Get Ready to Choke Down the Catfood

Looks like the "fucking stupid" lefties were right last year about the Social-Security-destroying Simpson-Bowles catfood plan ending up as the only alternative to repug anarchy.

Digby:

This has become the new "middle ground" and it includes devastating cuts to Social Security, the worst of which will fall upon women in their most geriatric years and disabled people who depend upon SSI, more cuts to Medicare and a likely devastating body blow to Medicaid, which also will hit the elderly far worse than anyone realizes. (Learn how to change adult diapers, kids, because that's what you're going to spend your 40s and 50s doing.)

And then there's the illusory "tax reform" which the plan sets forth as:

• Lower marginal tax rates so that they fall in 3 brackets: one at 8-12%, one at 14-22%, and one at 23-29%;
• The elimination of the alternative minimum tax, which would cost $1.7 trillion;
• Reform but not elimination of the really big tax expenditures, like charitable deductions, the employer health care deduction and the mortgage interest deduction;
• Revenue-neutral corporate income tax reform;
• And yet a grand total of $1 trillion in net revenues, on top of the $800 billion built in from the assumption of the end of the high-end Bush tax cuts.

I've been talking about this for some time. "Tax reform" as currently conceived is bullshit. It is basically more tax cuts for the wealthy and some magical thinking about revenues. It's fairly clear that any chance of passage depends upon that being so.

As Dday says, there is a better way:

If it seems too complicated, that’s because it probably is. Only the mother of all accounting tricks could lead to this tax reform penciling out. It’s far easier to just let the Bush tax cuts expire, all of them, and reach the $4 trillion deficit target that way. Now maybe there are some things that, piece by piece, you could substitute out in exchange: defense cuts for middle-class tax cuts, for example. But that’s essentially PAYGO. Just sticking to the CBO baseline, rather than this opulent tax reform plan that makes no sense in reality, seems preferable. And besides, even rich GOP donors are telling their leadership that they want their taxes increased.

If it is absolutely necessary to cut 4 trillion dollars in government spending in the middle of an economic downturn (a very questionable assumption) that should be the administration's preferred route, not this Grand Bargain nonsense.

Until the last few months I have always argued that a Democratic president was always going to be preferable to a Republican because of the Supreme Court --- and the partisan necessity to protect the "entitlements" from the GOP's ongoing assaults. I would have assumed that any Democrat would issue a veto threat on this Gang of Six monstrosity rather than praise it. I would have also assumed that all Democratic voters and liberal commentators would be aghast that the Democratic Party would even contemplate such a plan when so many people are suffering and there's no end in sight. Times have certainly changed.

SNIP

I know this is depressing. And there is still a good chance that the Republicans are too stupid to take yes for an answer. For all we know, a huge new boom in something is waiting just around the corner and it will obliterate all the bad decisions that are being made right now. But it still pays to remember that all this deficit talk is a construct that has no real meaning in terms of the immediate problems we face or the election to come. Interest rates are well in hand and even if they weren't, there would be other things to do aside from slashing government spending. This Grand Bargain talk is only even possible because we are in an Economic Shock environment in which all manner of otherwise nonsensical policies and delusional beliefs in magical solutions to irrelevant problems are being tested and possibly enacted.

It's true that the GOP is batshit nuts. Nobody is going to argue that the prospect of Michele Bachman and her freakshow followers with more power than they already have is terrifying. But the Democratic party isn't exactly behaving like solid, serious leaders either, no matter how many times they use the words "balanced approach." They are fiddling while Rome burns and the Tea Party is just dancing around the fire throwing gas on the flames.

Obama created the Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2009. Reality-based economists blanched: cutting spending in the midst of the Great Recession would eliminate jobs when what the country desperately needs is massive spending to create 10 million jobs. But the Obama-bots assured us it was all eleventy-dimensional chess to fool the repugs.

Then after the 2010 elections, when he should have been using the Democratic majority in Congress he still had until January, he handed the repugs a gift they didn't dare ask for: an extension of the bush tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy, now the economy-destroying Obama tax cuts.

And the repugs knew for certain they could ask for the moon and get it.

Back then, even deal-defending Kevin Drum
acknowledged that the future of progressive policy is now in the hands of local activists, not elected officials.

In the end, this is the second stimulus we all wanted. It's not a very efficient stimulus, and it sadly caves into the conservative snake oil that the sum total of fiscal policy is tax cuts, but them's the breaks. Anyone who doesn't like it needs to spend the next two years persuading the public not just to tell pollsters they don't like tax cuts for the rich, but to actually vote out of office anyone who supports tax cuts for the rich. That's the only way we'll win the replay of this battle in 2012.

But then he added this, which is complete and total bullshit designed specifically to make liberals sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up:

Looking at American politics from a 100,000-foot level, conservatives have won. Programmatic liberalism is essentially dead for a good long time, and small bore stuff is probably the best we can hope for over the next 10-20 years — though social liberalism will continue to make steady advances. I reserve judgment on whose fault that is.

That view is 100,000 feet high and 10 miles square - the 10 square miles of the Beltway bubble.

If we sit back sucking our thumbs waiting for Daddy in the White House or Congress to do everything for us, we deserve exactly the rethuglican nightmare we'll get.

But now we have overwhelming proof that Obama will always do whatever he thinks will piss off the maximum number of liberals. That knowledge both frees us and arms us.

Want an alternative to fight for? The Gang of 70 has the reality-based plan:

It’s good to get a grip and some perspective at times like these. That’s why I appreciated Congressman Raúl Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), reminding us that a “Gang of Seventy” Democrats in the House has already vowed to oppose any deal which cuts benefits in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

“Our Gang of Seventy-plus has the Gang of Six completely outnumbered,” says Grijalva. “And with Republicans not voting for any package, period, because of their opposition to a functional economy, House Democrats hold the key to whatever plan can pass Congress.”

Grijalva and his allies point to the CPC People’s Budget as an alternative more in sync with what people want and the economy needs—a budget that calls for shared sacrifice. For example, 66 percent of Americans favor raising income tax rates on those making more than $250,000 and 67 percent support raising the wage cap for Social Security taxes. Both of these measures are included in the CPC budget. It’s a budget that also offers sensible cuts to military spending run amok, new tax brackets for millionaires and billionaires, and an investment of $1.45 trillion in job creation, education, clean energy, broadband infrastructure, housing, and R&D. And it does all of this while achieving a lower debt-to-GDP ration in 2020 than the widely praised — praised by the elite, that is — budget proposal from Republican Congressman Paul Ryan.

Liberals don't hand the keys to the Treasury to the same people who have been looting the Treasury.