Like we didn't all know that?

No shit!  Now say that with as much condescending and  snarky cynicism as you can manage and yet it won't be enough to fit the circumstance.  You see, the central tenet of Republican politics has been the idea that cutting the tax rates for the very wealthy will spur the economy and yet, as far as I can tell the evidence for that has been the repetition of the formula in very stentorian and hortatory tones. In fact all the evidence I can see, and many economists agree, suggest that quite the opposite is true and reduced sufficiently, the economy will at first experience soaring markets and catastrophic busts and recessions.  And of course we've seen some very prosperous times with 90% tax brackets for earned income and much higher rates on Capital gains. One can argue all day about what should happen according to one hypotheses or conjecture, but of course most people have learned in the last half millennium  that the outcome of experiment, of experience counts more than dialectic and endless repetitions of doctrine.  It wasn't politics that settled the question of how fast things would fall after all.

But it seems to be politics that has to decide for all time whether the very wealthy are "job creators" who will create more and better jobs if they have sufficient capital, because experience shows otherwise.  The numbers history gives us show otherwise and like so many battles involving politics and religion, those made powerful through those things have to resort to things other than honest numbers.  The other lesson of history is that denial, anger and retribution are the responses of  religious and political power, threatened by strongly supported truth.

So you're not going to be surprised  to hear that a report by the research service, a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress argues that the foundations of the Republican edifice are as solid as Lamarkian evolution, an Apache rain dance or the Heliocentric universe. Actually they've been far easier to refute.  Supply side economics is a crock.  No shit! Is this the first time you've bothered to seek confirmation of that whackadoodle gospel?  Didja examine entrails, consult the oracle, sacrifice a goat?   Well you know about those first stages of grief.  Denial and anger, right?  So withdraw the research and repeat the catechism sirs -- and do it loud!

Obama's gas

I confess, I'm a loud-mouth critic of people who insist on driving heavy and dangerous trucks to the office or to do daily errands, but a guy who nevertheless owns a vehicle that gets, with a good tailwind, about one mile per gallon.

It's a boat, of course and these days I think carefully about where I'm going with it before I leave the dock. I probably don't use too much more than 500 gallons a year, which is still a whole lot less than I used to use as a commuter driving a small car. If gasoline rose to 5 or 6 or 7 dollars a gallon at the fuel docks, I probably wouldn't change the number of hours I put on the boat, but if I were driving to work, as many of you do, that 7500 pound, 8-12 mpg "SUV" or super heavy duty monster truck might just get traded for something less absurd.

So I have to make another confession: I secretly wish fuel prices would soar long enough to make urban hipsters go back to taking the bus or driving Fiat 500's, and suburbanites trade in their grotesque fashion statements for cars.

Of course the noises bubbling up from the bottom of the national cesspool have been blaming Barack Obama and "liberals" for those scary numbers that appear on gas station signs, as if it were the president or some government office that dictated prices on the free world market rather than the laws of supply and demand and the mechanisms of capitalism. I'm tempted to say that the self-appointed guardians of the free market either haven't the most elementary idea of how those markets work or perhaps are simply too dishonest to risk not blaming Obama for rising world demand. No sir, there's no pea under that particular walnut shell and if even a small proportion of Republicans had the mental wherewithal to deal with the notion that economic recovery means increased demand for resources, they might figure out that those screaming the loudest have a vested interest in a collapsing economy. As the infamous Rush once said: "I hope he fails."

So yes, some Republicans, some voices from the corporate owned media are also wishing for a big increase because the public is stupid enough, or so they hope, to believe that the "socialist" Obama is behind it all. You'll remember John McCain making that moronic accusation when gas prices soared under George Bush. No, he didn't blame Bush or the huge demand for fuel his wars gave us, he blamed Obama, because that's what Republicans do, they blame the other guy for their own actions; they blame the opposition for the workings of the natural forces of the same free markets they pretend to worship.

No, the old song is about the holy market and how all the ugly features of unrestrained capitalism like disregard for public safety and the powerlessness of an oppressed work force would wither away if we only let them drill for oil in your town's reservoir or chain your kids to a punch press the same way those Commies do, but the reality is that they have a very selective interest in capitalism and the high priests of 'enlightened self interest' are trying as hard as they can to take the enlightenment out of it.

So yes, rising energy costs sap the strength of the recovery and so that's just what a certain party wants so that they can go on pretending there is no recovery or that it would be a much better recovery if only they had someone like that Mad Monk Santorum in the White House. So maybe "jobs, jobs, jobs" is now last month's mantra because we're creating more jobs every week that were created under that 8 year Republican debacle. So it's time to turn on a dime and let's put on that Jumpin' Jack Flash disc 'cause now it's all gas, gas, gas.

Crocodile tears

Most bad drivers, like the American public in general have no concept of momentum or kinetic energy. Americans are the sort of people who will complain they're still falling after the parachute opens. Americans were the people who lapped up Fox News' "Democrats are pessimists trying to tear down the economy which is strong, strong, strong" and the Administration's "Debt doesn't matter" philosophy and are still the people who remain steadfastly unaware that the Republicans raised the Debt ceiling 7 times in the 8 years they held the White House and asked for a bigger bailout with no accountability or accounting. They're just shocked, shocked, shocked to see what that farleftliberalcommie president is doing and just look at the tears in Boehner's eyes.

Listening to Tim Geithner trying to be re-assuring on Meet the Press this morning didn't do much to dispel the idea that Republicans want nothing more than to allow default so as to give the illusion of Democratic guilt to their "look what Obama did" strategy. If he's right that the government will still pay it's bills after August 2nd, there will still be serious repercussions for all of us. If Geithner is right that a larger catastrophe than the Great Depression has been diverted it makes little impression on those who don't remember what caused the 1930's to be what they were and what brought about the rebound. They don't remember that every experiment in drastic upper bracket cuts has has the same negative result, that an extra few percent on the top bracket puts more back into the economy than cuts do or remember that paying off the debt on WWII brought steady expansion and job growth and infrastructure improvement. The kids in the back seat will continue to bitch until the money they imagined they had five years ago materializes again.

No, it's burn baby burn and the new Utopia will rise from the ashes and far better to let people who need Social Security and Medicare to stay alive die and reduce the surplus population than for hedge fund tycoons to pay an extra couple of grand more and send an extra couple of grand less to to offshore tax havens. If Medicare is indeed bankrupting us, it's by Republican design. If the debt is expanding, it's part of their plan to pay it off by reducing taxes and eliminating things they have opposed for 75 years on "moral" grounds. They look on economic tragedy as an opportunity and are probably quite aware at the Boehner and Koch Brothers and Murdoch level, that the 'lower the income to make the debt go away' strategy will, like pulling back on the stick and cutting the throttle, send us spinning downward instead of climbing. It's what they want.

I would be tempted to give a shit once again if there were any significant number of people who recognized that funny feeling in the rectum for what it is and weren't too easily seduced by the feeling of importance one gets by joining the Low-Brow Brotherhood of Trolls and Tea Smokers Marching Band, but there aren't enough and and no, I'm not tempted.

Pillars of wisdom

It seems to me that there are two kinds of Americans these days: the uninformed and the misinformed although one has to allow for considerable interbreeding. Is this more true than it used to be or are they just more self assured now that we have multi-billion dollar industries devoted to supporting both mental conditions?

At any rate, it's increasingly customary in the world of blogging in these latter days, to suffer unrestrained and personal attacks in proportion to how well one backs up one's thesis with facts and figures and of course the fury is loudest when one of the fragile pillars of the Republican temple are leaned upon. So let's have another go at it and see what happens. Having been subjected to the unending right wing Jeremiad about the massive public debt and the question of who bears responsibility for it, I thought it interesting to show what the U.S. Office of Management and Budget can tell us about where we are now.


First and most obvious of all is that we're nowhere near the level of debt we had by the end of WW II, although that may be as expected, but that debt fell sharply and almost uninterruptedly until Ronald Reagan established forever the two regnant principles of Republican policy: Debt doesn't matter and tax cuts pay for themselves by creating businesses and jobs. Looking above, it's hard to see the evidence. High marginal taxes of nearly three times as high as today's were in effect as the debt fell, Debt began to rise sharply in response to Reagan's tax cuts and what the chart fails to display is that unemployment during the Teflon years rose to 9.6%, essentially the current levels we have today. Neither does it show that no new private sector jobs were added during the years of the Bush II tax cuts.

Again, what you don't see is how expensive the S&L collapse under Bush I was or how quiet was the Right about Bush's bailout of an industry that collapsed largely because of deregulation. Uninformed? Misinformed or just hypocritical?

We can see elsewhere however, that during the Clinton years, characterized by hysterical outrage at the "confiscatory" tax structure of the Democrats, employment soared and the debt sank, not to resume it's climb until the Commander Guy outdid even Reagan in illustrating that, no, tax cuts don't pay for themselves, don't create jobs and do as they did in the 1920's precipitate bubbles, busts and recessions.

So, I'm waiting for the slurs about my parentage, defective IQ and the rest of the typical projectiles, or at least the catechism of unsupportable maxims we've heard from every Republican since the debt began to climb, but it's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I'm just sayin'

I know a country that one would think was a Capitalist paradise. No income taxes. No property taxes. A weak central government. Restrictive, nativist, immigration policies that effectively keep minorities from working legally or getting citizenship. There's a "Christian Values" clause in the constitution. Banking regulation is extremely lax.

It's the Bahamas and it's a third world country. Most of the nation's wealth is owned by a small handful of people and the obligatory multinational corporations. Nothing trickles down but the rain and there's little of that in the dry season. There's not as much reason to invest when it can just sit there and accumulate tax free. The basics like food, water and shelter are quite expensive, unemployment is tremendous.

I'm just sayin'. . .

But of course they do have a certain level of government backed health insurance for those who aren't privately insured and a Social Security like program, so that must be why they're an underdeveloped and poverty stricken country, right? I knew I'd find a reason.

Kill the cuts

There seems to be a difference between the ultra right as represented by Ayn Rand disciple and 'free markets cure all ills' cult leader Alan Greenspan, and the ultra right as personified by the rabble rousing opportunists who feed the vernacular conservatives of America. Dilatory though he may be in admitting that free markets are no more free or self steering than a car without a driver, he's none the less not as retarded as people who claim to see Russia over the horizon, staple tea bags to their hats and shriek about tax increases they didn't get. He does, albeit slowly, question the ad hoc axioms upon which he bases his theories and thus, through doubt, he thinks, he learns, he changes.

Amidst the tumult of irate e-mails calling President Obama a liar for personally having raised the cigarette tax ( a tax is a tax, after all ) and a communist for unleashing THE BIGGEST TAX INCREASE OF ALL TIME, which actually is nothing of the sort, it's refreshing to hear Greenspan utter:

"I am very much in favor of tax cuts but not with borrowed money."

What he's dismissing is the lifeblood of Republican economic policy and has been at least since the Reagan administration: tax cuts pay for themselves. It's policy that along with a huge increase in government agencies, military spending and a war now having cost more that World War 2 was supposed to be paid for by tax cuts, but failed. It was paid for by borrowing from foreign sources with our independence as collateral.

A rational person must have noticed by now that it doesn't work and never has worked and virtually always precipitates a recession. An irrational man, a Fox man, a Conservative man, even a Libertarian man, chants liberaliberaliberal, constructs straw stuffed scapegoats and tries to distract us with fairy tales about the President's religion and parentage.

"The problem that we've gotten into in recent years is that spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous."

said the Former Federal Reserve Chairman on NBC yesterday. It's axiomatic in our new propaganda soaked world that fixing a problem is far less effective and more expensive than hiding it under foamy lipped hysteria, and so the tax cuts that were designed to expire this year by the Republicans who wrote them into law, become a surprise betrayal by Obama. Those liberals are betraying us by following the law we wrote!

The tax cuts, that if renewed will cost us $2.2 trillion to $3.8 trillion over the next decade and put us that much further in debt, since no, they will not pay for themselves as has been demonstrated but will further impoverish the nation but to the benefit of a handful of people and corporations. But that debt must be thought of differently than any debt incurred in extending unemployment benefits and the glaring hypocrisy must never be acknowledged. For are we not conservative?

"You don't agree with Republican leaders who say tax cuts pay for themselves?"

asked David Gregory on Meet the Press.

"They do not."

was the emphatic reply.