretty clear example of argumentum ad populum?" This is the sort of shit that makes me despair for the Democratic coalition.

Taibbi: To me, the main thing about the Tea Party is that they're just crazy. If somebody is able to bridge the gap with those voters, it seems to me they will have to be a little bit crazy too. That's part of the Tea Party's litmus test: "How far will you go?"
Gergen: I flatly reject the idea that Tea Partiers are crazy. They had some eccentric candidates, there's no question about that. But I think they represent a broad swath of the American electorate that elites dismiss to their peril.
Hart: I agree with David. When two out of five people who voted last night say they consider themselves supporters of the Tea Party, we make a huge mistake to suggest that they are some sort of small fringe group and do not represent anybody else.
Taibbi: I'm not saying that they're small or a fringe group.
Gergen: You just think they're all crazy.
Taibbi: I do.
Gergen: So you're arguing, Matt, that 40 percent of those who voted last night are crazy?
Taibbi: I interview these people. They're not basing their positions on the facts — they're completely uninterested in the facts. They're voting completely on what they see and hear on Fox News and afternoon talk radio, and that's enough for them.
Gergen: The great unwashed are uneducated, so therefore their views are really beneath serious conversation?
Taibbi: I'm not saying they're beneath serious conversation. I'm saying that these people vote without acting on the evidence.
Gergen: I find it stunning that the conversation has taken this turn. I disagree with the Tea Party on a number of issues, but it misreads who they are to dismiss them as some kind of uneducated know-nothings who have somehow seized power in the American electorate. It is elitist to its core. We would all be better off if we spent more time listening to each other rather than simply writing them off.

Taibbi is arguing that the Tea Party supporters are crazy. Why? Because "They're not basing their positions on the facts — they're completely uninterested in the facts"; because they "vote without acting on the evidence." Benen defends Taibbi here, arguing that his criticism is "fair" and asking "what do we when we're done listening, and we realize that a contingent is saying things that don't make sense?"

This is nonsense. I disagree with so so much that the Tea Party supports, and I recognize that lacking a coherent and centralized organizational structure [1] identifying what "they support" is itself an amorphous category, the unstable aggregation of protest signs, TV interviews, and the position-taking of elites trying to capture a leadership position (what does it mean to be a leader of the Tea Party? It is unclear. It is almost like a valence leadership, in that if you can be identified as a leader, regardless of whether you have been chosen through any institutional mechanism, you will receive substantial support and opportunity to gain political power and leverage). And I think that Benen is right to point out that the Tea Party is in some sense just the conservative base of the Republican Party. The early organizational apparatus of the Tea Party seems to have been one that drew heavily on existing apparatuses of the conservative movement.

But what is the standard that we are comparing it against? I could definitely find you a large number of Democrats--liberal, conservative, whatever--that hold contradictory positions, that reject certain established 'facts' as being reflective of some form of institutionalized bias. Certainly a lot of us rejected the 'facts' of the Great Moderation, and many of us still reject at least some of the 'facts' of free trade. So one question, which I think the Tea Party has been right to ask, is "whose facts?" Now certainly some of the facts that have been rejected by different voices in the movement are probably actual facts, well-established by any reasonable metric. But even here I guarantee that you could find the same for any sizable portion of the Democratic coalition. And we would in all probably also find a comparable portion of Democrats treating the presentation of evidence contrary to our beliefs by doubling down on our positions.

What about contradictory positions? Those Social Security getting, Medicare loving, farm-subsidy dependents hate government programs, hate government health care, and hate dependency. Maybe these are contradictory, maybe not. Certainly previous generations of Democrats believed that there was value in basing Social Security (and by extension, Medicare) on contributions, precisely to undercut the opposition to redistribution (taking from Peter to pay Paul) that the Tea Party seems to be articulating. They believed that while Social Security was redistributive, that straight out redistribution was not sufficiently defensible or desirable and instead decided to base it on contributions, to make it into an insurance scheme instead. And most of us think that certain industries should be getting various forms of governmental support, either through favorable regulations, subsidies, or tax breaks. And we usually think that the ones that should get the most support are those that are either concordant with our values or that we believe are likely to further our values in some way. So renewable energy, public broadcasting, higher education. There have been a lot of complaints that the Tea Party is hypocritical because various self-proclaimed Tea Parties attack welfare but love farm subsidies. But maybe these Tea Partiers don't see these as hypocritical at all: the first (they might believe) encourages dependency and not working, while the second (they might believe) encourages national food self-sufficiency and working. And even still, how many of us--regardless of how well-educated, how well-informed, how self-criticising--have managed, or even sought, to make sure that our various beliefs are all in alignment with particular expressions of all the different first principles we might hold.

Furthermore, when Taibbi says he "interview[s] these people", does he mean the sympathizers, the identifiers, the active members, the rally-attenders, the rally-organizers, or the various levels of people trying to place themselves in the leadership positions? Like I said above, if you interviewed the Democratic sympathizers, the Democratic identifiers, the active members of the Democratic party (those who have volunteered for campaigns, attended rallies, worn buttons), or the ward leaders, you would almost certainly find a comparable degree of inattention to inconsistencies, to contrary evidence, to contradictory positions. They, like the rest of us, are regular people with some core values, some enduring identifications, some personal experiences, and some informed positions; all these interact in complex ways, and there is always a lot of noise going on around us while we try and sort these things out. That the end result is often an inconsistent, unstable mess is hardly a surprise. You'll even find these amongst members of Congress and the President. After all, their job really is to put together and keep together a coalition of different and often contradictory interests all the while appealing to a broader population whose positions are themselves often unstable. And if he is interviewing higher-ups, those who 'ought to know better,' well like I said, their job is coalition building and maintenance. That will necessarily lead to some issue incoherence.

But more importantly, who the hell are these higher-ups and why should we take them as representative? They haven't been elected as representative of the Tea Party. They are in all likelihood competing with each other for positions of influence within the movement. Some of these positions will be democratically chosen, while others will be valence representation--Sarah Palin representation, where identification with her, in a whole hell of a lot of ways, and appreciation for her, in a whole other set of ways, is sufficient to give her a following and leverage. All movements have this quality to them; all movements have these tensions; all movements try to motivate people by appealing to almost anything that they think will both resonate and further their own specific agendas.

The end result of all of this is that there will be a lack of coherence, a mess, one that relies on appeals that many believe, and many know to be false, and that even the listener and the audience might believe to be false. But they often serve larger movement purposes. The civil rights movement, the Populists, the Progressives, the environmentalists, and pretty much any other popular social movement has done the same. And when, like Taibbi, you disagree with the agendas, you are especially likely to see the worst, to see crazy, to see a deeply regressive and anti-rationalist band that is out to destroy everything you hold dear.

But democracy doesn't require intellectuals; it doesn't require a highly informed citizenry; I don't even think, Machiavelli to the contrary, that it requires a virtuous citizenry. It just requires one that is able in the aggregate to recognize when times are bad, and to vote out whoever is in government at that time. That's all we've ever had; that's what we have now; and that's part of what we had in the midterms, mediated through the specific institutional arrangements of American government (namely, that we voted on  1/3 of Senators, all the House and not on the Presidency).

And I despair for the Democratic coalition, because it's exactly Taibbi's brand of Jane Addams elitism, albeit with his own particular anti-corporate aggression (which I wholeheartedly support), that feeds the impression that liberals are fundamentally looking down their noses at the mass of the population. It is an impression rooted in the fact that the Democratic party, with the exception of the union movement and much of the civil rights movement [2], has become intellectually and electorally un-moored from the working classes of this country.


[1] It is not unorganized; nor is it disorganized. And saying it is over-organized is also inaccurate. Rather, it is a valence label, one that a resonates with a significant number of people and which a number of different groups and individuals are trying to organize into something more coherent. But its temporary strength has to be in some part its lack of coherence, something like the old Democratic-Republican societies, those "self-created" societies that claimed to speak for the people directly and that sought to bypass existing institutional structures.
[2] These are obviously influential components of the Democratic coalition, but I would also suggest that they are the components that are least influential in the progressive-managerial consensus that has dominated, in one form or another, the Democratic party since Clinton.

The President writes a children's book...

... and Fox News make asses of themselves.

Original headline (as indicated by the URL):

Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Killed U.S. General

Then, of course, we get

Editor's Note: Headline has been corrected for historical accuracy.

with the new headline

Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Defeated U.S. General

Now I don't care about the President's book. But this is some pretty petty stuff. This is referring to Obama's inclusion of Sitting Bull in Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, which is a tribute to 13 Americans presented to children.

Francoise Hardy...

...incomparable. She apparently does not like her version of this song, and the music is something of a departure from other renditions. It ranks as amongst my favorite versions, however, and the simplicity of her voice could carry the song even were one not to like the latin beat.

Obama might believe the GOP wasn't elected on a mandate of gridlock...

... but he doesn't seem to really be holding out for a lot of progress being made in the next Congress.

“They are not going to want to just obstruct, that they’re going to want to engage constructively,” he said of his Republican adversaries. “And then we’re going to have a whole bunch of time next year for some serious philosophical debates.”

There's nothing like "whole bunch of time" for "some serious philosophical debates" to really inspire a belief that any significant legislation will be passed in the 112th Congress.

Dumbest thing you'll read today...

... from Douglas Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell. 

It involves such gems as 

But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.

This, by the way, from a former Clinton (both Hillary and Bill) adviser. Now they I don't think Schoen [1] actually believe this. He was an adviser to Bill Clinton, who was also drubbed in the first midterms. It is also beyond ironic for Schoen to write

Obama can and should dispense with the pollsters, the advisers, the consultants and the strategists who dissect all decisions and judgments in terms of their impact on the president's political prospects.

This, from the man who insisted that they shouldn't pass health care reform because it would negatively impact the Democrats at the polls. They suggest a national unity government, and claim that "if he is to bring Democrats and Republicans together, the president cannot be seen as an advocate of a particular party, but as somebody who stands above politics, seeking to forge consensus." Now this is standard 'third party' claptrap. Without actually changing the institutions of governance, this would result in a largely ineffective President who had few allies whose fates were tied to him and so could cut him loose at will. We have seen this movie before; Mr. Tyler I am thinking of you.

Schoen and Caddell claim that

Forgoing another term would not render Obama a lame duck. Paradoxically, it would grant him much greater leverage with Republicans and would make it harder for opponents such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) - who has flatly asserted that his highest priority is to make Obama a one-term president - to be uncooperative.

This is nonsense. They do their best to shuffle away from providing any mechanism by which this supposed increase in leverage would be accomplished. And they ignore the fact that if Obama were to announce that he was not seeking another term it would feed the Republican (and Schoen/Caddell) narrative that Obama's agenda has been repudiated. It is not a paradox that this would strengthen him; it is a lie.

Also, lines such as

Moreover, if the president were to demonstrate a clear degree of bipartisanship, it would force the Republicans to meet him halfway

might as well have been written in 2009. Oh wait, they were. But the Republicans stuck to their game plan of 'no' and were handsomely rewarded. Not to say that this will always work, but that it can, especially when the economic factors are favorable. All in all, this is the dumbest article I've read in weeks. There is an argument with shallow explanations and with no mechanism. It lunges across the line from ironic to hypocritical. And it has about as much likelihood of influencing the President as I do of being elected President. But that's not the point. The point is to feed the narrative to achieve policy (and political) objectives, namely, the repudiation of any progressive gains, hardline military stances against Iran, and possibly the re-ascendancy of the Schoens and Caddells of the world in the Democratic party.

[1] Did you know that Schoen wrote a biography of Enoch Powell? Presumably a PhD dissertation. Given my own interests, I am pretty sure that sooner or later I will be reading up on the old Ulsterman.

Working class anthems...

...inspired by the recurring joy I've been getting from remembering Stan Rogers' classic. The criteria here is not necessarily songs about working class life, but rather songs that get everyone singing when they are played at the bar.  If there is a gathering at a house, and the whisky's been flowing, these are the songs that most people know and everybody sings.

Now the immediate impulse is to go with another Stan Rogers, maybe "Barrett's Privateers" or "The Mary Ellen Carter" [1]. But the morbid, fatalistic lyrics of Dark as the Dungeon will get any good bar going [3]. It'll start off as a low hum, and when it is done will leave the bar empty of sound, as everyone stares into the drinks and remembers or imagines the loved ones dead on the job.

Now the only question is whether to go with Cash, Travis, or Ernie Ford. I think I'll go with Travis, which includes the often-skipped final stanza

The midnight, the morning, or the middle of day,
Is the same to the miner who labors away.
Where the demons of death often come by surprise,
One fall of the slate and you're buried alive.

[1] Don't think this is a working class anthem? Go to any bar in the Maritimes and many bars in the west or Ontario, put this one on the juke, and hear the slowly gathering crescendo [2].

[2] I recognize and disregard the redundancy.

[3] Eventually we'll bring these selections up to date a little; it's not just the old hands singing, but the young'uns as well.

More on the Chairmen's Mark...

Two charts tell the story of the proposed reduction of the top rate of taxation to 23%, and how this reduction has been labeled a tax increase.

This shows the proposed tax rates under a number of different scenarios. The one that they suggest is the "Eliminate all Tax Expenditures," including the mortgage tax credit, the health care tax credit, the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit, and other political favorites. Now some of these are policy favorites as well, especially the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, and so the chairmen propose first getting rid of them all (making this the Zero Expenditure Plan), lowering the tax rates accordingly, and then raising the rates according to which of the tax credits are brought back.

So the top bracket gets a decrease in their tax rates under the zero expenditure scenario of 35%, that is from 36% of income to 23% of income. (I'm going to assume that the Democrats cave, of course, and all the Bush tax cuts are extended.) The lower top rate gets a 30% reduction, from 33%-23%. The current bottom rate, introduced by the Bush tax cuts, is 10%, and this decreases to 8%, a 20% reduction. The next lowest is at 15%, and decreases to 8%, a reduction of 46.7%. The lower middle, currently at 25%, gets a 44% reduction to 14%, while the upper middle gets a decrease of 50%, from 28% of income to 14% of income.

Of course this still benefits the top bracket the most, as their 36% decrease will--in actual dollar terms--dwarf the decrease of the middle's 50% reduction. It is not exactly progressive, although in percentage terms it benefits the middle more than the top (less so, however, if the Dems don't actually extend the Bush tax cuts for the above $250,000 crowd). And the slim reduction for the bottom bracket? We call that "broadening the base," on the grounds that the $0-$8,375 crowd currently isn't contributing their fair share from the less than nothing they have left over after scraping by another goddamned year.

But when we assume that the major tax expenditures are not going to be eliminated (the most likely scenario in my view), then this changes somewhat. The bottom bracket gets a tax increase, from 10% to 13% (30% increase), the upper bottom gets a 13% reduction from 15% to 13%, the bottom middle gets a 16% reduction, from 25% to 31%. The upper middle gets a decrease of 25% (from 28 to 21% of income). The lower top gets a 15% decrease and the upper rate gets a 20% decrease.

So to be clear, under the most likely scenario

• $0-$8,375:  tax increase of 30%
• $8,375-$34,000: tax decrease of 13%
• $34,000-$82,400: tax decrease of 16%
• $82,400-$171,850: tax decrease of 25%
• $171,850-$373,650: tax decrease of 15%
• $373,650-above: tax decrease of 20%

And under the situation they propose:

• $0-$8,375:  tax decrease of 20%
• $8,375-$34,000: tax decrease of 46.7%
• $34,000-$82,400: tax decrease of 44%
• $82,400-$171,850: tax decrease of 50%
• $171,850-$373,650: tax decrease of 30%
• $373,650-above: tax decrease of 35%

Not the most regressive it could be, but not exactly making the tax code more progressive. Remember, we want to "broaden the base" not "soak the rich."

The next chart is the distribution of benefits from tax expenditures. It is effect of the credits on the after-tax income, by income quintile.

The benefits of the tax expenditures go disproportionately to the wealthy. Surprised? So eliminating some of these might mean a progressivization of the income tax, although it depends on which are eliminated.

The devil will be in the details. On the whole it seems likely to make the tax code less progressive (which is troubling, given that federal income taxes are pretty much the only progressive element to the American tax system). But that overall it will likely be a reshuffling and simplification of the existing rates.

Deficit Commission

The key point in the Deficit Commission's Chairmen's Proposal[1]:

Set global target for total federal health expenditures after 2020 (Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, exchange subsidies, employer health exclusion), and review costs every 2 years. Keep growth to GDP+1%.

 Well hell, if the CBO could just say keep health care inflation to GDP+1%, then we wouldn't need a Deficit Commission in the first place. And their mechanisms for achieving this?

If costs have grown faster than targets (on average of previous 5 years), require President to submit and Congress to consider reforms to lower spending, such as:

• Increase premiums (or further increase cost-sharing)
• Overhaul the fee-for-service system 
• Develop a premium support system for Medicare
•  Add a robust public option and/or all-payer system in the exchange
•  Further expand authority of IPAB

Now that's all well and good. I recognize that each of these could in fact lower the health care inflation rate. And I certainly like the "Add a robust public option and/or all-payer system in the exchange," although I suspect that when crunch time came we would have a premium increase, a premium support system for Medicare, and maybe, just maybe, an expansion of the authority of the IPAB.

The main problem is political: "require President to submit and Congress to consider reforms to lower spending." Now there might be some mechanisms that could require Congress and President to do this, but I can't think of any off the top of my head that would not be easily avoided by a Congress or President who didn't want to take on health care. The exception, of course, is that if health care costs continue to rise at the rate they've been rising, then eventually there will be so much pressure to tackle the deficit (interest rates will be high and the Fed will say that interest rates are where they need to be to maintain price stability) that some course of action, almost certainly involving caps, rationing, and withdrawal of coverage, will be necessary.

But avoiding this seems to be the whole point of a Deficit Commission. So "mandating" these changes doesn't really make much sense to me, if the only real mechanism for making the President and Congress act is the fact that the problems of a large debt have already arrived.

[1] Note the qualifiers--this is not the Deficit Commission's proposal, as they are unlikely have the 14 votes needed to approve the report. Rather, this is the Chairmen's proposal, sent out to the media in order to dominate the conversation. Its release was not approved by the full commission, many of whose members are surprised that the chairmen did this, considering they have yet to vote on these proposals. Furthermore, the Deficit Commission is not a congressionally established Commission--it has no privileged procedural rules, as was originally proposed, and so its primary influence is in shaping the conversation. Which is partly why having staffers whose salaries for working on the commission are paid for by hard-right conservative institutes and centrist New Democrat institutes is such a scandal. Kevin Drum puts it well:

It's just a draft presentation put together by two guys. Do you know how many deficit reduction proposals are out there that have the backing of two guys? Thousands. Another one just doesn't matter.

I disagree on the "just doesn't matter point," largely because I think the Chairmen knew damn well that the headlines were going to be  "Examining The Deficit Commission's Proposals" (NPR) and "Examining The Deficit Commission's Proposals" (Examiner.com) and "Factbox: Deficit commission tax cut ideas" (Reuters) and "The President's Deficit Commission Makes Recommendations" (Nightly Business Report) rather than "Two Guys Spew Off."

Bush, McCain, and Obama

Bush had a remarkable candor with other politicians; Bush was always willing to lie to his constituents; Bush got a kick out of screwing with people; Bush saw very little in Obama that would unsettle the basic achievements of his administration; Bush can hold a grudge.

All of these and more might explain the following:

The venue was the Oval Office. A group of British dignitaries, including Gordon Brown, were paying a visit. It was at the height of the 2008 presidential election campaign, not long after Bush publicly endorsed John McCain as his successor.
Naturally the election came up in conversation. Trying to be even-handed and polite, the Brits said something diplomatic about McCain’s campaign, expecting Bush to express some warm words of support for the Republican candidate.
Not a chance. “I probably won’t even vote for the guy,” Bush told the group, according to two people present.“I had to endorse him. But I’d have endorsed Obama if they’d asked me.”

 

Many summers were spent driving through Saginaw, Michigan

A classic "gone west" song. Note the differences with The Idiot: here the reason to go west is to earn enough to marry his love, not his own sense of dignity, which a changing economy has not denied to him; here the contrast is not between work and "lying down," between a rotted soul and self-respect, but between greed and humble living. It is probably more in line with the classic themes of country music, and it lacks some of the moral complexity of Stan Rogers' song.

But its a different time, and I wonder what the song would be if it was about the end of the Saginaw fishermen, the collapse of that industry, and the fact that you could no longer support your family, not even taking her father's avarice and standards into account.