The Catfood Commission is Dead; Long Live a Real Deficit Debate

In the same sense that the only way to understand why corporations do what they do is to remember that their only goal is "increase profits," the only way to understand the budget/deficit/debt/taxes/entitlements/spending debate is to remember that the only goal of Washington power brokers is:

"take money away from the middle class and give it to the already obscenely wealthy."

Everything else is lies and misdirection.

Krugman:

It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.

Can anything be salvaged from this wreck? I doubt it. The deficit commission should be told to fold its tents and go away.

No, the deficit commission should get its own reality TV show, seven nights a week, so we can all get a daily reminder of precisely what is going on here.

The host will be someone deeply familiar with the lies told by the money men, and experienced in launching attacks on the liars. Someone who is leaving a job soon. Someone entertaining. Someone like Alan Grayson.

When the commission's apologists for obscene wealth start bleating about high tax rates and disappearing social security and deficit danger, Grayson will beat them back with giant barbed dildos of Fact:

• Social Security is stable and secure for at least the next century. If you really want to make it more perfect, remove the cap on income, so millionaires have to pay the same social security taxes that real working Americans do.
• Tax rates absolutely are an abomination - the obscenely wealthy pay far, far too little. Let's have another 10-year rate change: we'll add five new brackets to the top, where now everyone who makes more than $250,000 pays the same rate of 36%. For the next decade, $500K to $1 million will pay 40 percent, up to $10 million will pay 50 percent, up to $100 million will pay 60 percent, up to $500 million will pay 70 percent, and those raking in more than $500 million per year will pay 80 percent.*
• The inheritance tax is the only way to prevent obscenely wealthy parasites from over-breeding and replicating themselves. Restore the estate tax of 50 percent on estates larger than $1 million. If your children can't make it on $1 million, they're fucked-up wastes of oxygen anyway and don't deserve more money.
• The most effective and efficent spending in the federal budget - the spending that immediately stimulates the economy, that creates more economic activity than it costs, that benefits families and communities in both the long term and the short-term - is direct payments to struggling individuals: food stamps, unemployment and welfare. This economy needs massive economic stimulus, so: triple food stamps (currently about $10 per person per week), double welfare payments, restore the TANF jobs program and extend unemployment payments until the unemployment rate falls below 5 percent.
• Medicare really is a financial mess, but not for the reasons the deficit vultures claim. The only way to actually fix Medicare - and the broken healthcare system in this country - is to establish single-payer healthcare. The easiest way to do that is extend Medicare to everybody in the country. Premiums paid by younger people will more than cover the high costs of caring for the elderly that are currently breaking the system. Medicare For All. Problem solved.
• Taxes paid by working families struggling to make ends meet - and NOT paid by obscenely wealthy parasites - go to bloat the Defense Budget out of all effectiveness. More than double what the rest of the world budgets for defense - combined? That's crazier than Sharron Angle. So, let's impose a little discipline on the Pentagon (whose leaders, by the way, mostly agree its budget is stupid.) Cut the defense budget in half. Let the Pentagon budget boys decide how to divide it up. If they know for sure they can't get any more through any congressional back door, they'll cut the REAL fat and waste and buy only what's necessary. This will require the same system used to close redundant military bases: Congress gets a straight up-or-down vote on the budget the Pentagon presents. No adding wasteful weapons systems so everybody get a factory in her district. This 50 percent budget or nothing.

There is lots, lots more to talk about: farm subsidies that go to giant agribusiness, fossil fuel subsidies that kill us with terrorism and pollution, outdated transportation systems and electrical grids, needed support for renewable energy and universal broadband - both of which will create hundreds of thousands if not millions of new, highly-paid manufacturing jobs - adding staff and authority and power to regulatory agencies, multiplying Pell Grants by a factor of 10 ...

I'm sure Alan Grayson has many, many more ideas to keep the members of the Catfood Commission sweating under the kleig lights for a long, long time.

This would be fun.


*Everybody understands marginal rates, right? Even if you make $1 billion, you, like everybody else, pay 33 percent on the first $250K, and 36 percent on the next $999,750,000. Under my plan, the billionaire would pay 36 percent on the NEXT $250K, 40 percent on the NEXT $500K, 50 percent on the NEXT $9 million, 60 percent on the NEXT $90 million, 70 percent on the NEXT $400 million, and 80 percent ONLY on what you rake in ABOVE $500 million. If you make $50,000, you are paying the same tax rate on your TOTAL of $50,000 as the billionaire is paying on his FIRST $50,000.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....