January 2010 Archives

The California Budget Project's Jean Ross offers this outstanding list of resolutions. Her fourth resolution responds to a budget-related idiocy which drives me particularly crazy.

Don't promise to cut taxes and balance the budget. I have the cover of an old New Yorker magazine on the wall of my office. It is a take-off of Dante's Inferno. At the center ring of hell? Politicians that promise to cut taxes and balance the budget. It's a good reminder that the impossible is, well, impossible.

You can see the New Yorker cover here. It's an Edward Sorel illustration from the April 21, 1997 issue. I lost my copy years ago, much to my chagrin.

Digby is right: this is a "very, very very important observation" by Devilstower at Dkos:

Don't forget the naughts, because this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusuion of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. You want unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Man, we handed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented -- with a side order of Freedom Fries.

They will try to disown it, and God knows if I was responsible for this mess I'd be disowning it, too. But the truth is that the conservatives got everything they wanted in the decade just past, everything that they've claimed for forty years would make America "great again". They didn't fart around with any "red dog Republicans." They rolled over their moderates and implemented a conservative dream.

What did we get for it? We got an economy in ruins, a government in massive debt, unending war, and the repudiation of the world. There's no doubt that Republicans want you to forget the last decade, because if you remember... if you remember when you went down to the water hole and were jumped by every lunacy that ever emerged from the wet dreams of Grover Norquist and Dick Cheney, well, it's not likely that you'd give them a chance to do it again.

Because they will. Given half a chance -- less than half -- they'll do it again, only worse. Because that's the way conservatism works. Remember when the only answer to every economic problem was "cut taxes?" We have a surplus. Good, let's cut taxes. We have a deficit. Hey, cut taxes even more! That little motto was unchanging even when was clear that the tax cuts were increasing the burden on everyone but a wealthy few. That's just a subset of the great conservative battle whine which is now and forever "we didn't go far enough." If deregulation led to a crash, it's because we didn't deregulate enough. If the wars aren't won, it's because we haven't started enough wars. If there are people still clinging to their rights, it's because we haven't done enough to make them afraid.

Forget the naughts, and you'll forget that conservatives had another chance to prove all their ideas, and that their ideas utterly and completely failed. Again.

The naughts were the apotheosis of radical conservatism. So, our radical conservative friends have every incentive to rewrite that history. Such attempts have already begun. They must be opposed every time it is tried and with all the strength we can muster.

They have lectured to us about accountability moments. We really must make sure they have one.

Capital Games and Gains' Andrew Samwick links to a Wall Street Journal story by Holman Jenkins examining what the recent foiled terrorist attack says about Al Qaeda and our nation's response:

Considering the ease with which a suicide bomber could stroll into a Starbucks in any American city and kill a dozen people, you have to wonder at al Qaeda's obsession with targeting commercial airliners.

If 19 terrorists (the number who carried out the 9/11 attacks) each blew himself up at one- or two-week intervals in a shopping mall or a movie theater, America likely would become a seething nation of paranoid shut-ins. That it hasn't happened tells you something: Al Qaeda doesn't have a ready supply of competent suicide bombers, domestic or imported, to carry off serious attacks. That it continues to pour what little resources it can command into lame airliner attacks, like shoe bomber Richard Reid's failed attempt to blow himself up in 2001 and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's failed attempt on Christmas Day, tells you something else:

Al Qaeda may be incapacitated, but its leaders aren't dumb. So what if their hapless messengers only embarrass themselves and burn their legs? Al Qaeda can still count on the sizeable damage we will inflict on ourselves through an airport security apparatus that specializes in expensive political displays of barn-door closing that seldom have any real security payoff.

The few people who actually remember the fear created by the anthrax attacks or the D.C.-area sniper cannot doubt the potential effectiveness of the strategy Holman outlines.

I think the conclusions Holman reaches about Al Qaeda, our national battle against it, and our domestic security situation, have significant merit. His article is worth reading.

Please don't be alarmed. The non-existent disturbance in the force you didn't actually feel was the Earth reaching the closest point in its orbit around the sun. Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait has all the gory details.

Calculated Risk links to a Washington Post story and graphic highlighting just how bad the 2000s were for U.S. workers.

As the Post's Neil Irwin writes:

There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.

Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 -- and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.

And the net worth of American households -- the value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts -- has also declined when adjusted for inflation, compared with sharp gains in every previous decade since data were initially collected in the 1950s.

Heck of a job, President Bush. Thank God for those job producing and revenue producing tax cuts!

Oh. Never mind.

KQED Radio's John Myers provides a handy list of nine story lines Californians should watch as the 2010 political season begins.

The one part of the story that shall drive many of the others, of course, is the 2/3-vote hypermajority required to pass a budget. A requirement allowing Republicans to have veto power over the state budget even though they hold fewer than 40 percent of the seats in Sacramento.

Actually, if it were just veto power over the state budget, that would be bad enough. But it's more. As Myers writes:

Democrats decry the two-thirds mandate as an invitation for legislative extortion from the GOP legislators who they must cajole; Republicans defend it as the only way they ever get their issues heard in a statehouse where Dems often seem to dismiss GOP proposals out of hand.

You know, there is another way the GOP could get its proposals seriously heard in Sacramento.

Hmmm....what was that again? It's right on the tip of my tongue. Oh yeah, how about winning some elections?

The hypermajority requirements ensure our government cannot function and cannot solve problems. For the radical anti-government factions within the GOP, isn't that a feature and not a bug?