Jim Jones 2012 / 8-14-11

I used to shake my fits at their antics, roll my eyes at their lies.

Now I just feel pity for them.

The Republican candidates for president, that's who.

Last week at the Iowa debate, they were offered a hypothetical situation in which they could defeat the deficit by passing ten times as many spending cuts as tax raises. (Ten times!) They were asked to raise their hand if they would oppose such a deal.

Hey, guess what? They all raised their hands, like the dutiful little unthinking boys and girls they've become.

Because they've been brainwashed, you see.

(I know the real answer is somewhat different. It's political suicide to declare any kind of support for any kind of tax increase with primary season just around the corner. The R's had no choice, from a strategic standpoint. Adorably, Tim Pawlenty -- who has since dropped out, to which I must add a punctuationally illegal exclamation point! -- hesitated. He recovered and shot his arm up too. But what an cute little almost-thinker he was, if only for a moment. Seriously. He quit the race three days later.)

Anyway, the brainwashed thing makes so much sense. Because here's what the Republicans said no to Thursday night: eliminating the national debt.

They didn't just say no to balancing the budget and living with the $14.6 trillion or so we now owe, paying our minimum balance of $500 billion (!!!!) every year, never getting anywhere in the long term. They said no to turning that entire balance, the one we've spent our history accumulating, into zero.

All $14.6 trillion, gone. They declined that offer.

Analogy time. They said no to this domestic situation:

I make $60,000 a year. Pleasant salary for a single guy.

Well... I pay $20,000 for housing, $10,000 in taxes, $30,000 to survive, and I'm also on the hook for $5,000 annually in the form of minimum payments on my credit cards. How long will I last at this rate? Hm.

But look! I am offered another part-time job that will cause me to make a little less at my old job, and will cut into my leisure time because I'll be working more hours, but my income will increase overall to $75,000. I'll be able to pay off my cards AND save a little each month AND treat myself to something nice again. A vacation? A new home theater? A motorcycle.

Do I say no to the second job? Not only would I be able to pay off my credit cards, but I would be able to start setting myself up for life.

And I could always quit after my financial house is back in order. The second job, the extra revenue -- I won't always need it. I just am in kind of a bind right now, and it would come in awfully handy.

Analogy over. Reality now: Instituting a new tax bracket on ultra-wealthy Americans would raise about $800 billion over the next decade. (Got some numbers from here, so I'm not totally guessing.)

Couple that with the $8 trillion in cuts that come bundled with the extra revenue, and that pesky debt plus its annoying interest is halfway gone within ten years. Not only that, but you're running a surplus now. Within another decade, the entire debt has disappeared, and you could choose to lower tax rates or expand your safety net. Both, even.

Oh, but it gets better.

You don't need a 10-to-1 cuts-to-taxes ratio to get there. 4-1 is enough. And you can cross off the debt in less than one decade. Just let the Bush tax cuts expire next year, as they are scheduled to. The federal coffers will ka-ching to the tune of $3.6 trillion more in the next ten years. And $14.4 trillion in cuts come packaged with that, remember. That's a total of $18 trillion.

Debt gone.

To recap: the Republican candidates are so committed to lower taxes that they wouldn't even raise taxes if it were only on the richest one percent of taxpayers, only by a handful of percentage points, and even if it led to reducing the national debt to zero.

Like the headline says: Jim Jones 2012, everyone!

Domestic Terrorism / 8-9-11

When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Filibuster) says things like this,

"In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore,"

it's not hard to get at his meaning. The debt ceiling fight is far from over, y'all. Don't expect us to roll over next time. We take the long-term economic health of the country seriously, and we will fight to restrain spending every chance we get.

In a way, I like hearing him say that. Measures have to be taken to combat our mounting debt. The conversation needs to be had on a regular basis, so that we don't keep kicking the proverbial can down the proverbial road for as far as the proverbial eye can see. For sure, I don't believe him for a second when he implies that President Red Meat Republican would face a similar showdown. Yet he makes it sound like future debt increases will run into similar roadblocks as we saw this summer. And this in very plain language.

Now, when McConnell says things like this, in the same interview,

"I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn't think that. What we did learn is this: it's a hostage that's worth ransoming,"

you just have to first admire the man's candor, then shake your head in consternation, then begin to unpack the unsavory things you just read. You have to. It's required.

Unpacking:

"some of our members" = Tea Party wing.

"a hostage you might take a chance at shooting" = if they didn't get their way, they were ready to wreck the economy. Our economy, and by extension, the planet's. Be assured that as the U.S. economy goes, so does the world's. What else could "the hostage" be?

"Most of us" = People who actually make the decisions. (This is comforting. At least the Senate leader understands that the TP can not be trusted with serious adult policymaking.)

"it's a hostage worth ransoming." = We're still very excited, as a party, to continue to use the threat of economic meltdown to get our way. After all, we got most of what we wanted, because the President had the good sense to pay most of our demands. He saw default as an actual calamity. Not a tool to make policy. Given a totally awesome win-win choice between Dollarmageddon and partial capitulation, he chose the latter.

Don't be fooled: an actual default on our obligations would bring about serious calamity. Interest rates would immediately leap. Bankruptcies and foreclosures would skyrocket in number. And the end result would be a downgrade of the country's credit that would actually add trillions of dollars to the deficit by bumping up the amount of interest the government pays on its loans.

The interest, annually, on our debt is between $400 and $430 billion, depending on when and where you check. Yes, that's just the interest. Should the rate rise four percentage points (and here I'm getting my numbers from the Congressional Budget Office), that number would pass $500 billion in 2012 and $1 trillion in 2015.

Replay: interest rates up 4 percent. Government now faces a choice between gutting the military, the safety net, or raising taxes in the midst of the toughest economic times in 70 years.

Well, what if interest rates climb 6 points? Are we then done, as a nation, economically? We wouldn't be able to afford, oh, anything, or pay our debts, and the bottom half of the middle class would cease to exist. Eaten alive by interest. With no significant social programs to fall back on.

Then what?

So, that's the hostage situation McConnell and the rest of the Republicans in Congress are OPENLY admitting they will recreate. Hostage: their word. Not mine. But at least you get to BE the hostage.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2011 Republican Party.