I won’t deny that I’m tired, discouraged, and a bit frustrated. However, I’m alarmed at the increasingly strident tone of the commentariat in the blogosphere. Not here, thank goodness!
What I’m seeing are Left Bolsheviks and Right Bolsheviks and a distressing willingness to make judgments based on sweeping generalities.
That’s my reaction to the reaction to Mitt Romney’s tax returns. I don’t honestly give a damn how large his income is or how much he paid in taxes as long as a) he operated by the rules and b) he didn’t lobby to get the rules changed for himself. I’m incensed at the Congress for making the rules and, particularly, the Democratic Congressional leadership for bitching for eight years about the Bush tax cuts and then voting to keep them. Pick one, dammit.
Seeing some sort of wrongdoing on his part because of course the rich have gotten so on the backs of the poor and of course the rich have rigged the tax system and they’re all equally guilty simply boggles my mind. What are we, Madame Defarge?
I think the stridency is misplaced. I won’t be going to man the barricades to support the Princeton economics department against the University of Chicago’s business school. Or, worse, the Harvard Law School vs. the Harvard Business School. That’s what the argument is not about the universal rights of man.
I don’t see why anybody else should be eager to do so but that’s certainly the tone I hear.
I suspect I’ll be taken to task for making sweeping generalities about other people making sweeping generalities. I could document my claims but why bother? Sweeping generalities in support of rational moderation are no vice.
I can’t knit.
I’ve stayed out of the Mitt’s Taxes issue at OTB. But I can tell why it bothers me. We have a system where you can inherit a billion dollars, invest it all, and pay next to nothing, relatively, to support the system and society that protect that vast wealth for you.
Meanwhile some waiter working a double shift is paying more relatively for far less.
Is that on Mr. Romney? No. Is it a wonderful symbol for the small amount of common ground between the Tea Party and Occupy? You bet it is. My problem with Romney is not that he’s rich, it’s that he is devoted — insofar as Captain Weathervane can be said to be devoted to anything — to perpetuating the system that coddles him and leaves the poor and the working class out in the cold. He’s not just entitled and privileged, he’s working in the interests of his own entitlement and privilege.
Here’s the problem: so has President Obama. Who signed the extension of the Bush tax cuts?
That’s the hypocrisy of it all. Republicans vote for tax cuts for the wealthy during a recession = bad. Democrats vote for tax cuts for the wealthy during a recession = good.
To throw gasoline onto the fire the other day I read a paper that found that to maximize the revenues derived from taxing capital gains the tax should be lowered to 8%. Remember that capital gains differ from wage income: in general, they are voluntary.
You’re preaching to the choir on that. It’s why I am very sympathetic to Occupy. But at least Obama tried to bring a tax component to the debt ceiling fiasco.
Like you I tend to emphasize foreign policy in presidential choices. Obama seems to want to keep us out of a war with Iran. The GOP seems about ready to invade Iran. (Either way we may end up in a war with Iran.)
Generally I think Obama has done moderately well with foreign policy. He stayed out of the Iranian “spring” while presumably endorsing or at least allowing moves to retard Iran’s ability to go nuclear, he managed the Libya thing with minimal damage and very adroit diplomacy, he got us out of Iraq (just as Mr. Bush woud have done, granted,) he seems to understand that it’s time to start looking for the exit from Afghanistan. I favor the drone war on Al Qaeda, I generally like free trade agreements, I thought the outreach to Muslims was smart, I think he handled the Arab spring about as well it could be handled. (Not that we’re really much of a player in that, really.) And Bin Laden is a pile of bones at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Dave, you confuse me. Not because of your critique of Obama, which I understand. I could quibble at the margins, but that’s not what interests me.
It’s more that you say over and over again that you want politicians to compromise more, yet when they do you’re unhappy.
The extension of the Bush Tax Cuts was obviously a compromise for Obama – and to be generous, for Congressional Republicans as well, who’ve wanted them deepened or extended into perpetuity for god knows how long. I can document this, but I trust I don’t have to.
So if everyone’s compromising who is it that makes these bipartisan votes possible? It’s the moderates. It’s the Joe Liebermans, the Mark Warners, the Chuck Grassleys, etc. The congresscritters who because of belief or geography can get away with voting against their party’s line sometimes.
The way I see it, Obama has governed more or less the way Joe Lieberman would have. He’s started or intensified wars, continued to aggregate executive wartime powers over the justice system, engaged in questionably successful and expensive social policies, and generally tried to work with the opposition party, or at least the moderates in the Democratic party. He’s also a moderately competent politician and a middling-to-OK manager.
Yet you’ve frequently praised Joe Lieberman for his moderate tendencies, and criticized Obama as a partisan. I don’t get it. I think it’s the Liebermans and the Obamas, and the Grassleys and the Lugars, who keep compromise possible – and with it, the frequently bad, but sometimes OK decisions made by Congress. If you really want to change the dynamics in Congress it’s not moderates who will get you there – it’s the very Right and Left Bolsheviks who rile up the base.
I can easily fall into particularist arguments as a means of analyzing public policy issues, like Romney’s returns, the demographics of Glencoe or the life and times of Maddie the riveter. But at some point, these are just anecodtes. And in particular crafting tax policy for the one percent is a fool’s mission.
Change the tax code 25 years ago, and Bain changes the way it compensates its partners.
Change the tax code 15 years ago, and Romney and Bain negotiate a different retirment agreement.
Change the tax code this year to raise Romney’s taxes and his effective rate of taxation might go down next year.
The 1% have choices that the 99% do not have, unless perhaps you decide to tax wealth.
Dave,
It’s good to see that you have a limit on how much political bullshit you can take before becoming overtly disgusted and (moderately) losing your composure.
You must be thinking of someone else. I searched my blog posts for the last eight years. There were only a handful of mentions of Lieberman, mostly in quotes from other people, and no praise. A few mentions that, by Democratic Party standards, he’s a hawk.
Praising any politician would be an oddity for me and, in particular, praising somebody out-of-state. My general view is that whoever voters in other state elect is none of my business. My recollection is that the closest I’ve ever come to praise for Lieberman is pointing out that in a state evenly divided between the parties being a centrist might be thought of as constituent service.
As far as compromise goes, I don’t think that what passes for compromise in the Congress these days is worthy of the name.
Dave- Suppose Obama had 65 votes in the Senate and a big majority in the House. Do you think he signs an extension of the Bush tax cuts?
As to the rest, yes. It is very hard to actually discuss policy anymore.
Steve
@Maxwell, I didn’t respond to your last comment in deference to the fact that you asked Dave a question, but now that Dave has answered, I don’t agree with your claim in paragraph three that you believe is without need for evidentiary support. This is how I see events:
1. Bush wanted to propose the largest tax cuts he could and the one thing he was willing to compromise to get it through the Congress was the ten year sunset, which he believed (and I think events confirm) would be untenable to lift for opponents once the expectation of the tax rates had set in. He’s playing a trick.
2. Obama campaigned for President in support of those tax cuts, but against those cuts for a somewhat amorphous group of wealthy — those cuts he would allow to sunset. He didn’t say he would pass a law to raise taxes, he would allow them to expire. He is in my view buying into the game Bush laid out; there is a difference, either in substance or tactics, between allowing something to expire passively and active change. He’s trying to play a trick.
3. Obama’s stratagem, which is essentially to provoke a game of chicken, is shown to have real problems. Its something Obama’s betters could get away with in state politics on a more controlled stage, but at the federal level he is out of his league. Obama can’t raise taxes on “non-wealthy” so the threat of complete expiration of the tax cuts is not real. Reid pushed the vote back to after the election when he thought the situation would be more manageable in the lame duck, and the Democrats took an historic beating in the midterms partly on the complaint that you don’t raise taxes, _any taxes,_ in a recession.
I really don’t see any of this from Bush on as “compromise.” I see it as self-serving political positioning, that attempt to reduce your opponent’s options and drive a wedge in his/her base. And oddly your opponent has tricks up his sleeve too. And ultimately I don’t see both sides in an equivalent position; if government is dysfunctional then one of the parties is correct.
Dave,
As far as compromise goes, I don’t think that what passes for compromise in the Congress these days is worthy of the name.
I don’t think so either. It’s horse-trading and industrial-pandering. Every single bill that gets passed is like this. But I guess I’m just disgusted with the role moderates, including the moderates in my own party, have played in making it this way. And then when they retire or get voted out someone gives them a multimillion dollar lobbying gig.
So I say bring on the bolsheviks, on both sides. At least until we get a better class of centrist.
Regarding Lieberman – I did not mean to offend, nor to play gotcha. I probably should have chosen someone else as I know he’s pretty controversial. The example came up because I remembered you saying warm things about him in the past. That said, I think you may be misremembering. Try a google site search instead of your webpage search engine.
I did. It confirmed my recollection. I quoted some other sites, e.g. ABC News. I mentioned that he’d won re-election. That’s just a fact not praise.
Well, the other way to look at it is to take the opposite view – that the “bolsheviks” are the problem. After all, most of them are in politically safe offices (many of them gerrymandered) which is what allows them to be bolsheviks in the first place. Why should moderates (who are supposed to serve their constituents and not the whims of party loyalists) fall on their political swords to push through legislation from the minority factions on the wings? People worried about party loyalty should demand that the bolsheviks do the most compromising because they usually have the political depth to survive the hit they’ll take – moderates don’t. Which is what happened after the PPACA.
And the bolsheviks don’t get the nice after-office gigs? Since when?
“Seeing some sort of wrongdoing on his part because of course the rich have gotten so on the backs of the poor and of course the rich have rigged the tax system and they’re all equally guilty simply boggles my mind. What are we, Madame Defarge?”
I’m not even sure what your objection is based on. National income has shifted significantly away from wages and toward profits. That isn’t even arguable. The non-wealthy’s loss has been the wealthy’s gain. Attempting to add moral filler to it doesn’t help.
I don’t deny that the rich have gotten richer. But can you substantiate the sentence above? You’re implying causality where I don’t think any exists. What I think has actually happened is that for most people increases in compensation have gone to pay for healthcare and healthcare insurance.
My point in the section you quote is that they’re making judgments based on class behavior rather than on individual behavior. I think that’s wrong on any number of grounds.
What I think has actually happened is that for most people increases in compensation have gone to pay for healthcare and healthcare insurance.
Isn’t this the causality you’re looking for? Nominal compensation increases for working class people are going directly to doctors and insurance companies functionairies. These look like increases to one’s well-beinig, but the additional ‘income’ MUST be sent to doctors, insurance executives, pharmaceutical companies and the other assholes running the medical-industrial complex. Additionally, over time companies have shifted an ever greater portion of the burden of insurance onto the workers. The non-wealthy’s gain goes directly to making the wealthy wealthier, not to making the non-wealthy wealthier.
@Dave Schuler
I’d suggest looking here:
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/US_Wage_Share_1980_2011.jpg
For anyone interested, Bill Mitchell covered the topic of wage/profit distribution earlier this year:
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=16325
Where’s the causality? Post hoc propter hoc?
I think there’s a much stronger case that stagnation of 1040 wages among those in the lower three quintiles and increases in income by those in the topmost quintile have a common cause than that the increase in income among the topmost tier causes the stagnation in the lower quintiles.