It’s the FINAL COUNTDOWN!!!
Why aren’t Republicans in the Summer Olympics? With the mental gymnastics they perform, they should be able to translate those abilities to the physical spectrum so the US would sweep the floor routine. Where’s their patriotism? Get out of politics and hit the mat – go for the GOLD! Instead, the only floor we may be sweeping is our own in clearing the debris from the upcoming fallout. And the gold will be overpriced – because if the debt ceiling doesn’t rise, we’re in trouble. The GOP wants to walk us off the plank, screw the consequences – on principle, you see. Spending is out of control, and now is the time to take a stand. Interestingly, in the last 50 years the debt ceiling has been raised 72 times. But enough is enough, right? I’m sure the fact Obama is the President has no bearing on the GOPs motivations. None.
My friend the Roman is a student of history from the school of realism. This morning he echoed something I’ve long felt: 15 years ago, as the leading industrialized nation, the US had it all. Now the world has leveled the playing field and we embody an empire ready to choke on its own ashes. Can you really imagine where we’ll be in another 10 years?
I’d love to get all jingoistic and say otherwise, but it’s a point I’ve made on occasion, and recent events have exacerbated my sense of doom. One sign of the apocalypse is I do agree with the GOP that Federal spending is out of control. But as to their singular premise of cutting costs alone to fix it, I disagree completely – especially considering they want to cut Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security. I still believe as I did during the 2008 election cycle - raise taxes on those who can afford it and cut spending responsibly; the rich had their run of favoritism. It’s time to stop paying lobbyists and pony up. Obama proposed a hike for top earners to take effect in 2013 by allowing the Bush tax cuts for the highest earners to lapse, but the GOP says this will be a death strike to our sacred Economy. They say we need only cut spending. And somehow they’ve whipped up this anti-debt fervor in a country where the average person owes tens of thousands on cars, homes, credit cards, student loans, etc.
Let’s see where those taxes are going per the talking points. The 111th Congress added more debt than any other Congress in history – true, but this footnote fails to adjust for proportional inflation, which the GOP should know all about (God Bless Reagan’s America!). As the GOP points out in all of its stunted, contextually devoid glory of history revision, that particular Congress was led by Democrats. The Stimulus was bad! No Republicans voted for it, although 118 of them cut ribbons when Stimulus funds magically arrived for projects funded in their districts. It didn’t create jobs, says the GOP – although in reality it saved millions of existing jobs, and since its passage the private sector is currently swimming in record profits despite 9.2% unemployment (remember – productivity is polite for burnout).
Should we forget about Bush’s swan song to that same 111th Congress, the $700B bailout to his fraudulent banking pals with TARP? Isn’t deregulation cool? Or about the war in Iraq, which was predicated on lies and paid via credit card? Mission accomplished! Or what about the GOP’s unfunded $500B prescription drug benefit for Medicaid? Or the fact that the Bush tax loopholes he widened for the richest of us caused Clinton’s surplus to become a deficit? Conservatives like to tell me I live in the past, as if these colossal fuckups exist in a vacuum. But as I learned from Fox News, you have to repeat yourself again and again and again to make sure everyone knows your talking points.
The current attack on reducing Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security to lessen debt is a smokescreen – these are successful programs for the everyman and are well-funded entitlements. Social Security is funded so well that we’ve borrowed against it multiple times yet there’s still enough in the coffers to pay 75% of its expected return for retiring seniors through the year 2036. The interest alone on the Social Security Trust Fund of $2.4T has more than made up for shortcomings. Medicaid helps nearly 70 million people – namely poor children, the elderly and the disabled – the very people Republicans hate and want to hurt under the guise of fiduciary restraint. The GOP brain drain is even trying to repeal Obama-care as a fatalist negotiating tactic - negating pre-existing conditions for children hurts profits! I’m not a fan of the lack of cost curbs and I preferred a Single Payer Option, but Obama-care was a starting point, not an endpoint (as Obama pointed out way back when). But hang on – why live in the past about Obama-Care, Conservatives?
Another nasty fly in the lube is the pretend notion that we have a progressive tax system. Sure, the more you make, the more you pay in income taxes – but it’s completely disproportionate when comparing middle-income earners versus high income earners. In 2011, 2-income families making $139.5k combined are taxed at 25% via Federal rates, people making up to $212.3k pay 28%, and those making $379.1k are maxed at 35%. By comparison, if you make a combined $380k, you’re taxed the exact same as Bill Gates, the Walton family, Warren Buffet, God, Oprah, Mitt Romney, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Alex Rodriguez, and Rush Limbaugh. It’s safe to say all have well-compensated accountants and tax attorneys, especially God, who make sure their employers pay as little as possible just like General Electric. It pays to be rich!
The top 1% of American earners control 70%+ of America’s wealth – something I’ve railed about before, yet according to the CBO and the Tax Policy Center they only account for 22%-28% of all federal tax revenue. While their income-specific tax burden is proportionally higher, their total tax burden – State/SUTA/FICA/Social Security/Sales/Property, etc. – is proportionally much lower, which is to say way of whack. But aren’t these icons the hallowed ‘job creators,’ those who we should bow down and thank for allowing us to feed their need for hero worship? I call bullshit on that noise.
7 million less US jobs exist now versus in 2007. With massive corporate profits piling up from a smaller workforce today, why hire? Companies with 1k+ employees cut 2.6M jobs from 2007 to 2010. GE, which didn’t pay taxes on $12B in 2010 profits, cut 22k people from its US workforce in those 3 years. In that same period Exxon added 2,800 jobs, but 70% of their operations are outside the US. IBM lists 65% of its operations overseas, so their 40k hires weren’t all here. BP can ruin an American coastline and post record profits simultaneously, but they aren’t hiring at the record pace of their profits. But this is a misnomer - in the US it’s small to mid-sized firms where growth normally occurs. So let’s go bigger. On a macro scale we all create jobs – every time we pay for anything – even if that money goes to China, Singapore, India, etc. I don’t see the GOP considering a tax hike on companies hiring abroad. That would hurt profits and thus hiring, so the story goes…But no one is hiring. This is classic supply-side, golden-goose theory crap.
Yet the GOP clings to the mantra that we can’t tax the rich. In 1993, Clinton raised taxes, not long after HW Bush’s hike in 1990 – and the economy improved both times (though Bush was hung out for saying ‘No New Taxes’). After a tax cut failed to spur gains in the recession of 1981, Reagan increased taxes 4 times and saw 28 consecutive quarters of growth between recessions. W. Bush cut taxes and growth stagnated after the 2001 Dot-Com bust, and 2004-2006 were shaky. We have proof time and again over 3 big spending decades that tax cuts do not equal growth. Tax cuts also do not create jobs - if anything, tax hikes help spur economic growth and hiring.
So what if the current do-nothing GOP Congress won’t allow a tax hike as part of avoiding default? They’ll save face with loud mouth tea bagging idiots who aren’t smart enough to understand the negative systemic repercussions. YAY America! And this - if we default, the Feds may not be able to process Social Security and unemployment checks on time, so millions who rely on this guaranteed income would fall behind on bills. Federal employees could be furloughed; people knock Federal employees, and then realize companies like Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, ITT, Honeywell, HP, IBM, SAIC, Harris, and so on are also Federal-Program contractors. Investors would find T-Bonds devalued as our credit rating downgrades, and would run to commodities as the dollar weakens and oil fluctuates. The credit markets, still frozen despite TARP’s injections (no strings attached!), would cool to absolute zero while risk assets nosedive. An already weak ‘confidence’ level would go into full cardiac vapor lock. Without confidence, companies could add more excuses to not hire meaning even fewer jobs and less income tax revenue (discretionary spending on federal parks, the arts, and endowment grants would stop). On top of this, interest rates would hike temporarily tossing us headlong into a double-dip recession. But the GOP is publically trying to make believe this is all hype.
Why take us to the brink? The GOP strategy is to blame Obama, even going so far as to float the idea of a reverse psychology-inspired Bill stating Congress refuses to up the limit, so that Obama could veto it and up the limit by default as the GOP washes its hands of responsibility. How convoluted is that? But that plan died as soon as the GOP figured out it would give free reign to Obama to not cut any spending while increasing the debt limit, a win-win for the left. Obama has even offered up Medicaid and Social Security cuts, anathema to the left, yet the GOP still won’t agree to a limited tax hike of any kind. Plus, the GOP echo chamber - John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Eric Cantor-can’t even get on the same page. Boehner talked compromise and was lit up by the true believers; McConnell’s passive aggressive plan made him a pariah overnight; and Cantor can’t find his ass with two hands unless his ass is stuffed with tea leaves. Until last week, conservatives admitted they wanted the government to default, regardless of the harm to the country, and then downplayed the damages, all because they thought it’d make Obama look bad and help them come 2012. That is until McConnell, the pariah, remembered what happened to Newt Gingrich when the government shutdown in the mid-90s and how that backfired on the GOP – partially allowing Clinton to waltz into a second term.
At least people are paying some attention for now. A new Quinnipiac poll shows a majority of people still correctly blame the GOP and W. Bush for the poor economy-and would also blame them for a default. The majority of people want to raise taxes on top earners, and also trust Obama more than the GOP to guide us through this mess.
So why is the GOP confounding all logic and public sentiment, yet again? It’s the same as it ever was – they’ll sacrifice our well-being in hopes it will help them regain power in 2012. Take advantage of the under-educated and simplify complex issues into a bumper sticker slogan, and viola! A loud mass of fools will fall in line and even defend your callousness in the process. It’s still easy to rally the stupid. Get power back at all cost. McConnell, Boehner and Cantor must have deep contempt for our country, considering the malice they’d willfully inflict to protect their narrow interests. They’ll blame Obama, and since people are fickle they may buy it a year from now. This could pave the way to 2012 and get them closer to their final solution: enslave all non-millionaires; make military service mandatory; ‘relocate’ atheists, minorities, liberals, and homosexuals to ‘re-education’ camps; make NASCAR reverse its races so drivers take hard rights on oval tracks; declare war in the name of Jesus on Mars, Iceland, the Pacific Ocean, China, and Canada by 2015; and burn all books not hand-signed in order by James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney.
Just hyperbole-laden, half-witted sarcasm, right? Remember the tone the GOP has taken for a decade – fear, fear, fear, fear…This fight isn’t about just the federal debt. It’s not about any one issue, and that’s the problem. Everything is an ideologically extreme battleground in the war for our humanity. So why not fight fire with fire? The Republicans want to eat you and commit heinous acts on your dead body parts, like a starved and political Ed Gein. Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” has nothing on the depravity the GOP will reap. They are the last, best hope for total ignorance and intolerance in a world which modernized faster than they could have ever hoped to control. They are anachronistic, and cannot overcome generations of hatemongering; not when they’ve cultivated it with such aplomb that it’s embedded like a cancer within our collective. To them, we are outsiders, subhuman, incapable of assimilating to their righteous ways. They really believe they are performing the work of God for the Greater Good. We have no class, no decency, no morals, and no values. I’ve heard this time and again growing up in Colorado Springs. There is no tolerance here, for tolerance breeds acceptance – and nothing can be gray.
I’m old enough to know better, to recognize ignorance when I see it. Ignorance is a haven for the lazy, insecure and uninformed. Ignorance clings to arcane beliefs when challenged by truth. Those who revel in it are afraid of the dark, because of what they’ll find of themselves within it. These are the ones who will fuel the fall.
So will our empire collapse around us if we default? Not overnight, but it could be the tipping point. And what if we let these Republican fools prevail along the way? If that happens, there may be no stopping our fall.