Who Are You Going to Believe?
Comments (0) The weasely, lying fear mongers?
Or the person who actually takes the time to lay out the facts?
Category: Spending Cuts
Comments (0) 
This Money Is Apparently Not Paying Attention To Those Mouths
By Gregory Taggart, May 17, 2011 9:39 am
The talking heads have had nothing good to say about Mitt Romney lately, and especially since his healthcare speech in Michigan last week. Are his backers not paying attention? What do they see that the talking heads don’t?
The Lessons Are Obvious . . . to Some
By Gregory Taggart, May 14, 2011 2:42 pm
So what does a 51 foot-high floodgate in Japan have to do with our $14.377 trillion dollar debt? Do I really have to explain?
The more important question is who is going to step up and be our Mayor Kotaku Wamura? There’s a surfeit of poseurs. Who’s the real thing?
Baghdad Bobbette
By Gregory Taggart, April 18, 2011 10:19 am
Standard & Poor’s just shot a big gun across the bow of our ship of state, warning of
a “material risk” the nation’s leaders will fail to deal with rising budget deficits and debt.
At least one player in the government bond market agrees:
“It’s truly a shot across the bow and a message to Washington, which has been clowning around on this and playing politics when they should toss ideology aside and focus on achievement,” said David Ader, head of government bond strategy at CRT Capital Group LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. “The bond market is still trying to find out what to make of it. People don’t know what to do. If you sell Treasuries, what do you go in to? No one knows.”
So what’s Treasury’s response?
Treasury Assistant Secretary Mary Miller said today that S&P’s outlook on the U.S. credit rating “underestimates” U.S. leadership.
“We believe S&P’s negative outlook underestimates the ability of America’s leaders to come together to address the difficult fiscal challenges facing the nation,” Miller [NKA Baghdad Bobbette] said in a statement. (emphasis supplied)
Our debt may becoming more expensive, but this response is priceless.
UPDATE: As Barry Ritholtz’s post at The Big Picture reminded me, the S&P is very late with its take on this party, a party Bill Gross walked out of over a month ago.
He’s Baaaaack! And So Is His Cheer Squad!
By Gregory Taggart, April 17, 2011 6:07 pm
Barack Obama is back, and the press–in the person of Jonathan Alter–is carrying his water, again. In a column titled Republican Horror Movie Sequel Hits Theaters Alter breathlessly warns Republicans to
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
And why? Because of that speech BO gave last this week at George Washington University. You know, the one universally panned as not serious, awful, presidential politicking at its worst? Yeah, that one.
So why is Alter experiencing that special tingle? Well, for one, BO’ s a great story teller. I agree, but then I’m thinking of story in the sense that the man says whatever is to hand, whether it’s true or not. When his lips move, well, my antennae go up. I don’t think that’s what Alter meant.
The other think that’s ginned up the good columnist is that idea that
Most important, the president stressed the fundamental American values of fairness and compassion.
In other words, we’re back to Joe the Plumber talk–redistribution.
A highlight of Alter’s piece for me was his admission that Democrats are given to demagoguery. In taking his swipes at Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan, Alter writes,
Older, independent voters that Republicans won in 2010 will despise the Ryan plan once it filters down to them. A Democratic war cry of “They’re killing Medicare!” isn’t demagoguery this time. It’s true.
No, in fact it’s not true and Democratic talk like this continues to be demagoguery, especially given the fact that they refuse to offer a plan of their own with any specifics in it. Exactly how would they deal with Medicaid and Medicare, plans that Alter in one breathe says are “wildly popular” yet “must be reformed”?
As he admits, we’ll get no help from the Annointed One.
The president offered few specifics about how to save $4 trillion over 12 years beyond letting the tax cuts for wealthy expire in late 2012. That won’t be enough. But teeing up tax cuts for the rich as a campaign issue will clearly help the Democrats, as it did in 2008.
Yeah, that should scare Republicans. Drag out the hoary ghost of campaigns past, the “tax cuts for the wealthy” meme. If this is BO’s game, it brings to mind this game:
He’ll not win this time, not throwing like that. I’m not sure our fawning press will manage to carry that ball over the plate.
The Men (Women and Children) Behind the Curtain
By Gregory Taggart, April 11, 2011 8:10 am
Or as Pogo might say,
Today in The Washington Post,
Robert Samuelson writes,
We in America have [elected a] suicidal [president]; the threatened federal shutdown and stubborn budget deficits are but symptoms. By suicidal, I mean that [president] has promised more than [he] can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have.
Okay, so I changed a few things, the word president for the word government, for example. Or the word elected for the word created. But Samuelson could have written what I’ve posted and still have been right. Right?
Anyway, he actually says that our suicidal government is so in part because
[We] depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat.
Why is that? Surprise of surprises, because
The Census Bureau reports that in 2009 almost half (46.2 percent) of the 300 million Americans received at least one federal benefit: 46.5 million, Social Security; 42.6 million, Medicare; 42.4 million, Medicaid; 36.1 million, food stamps; 3.2 million, veterans’ benefits; 12.4 million, housing subsidies. The census list doesn’t include tax breaks. Counting those, perhaps three-quarters or more of Americans receive some sizable government benefit. For example, about 22 percent of taxpayers benefit from the home mortgage interest deduction and 43 percent from the preferential treatment of employer-provided health insurance, says the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
Kind of makes you lose hope that things are going to change.
Assurance That The Rules Won’t Change Next Week? Who Needs That?
By Gregory Taggart, April 7, 2011 9:44 am
Gary Becker, George Schultz, and John Taylor have a plan to bust the budget. It’s worth reading. To me the most obvious gem in the plan, and the one most sorely missing in all the talk in Washington right now is this:
Assurance that the current tax system will remain in place—pending genuine reform in corporate and personal income taxes—will be an immediate stimulus.
Congress and the President (any Congress and any President) have used the tax code to implement policy choices. It’s time to leave the rules be, so that business can plan, something they are loathe to do when there’s no promise that the rules won’t change next week.
Ten Economists, One Opinion: The Time to Cut the Deficit is Now!
By Gregory Taggart, March 26, 2011 5:04 pm
Ten former chairmen and chairwomen of the Council of Economic Advisors have joined in a statement that calls on Congress and the President to step up and get to work on the important task of cutting our monstrous deficit.
There are many issues on which we don’t agree. Yet we find ourselves in remarkable unanimity about the long-run federal budget deficit: It is a severe threat that calls for serious and prompt attention.
You can read more here, but there is one thing missing from both their statement and the Bowles/Simpson report they refer to: What can Congress and the President do to regain the trust they’ll need to pull this trick out of a hat?
I’m all for deficit reduction. I’ll even sign on for tax increases. But I will not agree to those increases unless and until Congress and the President show me that they are serious about cutting spending and that they will use the tax increases to cut the deficit rather to spend.
I am not holding my breath.
The Food Nazi–or is that Fascist?–Wants the Government to Pick Winners and Losers
By Gregory Taggart, March 2, 2011 12:34 pm
Elites. Can’t help themselves. Mark Bittman is at it again. If the government gets something wrong–defined as, something Bittman doesn’t like–well give ’em another bite at the organically grown apple:
Agricultural subsidies have helped bring us high-fructose corn syrup, factory farming, fast food, a two-soda-a-day habit and its accompanying obesity, the near-demise of family farms, monoculture and a host of other ills.
Yet — like so many government programs — what subsidies need is not the ax, but reform that moves them forward. Imagine support designed to encourage a resurgence of small- and medium-size farms producing not corn syrup and animal-feed but food we can touch, see, buy and eat — like apples and carrots — while diminishing handouts to agribusiness and its political cronies.
I really don’t have time to Fisk the entire article, so here is one more clip, and I’m off:
Thus even House Speaker Boehner calls the bill a “slush fund”; the powerful Iowa Farm Bureau suggests that direct payments end; and Glenn Beck is on the bandwagon. (This last should make you suspicious.) Not surprisingly, many Tea Partiers happily accept subsidies, including Vicky Hartzler (R-MO, $775,000), Stephen Fincher (R-TN, $2.5 million) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN $250,000). No hypocrisy there.
Left and right can perhaps agree that these are payments we don’t need to make. But suppose we use this money to steer our agriculture — and our health — in the right direction. A Gallup poll indicates that most Americans oppose cutting aid to farmers, and presumably they’re not including David Rockefeller or Michele Bachmann in that protected group; we still think of farmers as stewards of the land, and the closer that sentiment is to reality the better off we’ll be.
By making the program more sensible the money could benefit us all.
Apparently playing to his audience, Bittman takes unrelated cheap shots at the usual right-wing suspects, appears to agree that farm subsidies are subsidies we should end, but then makes one final pitch–if we just make the program more sensible.
Yeah, like that will happen. As Bittman reported about New Deal farm programs a few paragaphs above the last quote,
That wasn’t the plan, of course. In the 1930s, prices were fixed on a variety of commodities, and some farmers were paid to reduce their crop yields. The program was supported by a tax on processors of food — now there’s a precedent! — and was intended to be temporary. It worked, sort of: prices rose and more farmers survived. But land became concentrated in the hands of fewer farmers, and agribusiness was born, and along with it the sad joke that the government paid farmers for not growing crops.
And this time it will be better because a new, smarter group of elites is in charge? Of course.
Bittman should take up selling the Brooklyn Bridge.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
By Gregory Taggart, February 28, 2011 11:50 am
The New York post has a column today about the prescience of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of my favorite people.
According to writer Bob McManus, Moynihan saw the future of public unions, and it was not rosey.
“[NYU economics professor William J.] Baumol started out by asking himself why the costs of the performing arts always seemed to be rising” Moynihan wrote. “I remarked that if you want a Dixieland band for a campaign rally today, you will need the same [number of] players you would have needed at the beginning of the century. Productivity just hasn’t changed much.”
But per-player costs — salaries and benefits — had risen dramatically, and the price of that Dixieland band along with them.
So, too, the price of health care, the senator argued. An already labor-intensive industry was becoming even more so with each technological advance — driving per-patient productivity ever lower and overall costs inexorably higher.
The same, he said, is true of what he termed the “stagnant [public-sector] services” — including “education high and low, welfare, the arts, legal services, the police. This means that the [costs] of the public sector will continue to grow.”
Moynihan had an eye for what seems obvious today. And he was not shy about telling others what he saw, a trait that served him well–and impressed me–when he served as the U.S.’s ambassador to the United Nations.
My cousin, then an aide to Senator Alan Simpson, once arranged a tour of the Capitol for me. The highlight was when a door swung open as I walked by, revealing Senator Moynihan, bow tie and all, talking to someone behind what had been closed doors.
The Democrats–hell, the Republicans–could use someone like him right now.
Themocracy