I feel like I'm taking crazy pills

Over the weekend, there were two votes in the Senate. One would have extended Bush-era tax cuts, but only on incomes of $200,000 or less for individuals and $250,000 or less for couples. The other would have extended the cuts, but only on incomes of $1 million or less.

Republicans decried the votes as pure politics, in spite of the fact that they have on other occasions insisted on the principle that judicial nominees, and bills as well, deserve an up-or-down vote. Remember that phrase? According to former Republican Senator Bill Frist (the guy who can magically diagnose persistent vegetative state merely by viewing videotape of a patient), "Until [George W. Bush] took office, Democrats and Republicans alike were firmly opposed to all filibusters, and said so repeatedly. We had a tradition based on mutual respect and restraint" (my emphasis). Like any principle that no longer serves their interests, however, the up-or-down vote has been abandoned by the GOP.

Now there is news of another potential compromise: in exchange for an extension of unemployment benefits, all Bush-era tax cuts will be temporarily extended for perhaps two years.

Let me just repeat this for you, since I can hardly fucking believe it myself. The Republicans, who have been complaining about deficits ever since Barack Obama won the election in 2008, are negotiating to extend both unemployment benefits and tax cuts. Together, both measures will add to the deficit. And this from the party that delayed extending unemployment benefits on multiple occasions on the grounds that they were not paid for.

Extending unemployment benefits will stimulate the economy, and they would be paid for by allowing tax cuts for the very wealthy to expire. The Democratic plan is obviously better for both the deficit and the economy. And it is the more moderate plan, since only some of the tax cuts are allowed to expire, in deference to the GOP fantasy that tax cuts are always good for the economy. (Some, like former Reagan OMB director David Stockman, think they should all expire.) Balancing the federal budget is also good for the economy. I'm no economist, but I do remember what the economy was like under the last president to balance the budget.

Democrats can't get what they want, in spite of the fact that the facts and the polls are on their side.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Irony, Indeed II: Eat Your Spinach

Mike Huckabee

I just saw film of an interview with Mike Huckabee on CNN today in which Huckabee predicted a Republican tsunami next Tuesday.

According to CNN, Huckabee

cast the Democratic National Committee's opposition research effort as a sign of desperation as they brace for a "political tsunami" next Tuesday.

"They know they are going to get wiped out next Tuesday," he said. "They wouldn't be looking down the road in two years if they thought that they really had any shot at winning these races next week."

He compared the Obama administration to "parents who kept feeding spinach to their kids when the kids hated it" and said Democrats have given up all hope of moving their agenda forward after next week.

"They have pulled out, they have given up, they have circled the wagons, they are having prayer meetings and closed doors sessions," he said of the Democratic Party. "They are getting out the Kleenex and starting the crying, and they have done it to themselves."

In the same interview, Huckabee predicted that Republicans would take control of both the House and the Senate. While I'm not sure how "political tsunami" should be defined, Huckabee's prediction is not likely to come true. FiveThirtyEight is now predicting a 90% chance that Democrats retain control of the Senate after Tuesday.

While the Democrats' mistake may have been to feed spinach to an electorate that was clamoring for pizza, it's well known that spinach is good for you (when it's not tainted, of course). And that's the irony. Here are just two pieces of evidence: jobs are coming back, and some experts are confident that there will be no double-dip recession. When conservatives complain about the work Democrats have done since January 2009, they are likely to make the ludicrous claim that we're on a slippery slope to socialism. That really is how bad it has gotten, intellectually, for Republicans. So why are Republicans going to take the House back this year? Perhaps it's because we are so loathe to do nothing when times are hard that we would rather do something even if it makes us worse off. Perhaps it's because too many think that these are the end times, not just hard times. Whatever the reason, one thing is clear: Huckabee is more right than he knows.

The Tax Cut that Fell in the Woods

From The New York Times:

In a troubling sign for Democrats as they head into the midterm elections, their signature tax cut of the past two years, which decreased income taxes by up to $400 a year for individuals and $800 for married couples, has gone largely unnoticed.

In a New York Times/CBS News Poll last month, fewer than one in 10 respondents knew that the Obama administration had lowered taxes for most Americans. Half of those polled said they thought that their taxes had stayed the same, a third thought that their taxes had gone up, and about a tenth said they did not know. As Thom Tillis, a Republican state representative, put it as the dinner wound down here, “This was the tax cut that fell in the woods — nobody heard it.”

Actually, the tax cut was, by design, hard to notice. Faced with evidence that people were more likely to save than spend the tax rebate checks they received during the Bush administration, the Obama administration decided to take a different tack: it arranged for less tax money to be withheld from people’s paychecks.

They reasoned that people would be more likely to spend a small, recurring extra bit of money that they might not even notice, and that the quicker the money was spent, the faster it would cycle through the economy.

Economists are still measuring how stimulative the tax cut was. But the hard-to-notice part has succeeded wildly. In a recent interview, President Obama said that structuring the tax cuts so that a little more money showed up regularly in people’s paychecks “was the right thing to do economically, but politically it meant that nobody knew that they were getting a tax cut.”

“And in fact what ended up happening was six months into it, or nine months into it,” the president said, “people had thought we had raised their taxes instead of cutting their taxes.”

Democrats are in danger of losing the House of Representatives to Republicans, and this is certainly due in part to their failure to advertise their own tax cut and one that many Republicans would agree is stimulative. Oh, the irony.

Tell us how you really feel, Phi.

Perhaps you're aware of the possibility that some guy in Connecticut could kill health care reform in the Senate.

And perhaps you know his name: Senator Joe Lieberman.

We face a crisis in government when one man in Connecticut can stop the Democratic party from achieving its goals—in spite of the fact that democrats have through free and fair elections built commanding majorities in both houses of Congress.

President of Air America Media Mark Green discusses the problem here.

According to Green, Lieberman's only remaining argument against the public option is that it would be "an unnatural and dangerous appendage to health care reform."

If Lieberman's opposition to the public option rests on this atrocious argument, then Lieberman must be motivated by money. This is a manifestation of a structural problem with government, argues Green, and it must be addressed if we are to govern ourselves well and wisely.

How do you sleep at night, Sen. Droopy Dog? Do you have any idea how infuriating it is that some son of a bitch in Connecticut might actually deprive the people in my own state of the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they want a public option?

I hate to use this kind of language, but I think it is appropriate here:

Fuck you, Senator Joe Lieberman. Fuck you.