Thursday, November 22, 2012 9:24:35 PM
The New Republicans
by Paul Krugman
November 20, 2012, 12:03 pm
There has been a lot of talk since the election about the possible emergence of a new faction within the Republican party, or at least among the conservative intelligentsia. These new Republicans, we’re told, are willing to be more open-minded on cultural issues, more understanding of immigrants, and more skeptical that trickle-down economics is enough; they’ll favor direct measures to help working families.
So what should we call these new Republicans? I have a suggestion: why not call them “Democrats”?
There are three things you need to understand here.
First, on economic issues the modern Democratic party is what we would once have considered “centrist”, or even center-right. Obama’s Heritage-Foundation-inspired health care plan is to the right of Richard Nixon’s [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/11/19/cheer-up-papa-johns-obamacare-gave-you-a-good-deal/ ]. Nobody with political influence is suggesting a return to pre-Reagan tax rates on the wealthy. Fantasies about Obama as a socialist, redistributionist hater of capitalism bear no more resemblance to reality than fantasies about his birthplace or religion.
Second, today’s Republican party is an alliance between the plutocrats and the preachers, plus some opportunists along for the ride — full stop. The whole party is about low taxes at the top (and low benefits for the rest), plus conservative social values and putting religion in the schools; it has no other reason for being. Someday there may emerge another party with the same name standing for a quite different agenda; after all, the Republicans were once defined by opposition to slavery, and the Democrats by rural voters (hence the donkey) and Tammany Hall. But that will take a long time, and it won’t really be the same party.
Finally, it’s true that there are some Republican intellectuals and pundits who seem to be truly open-minded about both economic and social issues. But I worded that carefully: they “seem to be” open-minded; indeed, they’re professional seemers. When it matters, they can always be counted on — after making a big show of stroking their chins and agonizing — to follow the party line, and reject anything that doesn’t go along with the preacher-plutocrat agenda. If they don’t deliver when it counts, they are excommunicated; see Frum, David.
Anyone who imagines that there is any real soul-searching going on is deluding himself or herself.
© 2012 The New York Times Company (emphasis in original)
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/the-new-republicans/ [with comments]
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Commentary Editor John Podhoretz Has Awkward Postelection Epiphany
The election situation has developed, not necessarily to the GOP's advantage.
By Jonathan Chait
November 21, 2012 at 12:24 PM
The first few weeks after a losing presidential election are an awkward period for the most devoted ideological polemicist. Months of optimistic spin about your candidate must be cast aside for an entirely different sort of spin — where before the candidate was a budding juggernaut boldly carrying the party banner onward to victory, now we can see in hindsight that he was a hapless loser unable to articulate our side’s clearly winning vision. Transitioning from one line to another can often take months of careful tip-toeing. Commentary editor John Podhoretz offers up a magisterial postelection essay, “The Way Forward [ http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-way-forward/ ],” that instead simply takes the full plunge all at once.
The postelection Podhoretz argues that Obama’s win was “an astonishing technical accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one.” He owes it all to the brilliance of his campaign strategists — “a peerless political instrument, a virtual machine.” Obama’s assault on Romney business career may have “been the smartest and most effective political campaign of our lifetime.”
This may be a jarring message for Podhoretz’s devoted readers, whom Podhoretz spent months assuring that Obama was flailing about and headed for near-certain defeat. Obama was politically incompetent [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/team_uphill_battle_czkRYqnh3GWSQ46meGa5JP ] (“what we’ve seen so far is a reminder that the skills required to mount an insurgent campaign with a charismatic unknown aren’t those needed to mount a re-election effort featuring an incumbent with a problematic record"). On top of this he was weighed [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/get_mad_now_mitt_wunzaaqOO7EZz5i7txHcaM ] down [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/mission_failure_RWmXR6mSpwl3SCy0AEVeHJ ] by a terrible economy. Romney was in much better condition [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/romney_on_the_rise_8eNu33gii9jjQzDQ5s65AJ ] than the polls showed, Obama in deep [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/mission_failure_RWmXR6mSpwl3SCy0AEVeHJ ], deep [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_president_has_no_clothes_B64lVEr3QTTgN2TaHRMlfN/1 ] trouble. “Without a stark turnaround in his fortunes,” observed [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/bad_omens_for_bam_FtCfOA8c2FgBja5BPuQghK ] Podhoretz, he might lose [North Carolina] by 10 points this November.”
Romney was the candidate running a brilliant campaign [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/romney_closing_case_nkvwoHXVrF9y1DbGvznMIK ]. To the preelection Podhoretz, it was obvious that the ads attacking Romney’s biography would fail [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/what_is_case_G2XmxRTEFv1ieifcFmAs3O ]. (“Obama team must know that they can’t prevail solely with a negative assault on Mitt Romney.”) Obama’s campaign was in the midst of a “smoke screen of self-delusion [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/smoke_screen_of_self_delusion_PvTx6vXdY3qTy41OHRggTJ ],” pathetically unaware [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/democrats_delusions_Oa80ol18vgFWSbx3xn1oOP ] of their own coming demise:
Because they don’t only sell the snake oil, they drink it themselves. They buy their own propaganda; they believe the hype.
The astonishing turnabout in the evaluation of Obama’s campaign, from delusional nincompoops to the most terrifyingly efficient campaign apparatus in history, helps Podhoretz reach his desired conclusion, that Obama’s victory owed nothing at all to his policy platform. Obama’s campaign, he tells us now, was “bereft of ideas” and offered “no second-term governing agenda whatsoever.”
The preelection Podhoretz believed [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/mitt_nit_picks_I3jLFPtNn06qyQf7SEsRHJ ] that Romney was offering just the right level of detail to the voters:
... the “Romney isn’t being substantive enough” crowd is wrong if its members think the strategy of staying relatively vague is a losing one. Successful politicians have to allow less ideological voters some room to project their own best hope for the future onto the person they’re thinking of voting for.
The postelection Podhoretz now sees that Romney’s singular error was his failure to offer enough specifics:
The contentlessness of the Romney campaign was a vacuity of the center-right …Thus did the flight from content create a fatal problem for Romney. He may have thought his lack of specificity would lend him more appeal, but in the end, it made him less appealing because he offered nothing but words.
The preelection Podhoretz was perfectly willing to credit any potential Obama victory, however unlikely, to his policy agenda:
if he loses on Nov. 6, he will lose for the same reason he would have won — because of his very real, very substantial, and very consequential achievements.
The postelection Podhoretz asserts that Obama’s win was “an astonishing technical accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one.” In no way whatsoever. Onward to victory in 2016, comrades!
Copyright © 2012, New York Media LLC (emphasis in original)
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/podhoretz-has-awkward-postelection-epiphany.html?test=true [with comments]
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How the 2012 election polling really was skewed – for Mitt Romney
Democratic political strategist Stan Greenberg: Democracy Corps, the polling organization founded by him and James Carville, was one of the few to predict accurately the size of Obama's 2012 win.
Photograph: Jay Westcott/Rapport
Many in the GOP were sure polls were biased against their guy. In fact, they undershot Obama's win by an embarrassing margin
Harry J Enten
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 November 2012 15.18 EST
There is a fear that runs through any good prognosticator's bones when dealing with a seemingly close election. Polls are not perfect. They are instruments to judge public opinion, and they can be wrong.
2012 also had the added feature of Republican confidence. You didn't have to look very far to hear the word "skewed [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/331192/nate-silver-s-flawed-model-josh-jordan ]" in response to polling data. The polls had too many Democrats, or so the claim went. Republicans were also banking on national polls [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/11/mitt-romney-leads-national-polls ] that were kinder to Romney than state surveys.
The national polls, as it turned out, were not systematically biased against Republican Mitt Romney. The final surveys pointed [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/07/how-pollsters-won-2012-election-mostly ] to President Obama's re-election, and they were right. That does not mean, however, that the polls weren't biased. It won't be until all the ballots are counted that we can access who the most accurate pollster was on the state level, but we do know that Mason-Dixon and Rasmussen were off the mark. Right now, we can only make statements about national polling.
We know that the national surveys [ http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2012-general-election-romney-vs-obama ] tilted heavily against Obama. When we don't count any one survey date twice (that is, tracking polls such as from Gallup only have each day counted once), we can say that the average of national polls taken after the first debate through election day had Obama winning by 0.3 percentage points. President Obama currently [ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AjYj9mXElO_QdHpla01oWE1jOFZRbnhJZkZpVFNKeVE&f=true&noheader=false&gid=19 ] has a 3.2pt lead nationally and it seems like he may finish with an edge above 3.5pt.
Let's say you don't want to count Gallup and Rasmussen [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/25/gallup-rasmussen-polling-outliers-lean-republican ] because you judge that they were biased. The average of non-Gallup and non-Rasmussen surveys after the first debate had Obama leading by 0.7pt: that's still going to be an error of at least 2.5pt and perhaps nearly 3pt.
You might think it's unfair to count polls taken so far back from election day (although most scoring techniques [ http://www.openleft.com/diary/19686/the-worlds-greatest-election-forecast-in-the-world ] utilize a similar method to the one employed here). Even if you only count the surveys done over the final week of the campaign, Obama's lead is 1.3pt; that'll be an error of around 2pt. Eliminating Gallup and Rasmussen put the final average up at 1.5pt, yet, that is also going to be perhaps up to 2pt biased against Obama.
Some math indicates that internet polls [ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/ ] were more accurate than other surveys. That's true to an extent, yet internet polls were biased, as well. Over the final month, an average of internet polls gave Obama a 1.6pt lead, to give an overall bias of at least 1.5pt, and perhaps near 2pt. For example, an average of all Google polls, post-first debate, gave Obama a 1.4pt advantage.
Unlike the overall aggregate, internet polls were not too much more accurate in the final week than in the month before the election. They had Obama ahead by only 1.8pt. Counting each pollster only once (as Google had many one-day surveys in the final week), Obama is ahead by a slightly larger 2.2pt – at least a percentage point off the final margin.
What about the pollsters who did everything right, according to polling gold standards? Those who conducted surveys over the phone with people doing the interviewing and including cellphone calling? The average of those polls after the first debate had Obama ahead by an average by just 0.1pt. Eliminating Gallup puts the average at a slightly higher 0.5pt – in other words, way off the mark.
These live-interview cellphone calling pollsters were slightly better in the final week. They pegged Obama's lead at 1.2pt – still at least 2pt too low. Without Gallup, Obama's edge climbs to 1.5pt, which is not a whole lot better.
It's fairly clear that no matter what method is utilized, the national polls were too favorable towards Romney. Only eight out of 113 polls (or 7.1%) during the final month had Obama's lead at above 3pt. Three of the eight were from the Rand Corporation, two were from Google, and the rest were scattered between Democracy Corps, IBD/TIPP, and the United Technologies/National Journal survey.
During the final week, only three out of 30 polls (or 10%) conducted had Obama's lead above 3pt. They belonged to Democracy Corps, Google, and Rand. If Obama's lead climbs to 3.5pt, then, even with rounding, the vast majority of national polls were off in the final week. (Note: usually one would consider a poll giving Obama's victory margin as 3pt to be right if the final result were between 2.50 and 3.49pt.)
Only two pollsters with at least two surveys post-first debate out of about 30 (less than 10%) had Obama's average lead at 3.5pt or above. Again, it was Democracy Corps (Obama +3.5) and Rand (Obama +4.0).
The fact that it's these two pollsters that may come closest to the final result is interesting to say the least. Democracy Corps is a fine polling organization, though some might assume bias in an outfit founded by Democratic operatives James Carville and Stan Greenberg [ http://www.democracycorps.com/about-us/ ]. Rand was a panel-back survey (that is, using the same respondents over and over again), which weighted respondents [ http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR961.html ] according to how sure they were to vote and for whom. That is, a respondent might say they were only 60% likely to vote and 60% likely to vote for a particular candidate. There were doubts whether Rand's methodology was sound, but it clearly worked this year.
Overall, it's fairly clear that the national polls missed the mark, big time. Depending on the final count, it seems possible that less than 10% of surveys came close to correctly projecting Obama's edge. Few will talk about the national miss because Obama won. But just imagine that the same magnitude of error had resulted in almost all the polls showing a narrow Romney lead going into election day, but Obama had won by just 1pt. Then we'd be having a conversation.
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/21/2012-election-polling-skewed-for-mitt-romney [with comments]
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Obama Campaign Polls: How The Internal Data Got It Right
President Barack Obama, with his daughter Malia, waves toward the crowd at his reelection night party on Nov. 7, 2012, in Chicago.
11/21/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/21/obama-campaign-polls-2012_n_2171242.html [with comments]
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Where Obama and Romney Beat Their Polls
November 21, 2012
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/21/where-obama-and-romney-beat-their-polls/ [with comments]
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The New Republican Tax Policy
By BRUCE BARTLETT
November 20, 2012, 6:00 am
Bruce Bartlett [ http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/economy/bruce-bartlett-bio.html ] held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take [ http://books.simonandschuster.com/Benefit-and-The-Burden/Bruce-Bartlett/9781451646191 ].”
Although it is commonly believed that the Laffer curve [ http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/laffercurve.asp ] – the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves – is the core Republican idea about tax policy, this is wrong. The true core idea is something called starve-the-beast – the idea that tax cuts will force cuts in spending precisely because they reduce revenue. But there are slight indications that some conservatives have awakened to the reality that not only does starve-the-beast not work, but it also leads to higher spending.
The notion came into being in the 1970s to allow conservative Republican economists to reconcile their support for a balanced budget with their party’s intense desire to cut taxes without worrying about the deficit. Proposition 13 in California had proven unmistakably that voters didn’t much care whether spending was cut; they just wanted lower taxes.
I have traced the origins of Republican starve-the-beast theory to testimony by Alan Greenspan before the Senate Finance Committee on July 14, 1978 – just weeks after the passage of Proposition 13 on June 6. In explaining why he supported the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which proposed an across-the-board tax rate reduction of 30 percent, while also supporting deficit reduction, Mr. Greenspan said:
Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today’s environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenues available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending.
Among those who totally bought into this theory was Ronald Reagan. When criticized for proposing a tax cut in 1981 even though the deficit was high and rising, he replied in a national television address on Feb. 5, 1981 [ http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43132&st=&st1= ]:
Over the past decades we’ve talked of curtailing government spending so that we can then lower the tax burden. Sometimes we’ve even taken a run at doing that. But there were always those who told us that taxes couldn’t be cut until spending was reduced. Well, you know, we can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath. Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance.
In 2001, George W. Bush justified his tax cut on starve-the-beast grounds, saying it would constitute a “fiscal straitjacket for Congress [ http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64316&st=&st1= ].” According to the journalist Ron Suskind’s book, “The Price of Loyalty [ http://books.simonandschuster.com/Price-of-Loyalty/Ron-Suskind/9780743255462 ],” the Bush adviser Karl Rove often invoked the starve-the-beast approach as “conservative economic theology” in White House meetings. By 2003, using deficits strategically to slash the size of government was widely considered to be party doctrine [ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/11/us/washington-talk-conservatives-now-see-deficits-as-a-tool-to-fight-spending.html ] among Republicans.
During the Obama administration, the principal enforcer of that doctrine among Republicans is the anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. He continually argues against tax increases because they feed the beast and lead to higher spending. As he put it in an Op-Ed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/opinion/22Norquist.html ] page column last year in The New York Times, “Raising taxes is what politicians do instead of reforming and reducing the cost of government.”
The problem for Republicans, as is so often the case, is that the real-world impact of their theories doesn’t measure up to their theories. There was no reduction in spending as a share of the gross domestic product despite a sharp fall in revenue as a share of G.D.P. during the Reagan years. By the time Reagan left office the spending/G.D.P. ratio was about the same as it was in Jimmy Carter’s last year: 21.7 percent in 1980 vs. 21.3 percent in 1988.
During the George W. Bush administration, spending increased sharply even as revenue collapsed. Revenue as a share of G.D.P. fell to 17.5 percent in 2008 from 20.6 percent in 2000, yet spending rose to 20.1 percent in 2006, before the economic crisis hit, and 20.7 percent in 2008, from 18.2 percent of G.D.P.
In short, we have tested starve-the-beast theory in the laboratory, and it has failed miserably. At least a few conservatives have had the courage to acknowledge that lowering the tax cost of spending may be a culprit. After all, the main reason to oppose higher spending is that it will lead to higher taxes. But if people can have tax cuts and higher spending at the same time, why should they not have their cake and eat it too?
In 2007, Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review made this perceptive observation [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/150376/peter-robinsons-questions/ramesh-ponnuru ] about starve-the-beast theory:
The theory made sense so long as the maximum politically acceptable deficit was an independent variable. But if in fact the effort to cut taxes increased the political system’s tolerance for deficits, then spending could go up. And it’s easy to see how cutting taxes could make deficits more acceptable. As for practice: The last decade has not been kind to the idea that cutting taxes would restrain spending.
The late economist William Niskanen [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/business/william-a-niskanen-a-blunt-libertarian-economist-dies-at-78.html ] of the Cato Institute was another pioneer on the right in recognizing the perversity of starve-the-beast theory [ http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v26n2/cpr-26n2-2.pdf ]. His work has been revived by The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson in a new article [ http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/gorging-beast_663547.html ] for the conservative magazine. This is significant because The Standard often sets the agenda for Republicans. This article may signal a change in thinking about whether tax increases may be a better way of starving the beast than tax cuts.
At the risk of reading the tea leaves too closely, I think Mr. Ferguson’s article needs to be read in conjunction with comments made by The Standard’s editor William Kristol on “Fox News Sunday” [ http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/fox-news-sunday-chris-wallace/2012/11/11/sen-feinstein-talks-petraeus-scandal-benghazi-investigation-key-lawmakers-fiscal-cliff#p//v/1962178274001 ] on Nov. 11. Said Mr. Kristol: “You know what? It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires. It really won’t, I don’t think.”
Mr. Kristol is not a fool and can read the polls as easily as I can; he knows Republicans are holding a losing hand on taxes. A Nov. 14 Gallup poll [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/158828/balanced-approach-cutting-deficit.aspx ] shows the percentage of Americans favoring a spending-cuts-only approach to the deficit has fallen in half, to 10 percent from 20 percent last year; the percentage willing to accept higher taxes to reduce the deficit has risen to 86 percent from 73 percent.
Taxes are going to rise; that is no longer in doubt. The question for Republicans is what can they get in return. Starve-the-beast is dead.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/the-new-republican-tax-policy/ [with comments -- the first, apt comment to Bartlett's pained parsing of patent bullshit either way currently showing:
Swatter
Washington DC
Looking at the time series (bea.gov) for federal expenditure and receipts from 1969-2012 Q2, Reagan is the spending and deficit king when comparing the total expenditure and debt of each president's first term with the last of his predecessor's. Carter and Clinton actually had lower deficits during their presidencies than their republican predecessors, the only 2 presidents to do so. W's spending increase was in line with others but his tax receipts increase was much smaller than previous presidents'. Obama's spending increase is coming in as the least increase of any president over his predecessor since 1969, yet his deficits are topped only by Reagan's because of, the real story: the drop in receipts, the first time receipts over a whole term have actually decreased since 1969; the only jump in expenditure (2009 Q2) was from a jump in transfers to individuals and states, and a jump in interest payments.
So that's the reality that the numbers tell.
As for starving the beast, it has been used to gut programs that conservatives don't like while they spend as they wish on what they like, and then use the resulting deficits (surprise!) to call for more cuts to the things they don't like.
Nov. 22, 2012 at 2:34 p.m.]
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Econ Crisis 12 - Deficits & the Debt
VOICE NARRATOR: The United States is at a decision point that will affect everyone. To understand the issues, start with Federal spending as a percentage of GDP from 1970 to 2087 -- 75 years from now. Here is 2012. So this part actually happened, and this is what is projected by the Congressional Budget Office.
Now look at Federal tax revenue: income taxes and payroll taxes and everything else. The difference between taxes and spending gives us deficits (in pink) or surpluses (in yellow). Spending more than taxes makes pink deficits, and spending less than taxes makes yellow surpluses.
This adds or subtracts from another graph: the total debt, held by the public as Treasury bills and bonds, which goes to back to zero around 2070. So the bottom graph, on spending and taxes, changes the top graph on total debt.
Notice that we are not changing the percentages on the left side. We are just squashing the pictures.
Here is President Obama's first term. There were spikes in spending and in debt. What caused this?
Well, it is not Social Security. That flattens out for the next 75 years. It will be easy to manage. Please do not believe the silly propaganda that we cannot afford it.
On the other hand, Medicare and Medicaid grow continuously. But there is no bulge, at this point. So they didn't do it, either. Let's make them into the top layers.
Here is Defense. The bump starts with spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here is all the other spending, including Defense. We blend-in Defense.
There is the rest of the spike. It is stimulus spending to fight the recession, plus some of the bank bailouts.
But if we look at the bump in total debt, the wars and stimulus are little slices. So what else is there?
Well, did you notice the dip in tax revenue? There are two causes: the economic downturn means people work less, so they pay less in taxes. And there are the Bush tax cuts, which are supposed to end. Without these two, the deficits would be small.
They complete the causes of the bump in debt. Otherwise, the debt would go downhill.
So this was predetermined, no matter who was elected. It's like "pre-existing conditions". What is important is that this is a short-term problem (if we can call 20 years the short-term). And it solves itself, because the reasons are supposed to end.
But after that, we see long-term growth in spending, due to something different: the long-term rise in medical costs, from the inefficient healthcare system, plus the aging population. So there are two stories: the short-term, and the long-term.
Well the short-term solves itself. The way to deal with the long-term (for now) is a piecemeal approach, little by little. Number one: raise taxes to cover our needs. But do it slowly, while we work on number two: fix the healthcare system to get everyone's medical costs down, because the private costs affect the public costs.
In fact, there is serious doubt about the healthcare projections. An alternative CBO scenario makes them higher, due to the Medicare doctor fix, and other things. But they may also be lower, because Obamacare has efficiencies that are difficult to calculate in the official projections. Plus, every other country already spends only half as much as the U.S. So we may be able to bend down taxes, as well. No one really knows. We just have to work on it, and see what happens.
Even as it stands now, do not be fooled: officially, there is no crisis. Let's repeat that: there is no crisis. "Crisis-talk" is politics. By the laws in effect, as of December 2012, taxes will rise to cover spending. No one would enjoy that, but taxes still stay lower than most modern countries for many decades more. There are surpluses, so the debt will be paid down.
But some Washington politicians are using the short-term build-up of debt, to scare us about the long-term. What they really want is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and to level the revenues, first. Of course, this makes the debt explode. Their answer is to cut the safety-net and entitlements, including Social Security.
There is no reason to cut entitlements. It puts people in danger. And it puts the cart before the horse. A better solution is to work on it little by little. First, take care of the short term: as we exit the economic slump, raise revenue slowly, and begin now by returning to the Clinton tax rates, on the wealthiest incomes. This is unlikely to hurt economic growth. Second, work on efficiency in the healthcare system, to reduce our long-term revenue needs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd4HDautaUw
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A Public Service Reminder: Paul Ryan is a Con Man
by Paul Krugman
November 19, 2012, 6:48 pm
So now that the Unperson/Ryan ticket has lost, Republicans are clearly expecting [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/us/politics/paul-ryan-emerges-as-power-broker-in-fiscal-talks.html?pagewanted=all ] Paul Ryan to move right back into his previous role as Washington’s favorite Serious, Honest Conservative.
He might get away with it; but I hope not.
The fact is that Ryan is and always was a fraud. His plan never added up [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/whats-in-the-ryan-plan/ ]; it was never, contrary to what people who should know better asserted, “scored” by the CBO. What he actually offered was a plan to hurt the poor and reward the rich, actually increasing the deficit along the way, plus magic asterisks that supposedly reduced the debt by means unspecified.
His genius, if you can all it that, was in realizing that there was a role — as I said, that of Honest, Serious Conservative — that self-proclaimed centrists desperately wanted to see filled, so that they could demonstrate their bipartisanship by lavishing praise on the holder of that position. So Ryan did his best to impersonate a budget wonk. It wasn’t a very good impersonation — in fact, he’s pretty bad at budget math. But the “centrists” saw what they wanted to see.
Ryan can’t be ignored, since his party does retain blocking power, and he chairs an important committee. But if he must be dealt with, it should be with no illusions. Fool me once …
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/a-public-service-reminder-paul-ryan-is-a-con-man/ [with comments]
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The New York Times Reporters Do Not Understand How Marginal Tax Rates Work
11/20/2012
For whatever reason, an article titled "Investors Rush to Beat Threat of Higher Taxes [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/business/investors-rush-to-beat-threat-of-higher-taxes.html?pagewanted=all ]" was published by The New York Times despite the fact that it contains a galling bit of stupidity, which could spread like a supervirus to the general public.
It is these three paragraphs in particular:
"Kristina Collins, a chiropractor in McLean, Va., said she and her husband planned to closely monitor the business income from their joint practice to avoid crossing the income threshold for higher taxes outlined by President Obama on earnings above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples.
Ms. Collins said she felt torn by being near the cutoff line and disappointed that federal tax policy was providing a disincentive to keep expanding a business she founded in 1998.
“If we’re really close and it’s near the end-year, maybe we’ll just close down for a while and go on vacation,” she said."
This is a stupidity as persistent as it is avoidable. Ms. Collins, chiropractor from Virginia, is among the many people of affluence who have somehow survived without understanding how marginal tax rates work. ...
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/20/new-york-times-tax-rates_n_2166967.html [with comments]
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Fox Business on food stamps
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/11/21/1228731/fox-pundit-jokes-food-stamps-could-be-a-diet-plan/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVag_ngxHZs
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Mitt Romney loses election, but still goes to Disneyland
November 21, 2012
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/11/mitt-romney-disneyland.html [with comments]
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(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81705887 and preceding (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81707886 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81723741 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81739388 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81749620 and preceding (and any future following)
by Paul Krugman
November 20, 2012, 12:03 pm
There has been a lot of talk since the election about the possible emergence of a new faction within the Republican party, or at least among the conservative intelligentsia. These new Republicans, we’re told, are willing to be more open-minded on cultural issues, more understanding of immigrants, and more skeptical that trickle-down economics is enough; they’ll favor direct measures to help working families.
So what should we call these new Republicans? I have a suggestion: why not call them “Democrats”?
There are three things you need to understand here.
First, on economic issues the modern Democratic party is what we would once have considered “centrist”, or even center-right. Obama’s Heritage-Foundation-inspired health care plan is to the right of Richard Nixon’s [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/11/19/cheer-up-papa-johns-obamacare-gave-you-a-good-deal/ ]. Nobody with political influence is suggesting a return to pre-Reagan tax rates on the wealthy. Fantasies about Obama as a socialist, redistributionist hater of capitalism bear no more resemblance to reality than fantasies about his birthplace or religion.
Second, today’s Republican party is an alliance between the plutocrats and the preachers, plus some opportunists along for the ride — full stop. The whole party is about low taxes at the top (and low benefits for the rest), plus conservative social values and putting religion in the schools; it has no other reason for being. Someday there may emerge another party with the same name standing for a quite different agenda; after all, the Republicans were once defined by opposition to slavery, and the Democrats by rural voters (hence the donkey) and Tammany Hall. But that will take a long time, and it won’t really be the same party.
Finally, it’s true that there are some Republican intellectuals and pundits who seem to be truly open-minded about both economic and social issues. But I worded that carefully: they “seem to be” open-minded; indeed, they’re professional seemers. When it matters, they can always be counted on — after making a big show of stroking their chins and agonizing — to follow the party line, and reject anything that doesn’t go along with the preacher-plutocrat agenda. If they don’t deliver when it counts, they are excommunicated; see Frum, David.
Anyone who imagines that there is any real soul-searching going on is deluding himself or herself.
© 2012 The New York Times Company (emphasis in original)
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/the-new-republicans/ [with comments]
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Commentary Editor John Podhoretz Has Awkward Postelection Epiphany
The election situation has developed, not necessarily to the GOP's advantage.
By Jonathan Chait
November 21, 2012 at 12:24 PM
The first few weeks after a losing presidential election are an awkward period for the most devoted ideological polemicist. Months of optimistic spin about your candidate must be cast aside for an entirely different sort of spin — where before the candidate was a budding juggernaut boldly carrying the party banner onward to victory, now we can see in hindsight that he was a hapless loser unable to articulate our side’s clearly winning vision. Transitioning from one line to another can often take months of careful tip-toeing. Commentary editor John Podhoretz offers up a magisterial postelection essay, “The Way Forward [ http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-way-forward/ ],” that instead simply takes the full plunge all at once.
The postelection Podhoretz argues that Obama’s win was “an astonishing technical accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one.” He owes it all to the brilliance of his campaign strategists — “a peerless political instrument, a virtual machine.” Obama’s assault on Romney business career may have “been the smartest and most effective political campaign of our lifetime.”
This may be a jarring message for Podhoretz’s devoted readers, whom Podhoretz spent months assuring that Obama was flailing about and headed for near-certain defeat. Obama was politically incompetent [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/team_uphill_battle_czkRYqnh3GWSQ46meGa5JP ] (“what we’ve seen so far is a reminder that the skills required to mount an insurgent campaign with a charismatic unknown aren’t those needed to mount a re-election effort featuring an incumbent with a problematic record"). On top of this he was weighed [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/get_mad_now_mitt_wunzaaqOO7EZz5i7txHcaM ] down [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/mission_failure_RWmXR6mSpwl3SCy0AEVeHJ ] by a terrible economy. Romney was in much better condition [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/romney_on_the_rise_8eNu33gii9jjQzDQ5s65AJ ] than the polls showed, Obama in deep [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/mission_failure_RWmXR6mSpwl3SCy0AEVeHJ ], deep [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_president_has_no_clothes_B64lVEr3QTTgN2TaHRMlfN/1 ] trouble. “Without a stark turnaround in his fortunes,” observed [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/bad_omens_for_bam_FtCfOA8c2FgBja5BPuQghK ] Podhoretz, he might lose [North Carolina] by 10 points this November.”
Romney was the candidate running a brilliant campaign [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/romney_closing_case_nkvwoHXVrF9y1DbGvznMIK ]. To the preelection Podhoretz, it was obvious that the ads attacking Romney’s biography would fail [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/what_is_case_G2XmxRTEFv1ieifcFmAs3O ]. (“Obama team must know that they can’t prevail solely with a negative assault on Mitt Romney.”) Obama’s campaign was in the midst of a “smoke screen of self-delusion [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/smoke_screen_of_self_delusion_PvTx6vXdY3qTy41OHRggTJ ],” pathetically unaware [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/democrats_delusions_Oa80ol18vgFWSbx3xn1oOP ] of their own coming demise:
Because they don’t only sell the snake oil, they drink it themselves. They buy their own propaganda; they believe the hype.
The astonishing turnabout in the evaluation of Obama’s campaign, from delusional nincompoops to the most terrifyingly efficient campaign apparatus in history, helps Podhoretz reach his desired conclusion, that Obama’s victory owed nothing at all to his policy platform. Obama’s campaign, he tells us now, was “bereft of ideas” and offered “no second-term governing agenda whatsoever.”
The preelection Podhoretz believed [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/mitt_nit_picks_I3jLFPtNn06qyQf7SEsRHJ ] that Romney was offering just the right level of detail to the voters:
... the “Romney isn’t being substantive enough” crowd is wrong if its members think the strategy of staying relatively vague is a losing one. Successful politicians have to allow less ideological voters some room to project their own best hope for the future onto the person they’re thinking of voting for.
The postelection Podhoretz now sees that Romney’s singular error was his failure to offer enough specifics:
The contentlessness of the Romney campaign was a vacuity of the center-right …Thus did the flight from content create a fatal problem for Romney. He may have thought his lack of specificity would lend him more appeal, but in the end, it made him less appealing because he offered nothing but words.
The preelection Podhoretz was perfectly willing to credit any potential Obama victory, however unlikely, to his policy agenda:
if he loses on Nov. 6, he will lose for the same reason he would have won — because of his very real, very substantial, and very consequential achievements.
The postelection Podhoretz asserts that Obama’s win was “an astonishing technical accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one.” In no way whatsoever. Onward to victory in 2016, comrades!
Copyright © 2012, New York Media LLC (emphasis in original)
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/podhoretz-has-awkward-postelection-epiphany.html?test=true [with comments]
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How the 2012 election polling really was skewed – for Mitt Romney
Democratic political strategist Stan Greenberg: Democracy Corps, the polling organization founded by him and James Carville, was one of the few to predict accurately the size of Obama's 2012 win.
Photograph: Jay Westcott/Rapport
Many in the GOP were sure polls were biased against their guy. In fact, they undershot Obama's win by an embarrassing margin
Harry J Enten
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 November 2012 15.18 EST
There is a fear that runs through any good prognosticator's bones when dealing with a seemingly close election. Polls are not perfect. They are instruments to judge public opinion, and they can be wrong.
2012 also had the added feature of Republican confidence. You didn't have to look very far to hear the word "skewed [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/331192/nate-silver-s-flawed-model-josh-jordan ]" in response to polling data. The polls had too many Democrats, or so the claim went. Republicans were also banking on national polls [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/11/mitt-romney-leads-national-polls ] that were kinder to Romney than state surveys.
The national polls, as it turned out, were not systematically biased against Republican Mitt Romney. The final surveys pointed [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/07/how-pollsters-won-2012-election-mostly ] to President Obama's re-election, and they were right. That does not mean, however, that the polls weren't biased. It won't be until all the ballots are counted that we can access who the most accurate pollster was on the state level, but we do know that Mason-Dixon and Rasmussen were off the mark. Right now, we can only make statements about national polling.
We know that the national surveys [ http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2012-general-election-romney-vs-obama ] tilted heavily against Obama. When we don't count any one survey date twice (that is, tracking polls such as from Gallup only have each day counted once), we can say that the average of national polls taken after the first debate through election day had Obama winning by 0.3 percentage points. President Obama currently [ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AjYj9mXElO_QdHpla01oWE1jOFZRbnhJZkZpVFNKeVE&f=true&noheader=false&gid=19 ] has a 3.2pt lead nationally and it seems like he may finish with an edge above 3.5pt.
Let's say you don't want to count Gallup and Rasmussen [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/25/gallup-rasmussen-polling-outliers-lean-republican ] because you judge that they were biased. The average of non-Gallup and non-Rasmussen surveys after the first debate had Obama leading by 0.7pt: that's still going to be an error of at least 2.5pt and perhaps nearly 3pt.
You might think it's unfair to count polls taken so far back from election day (although most scoring techniques [ http://www.openleft.com/diary/19686/the-worlds-greatest-election-forecast-in-the-world ] utilize a similar method to the one employed here). Even if you only count the surveys done over the final week of the campaign, Obama's lead is 1.3pt; that'll be an error of around 2pt. Eliminating Gallup and Rasmussen put the final average up at 1.5pt, yet, that is also going to be perhaps up to 2pt biased against Obama.
Some math indicates that internet polls [ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/ ] were more accurate than other surveys. That's true to an extent, yet internet polls were biased, as well. Over the final month, an average of internet polls gave Obama a 1.6pt lead, to give an overall bias of at least 1.5pt, and perhaps near 2pt. For example, an average of all Google polls, post-first debate, gave Obama a 1.4pt advantage.
Unlike the overall aggregate, internet polls were not too much more accurate in the final week than in the month before the election. They had Obama ahead by only 1.8pt. Counting each pollster only once (as Google had many one-day surveys in the final week), Obama is ahead by a slightly larger 2.2pt – at least a percentage point off the final margin.
What about the pollsters who did everything right, according to polling gold standards? Those who conducted surveys over the phone with people doing the interviewing and including cellphone calling? The average of those polls after the first debate had Obama ahead by an average by just 0.1pt. Eliminating Gallup puts the average at a slightly higher 0.5pt – in other words, way off the mark.
These live-interview cellphone calling pollsters were slightly better in the final week. They pegged Obama's lead at 1.2pt – still at least 2pt too low. Without Gallup, Obama's edge climbs to 1.5pt, which is not a whole lot better.
It's fairly clear that no matter what method is utilized, the national polls were too favorable towards Romney. Only eight out of 113 polls (or 7.1%) during the final month had Obama's lead at above 3pt. Three of the eight were from the Rand Corporation, two were from Google, and the rest were scattered between Democracy Corps, IBD/TIPP, and the United Technologies/National Journal survey.
During the final week, only three out of 30 polls (or 10%) conducted had Obama's lead above 3pt. They belonged to Democracy Corps, Google, and Rand. If Obama's lead climbs to 3.5pt, then, even with rounding, the vast majority of national polls were off in the final week. (Note: usually one would consider a poll giving Obama's victory margin as 3pt to be right if the final result were between 2.50 and 3.49pt.)
Only two pollsters with at least two surveys post-first debate out of about 30 (less than 10%) had Obama's average lead at 3.5pt or above. Again, it was Democracy Corps (Obama +3.5) and Rand (Obama +4.0).
The fact that it's these two pollsters that may come closest to the final result is interesting to say the least. Democracy Corps is a fine polling organization, though some might assume bias in an outfit founded by Democratic operatives James Carville and Stan Greenberg [ http://www.democracycorps.com/about-us/ ]. Rand was a panel-back survey (that is, using the same respondents over and over again), which weighted respondents [ http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR961.html ] according to how sure they were to vote and for whom. That is, a respondent might say they were only 60% likely to vote and 60% likely to vote for a particular candidate. There were doubts whether Rand's methodology was sound, but it clearly worked this year.
Overall, it's fairly clear that the national polls missed the mark, big time. Depending on the final count, it seems possible that less than 10% of surveys came close to correctly projecting Obama's edge. Few will talk about the national miss because Obama won. But just imagine that the same magnitude of error had resulted in almost all the polls showing a narrow Romney lead going into election day, but Obama had won by just 1pt. Then we'd be having a conversation.
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/21/2012-election-polling-skewed-for-mitt-romney [with comments]
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Obama Campaign Polls: How The Internal Data Got It Right
President Barack Obama, with his daughter Malia, waves toward the crowd at his reelection night party on Nov. 7, 2012, in Chicago.
11/21/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/21/obama-campaign-polls-2012_n_2171242.html [with comments]
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Where Obama and Romney Beat Their Polls
November 21, 2012
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/21/where-obama-and-romney-beat-their-polls/ [with comments]
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The New Republican Tax Policy
By BRUCE BARTLETT
November 20, 2012, 6:00 am
Bruce Bartlett [ http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/economy/bruce-bartlett-bio.html ] held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take [ http://books.simonandschuster.com/Benefit-and-The-Burden/Bruce-Bartlett/9781451646191 ].”
Although it is commonly believed that the Laffer curve [ http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/laffercurve.asp ] – the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves – is the core Republican idea about tax policy, this is wrong. The true core idea is something called starve-the-beast – the idea that tax cuts will force cuts in spending precisely because they reduce revenue. But there are slight indications that some conservatives have awakened to the reality that not only does starve-the-beast not work, but it also leads to higher spending.
The notion came into being in the 1970s to allow conservative Republican economists to reconcile their support for a balanced budget with their party’s intense desire to cut taxes without worrying about the deficit. Proposition 13 in California had proven unmistakably that voters didn’t much care whether spending was cut; they just wanted lower taxes.
I have traced the origins of Republican starve-the-beast theory to testimony by Alan Greenspan before the Senate Finance Committee on July 14, 1978 – just weeks after the passage of Proposition 13 on June 6. In explaining why he supported the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which proposed an across-the-board tax rate reduction of 30 percent, while also supporting deficit reduction, Mr. Greenspan said:
Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today’s environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenues available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending.
Among those who totally bought into this theory was Ronald Reagan. When criticized for proposing a tax cut in 1981 even though the deficit was high and rising, he replied in a national television address on Feb. 5, 1981 [ http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43132&st=&st1= ]:
Over the past decades we’ve talked of curtailing government spending so that we can then lower the tax burden. Sometimes we’ve even taken a run at doing that. But there were always those who told us that taxes couldn’t be cut until spending was reduced. Well, you know, we can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath. Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance.
In 2001, George W. Bush justified his tax cut on starve-the-beast grounds, saying it would constitute a “fiscal straitjacket for Congress [ http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64316&st=&st1= ].” According to the journalist Ron Suskind’s book, “The Price of Loyalty [ http://books.simonandschuster.com/Price-of-Loyalty/Ron-Suskind/9780743255462 ],” the Bush adviser Karl Rove often invoked the starve-the-beast approach as “conservative economic theology” in White House meetings. By 2003, using deficits strategically to slash the size of government was widely considered to be party doctrine [ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/11/us/washington-talk-conservatives-now-see-deficits-as-a-tool-to-fight-spending.html ] among Republicans.
During the Obama administration, the principal enforcer of that doctrine among Republicans is the anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. He continually argues against tax increases because they feed the beast and lead to higher spending. As he put it in an Op-Ed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/opinion/22Norquist.html ] page column last year in The New York Times, “Raising taxes is what politicians do instead of reforming and reducing the cost of government.”
The problem for Republicans, as is so often the case, is that the real-world impact of their theories doesn’t measure up to their theories. There was no reduction in spending as a share of the gross domestic product despite a sharp fall in revenue as a share of G.D.P. during the Reagan years. By the time Reagan left office the spending/G.D.P. ratio was about the same as it was in Jimmy Carter’s last year: 21.7 percent in 1980 vs. 21.3 percent in 1988.
During the George W. Bush administration, spending increased sharply even as revenue collapsed. Revenue as a share of G.D.P. fell to 17.5 percent in 2008 from 20.6 percent in 2000, yet spending rose to 20.1 percent in 2006, before the economic crisis hit, and 20.7 percent in 2008, from 18.2 percent of G.D.P.
In short, we have tested starve-the-beast theory in the laboratory, and it has failed miserably. At least a few conservatives have had the courage to acknowledge that lowering the tax cost of spending may be a culprit. After all, the main reason to oppose higher spending is that it will lead to higher taxes. But if people can have tax cuts and higher spending at the same time, why should they not have their cake and eat it too?
In 2007, Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review made this perceptive observation [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/150376/peter-robinsons-questions/ramesh-ponnuru ] about starve-the-beast theory:
The theory made sense so long as the maximum politically acceptable deficit was an independent variable. But if in fact the effort to cut taxes increased the political system’s tolerance for deficits, then spending could go up. And it’s easy to see how cutting taxes could make deficits more acceptable. As for practice: The last decade has not been kind to the idea that cutting taxes would restrain spending.
The late economist William Niskanen [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/business/william-a-niskanen-a-blunt-libertarian-economist-dies-at-78.html ] of the Cato Institute was another pioneer on the right in recognizing the perversity of starve-the-beast theory [ http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v26n2/cpr-26n2-2.pdf ]. His work has been revived by The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson in a new article [ http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/gorging-beast_663547.html ] for the conservative magazine. This is significant because The Standard often sets the agenda for Republicans. This article may signal a change in thinking about whether tax increases may be a better way of starving the beast than tax cuts.
At the risk of reading the tea leaves too closely, I think Mr. Ferguson’s article needs to be read in conjunction with comments made by The Standard’s editor William Kristol on “Fox News Sunday” [ http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/fox-news-sunday-chris-wallace/2012/11/11/sen-feinstein-talks-petraeus-scandal-benghazi-investigation-key-lawmakers-fiscal-cliff#p//v/1962178274001 ] on Nov. 11. Said Mr. Kristol: “You know what? It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires. It really won’t, I don’t think.”
Mr. Kristol is not a fool and can read the polls as easily as I can; he knows Republicans are holding a losing hand on taxes. A Nov. 14 Gallup poll [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/158828/balanced-approach-cutting-deficit.aspx ] shows the percentage of Americans favoring a spending-cuts-only approach to the deficit has fallen in half, to 10 percent from 20 percent last year; the percentage willing to accept higher taxes to reduce the deficit has risen to 86 percent from 73 percent.
Taxes are going to rise; that is no longer in doubt. The question for Republicans is what can they get in return. Starve-the-beast is dead.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/the-new-republican-tax-policy/ [with comments -- the first, apt comment to Bartlett's pained parsing of patent bullshit either way currently showing:
Swatter
Washington DC
Looking at the time series (bea.gov) for federal expenditure and receipts from 1969-2012 Q2, Reagan is the spending and deficit king when comparing the total expenditure and debt of each president's first term with the last of his predecessor's. Carter and Clinton actually had lower deficits during their presidencies than their republican predecessors, the only 2 presidents to do so. W's spending increase was in line with others but his tax receipts increase was much smaller than previous presidents'. Obama's spending increase is coming in as the least increase of any president over his predecessor since 1969, yet his deficits are topped only by Reagan's because of, the real story: the drop in receipts, the first time receipts over a whole term have actually decreased since 1969; the only jump in expenditure (2009 Q2) was from a jump in transfers to individuals and states, and a jump in interest payments.
So that's the reality that the numbers tell.
As for starving the beast, it has been used to gut programs that conservatives don't like while they spend as they wish on what they like, and then use the resulting deficits (surprise!) to call for more cuts to the things they don't like.
Nov. 22, 2012 at 2:34 p.m.]
===
Econ Crisis 12 - Deficits & the Debt
Published on Nov 18, 2012 by leearnold
VOICE NARRATOR: The United States is at a decision point that will affect everyone. To understand the issues, start with Federal spending as a percentage of GDP from 1970 to 2087 -- 75 years from now. Here is 2012. So this part actually happened, and this is what is projected by the Congressional Budget Office.
Now look at Federal tax revenue: income taxes and payroll taxes and everything else. The difference between taxes and spending gives us deficits (in pink) or surpluses (in yellow). Spending more than taxes makes pink deficits, and spending less than taxes makes yellow surpluses.
This adds or subtracts from another graph: the total debt, held by the public as Treasury bills and bonds, which goes to back to zero around 2070. So the bottom graph, on spending and taxes, changes the top graph on total debt.
Notice that we are not changing the percentages on the left side. We are just squashing the pictures.
Here is President Obama's first term. There were spikes in spending and in debt. What caused this?
Well, it is not Social Security. That flattens out for the next 75 years. It will be easy to manage. Please do not believe the silly propaganda that we cannot afford it.
On the other hand, Medicare and Medicaid grow continuously. But there is no bulge, at this point. So they didn't do it, either. Let's make them into the top layers.
Here is Defense. The bump starts with spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here is all the other spending, including Defense. We blend-in Defense.
There is the rest of the spike. It is stimulus spending to fight the recession, plus some of the bank bailouts.
But if we look at the bump in total debt, the wars and stimulus are little slices. So what else is there?
Well, did you notice the dip in tax revenue? There are two causes: the economic downturn means people work less, so they pay less in taxes. And there are the Bush tax cuts, which are supposed to end. Without these two, the deficits would be small.
They complete the causes of the bump in debt. Otherwise, the debt would go downhill.
So this was predetermined, no matter who was elected. It's like "pre-existing conditions". What is important is that this is a short-term problem (if we can call 20 years the short-term). And it solves itself, because the reasons are supposed to end.
But after that, we see long-term growth in spending, due to something different: the long-term rise in medical costs, from the inefficient healthcare system, plus the aging population. So there are two stories: the short-term, and the long-term.
Well the short-term solves itself. The way to deal with the long-term (for now) is a piecemeal approach, little by little. Number one: raise taxes to cover our needs. But do it slowly, while we work on number two: fix the healthcare system to get everyone's medical costs down, because the private costs affect the public costs.
In fact, there is serious doubt about the healthcare projections. An alternative CBO scenario makes them higher, due to the Medicare doctor fix, and other things. But they may also be lower, because Obamacare has efficiencies that are difficult to calculate in the official projections. Plus, every other country already spends only half as much as the U.S. So we may be able to bend down taxes, as well. No one really knows. We just have to work on it, and see what happens.
Even as it stands now, do not be fooled: officially, there is no crisis. Let's repeat that: there is no crisis. "Crisis-talk" is politics. By the laws in effect, as of December 2012, taxes will rise to cover spending. No one would enjoy that, but taxes still stay lower than most modern countries for many decades more. There are surpluses, so the debt will be paid down.
But some Washington politicians are using the short-term build-up of debt, to scare us about the long-term. What they really want is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and to level the revenues, first. Of course, this makes the debt explode. Their answer is to cut the safety-net and entitlements, including Social Security.
There is no reason to cut entitlements. It puts people in danger. And it puts the cart before the horse. A better solution is to work on it little by little. First, take care of the short term: as we exit the economic slump, raise revenue slowly, and begin now by returning to the Clinton tax rates, on the wealthiest incomes. This is unlikely to hurt economic growth. Second, work on efficiency in the healthcare system, to reduce our long-term revenue needs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd4HDautaUw
===
A Public Service Reminder: Paul Ryan is a Con Man
by Paul Krugman
November 19, 2012, 6:48 pm
So now that the Unperson/Ryan ticket has lost, Republicans are clearly expecting [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/us/politics/paul-ryan-emerges-as-power-broker-in-fiscal-talks.html?pagewanted=all ] Paul Ryan to move right back into his previous role as Washington’s favorite Serious, Honest Conservative.
He might get away with it; but I hope not.
The fact is that Ryan is and always was a fraud. His plan never added up [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/whats-in-the-ryan-plan/ ]; it was never, contrary to what people who should know better asserted, “scored” by the CBO. What he actually offered was a plan to hurt the poor and reward the rich, actually increasing the deficit along the way, plus magic asterisks that supposedly reduced the debt by means unspecified.
His genius, if you can all it that, was in realizing that there was a role — as I said, that of Honest, Serious Conservative — that self-proclaimed centrists desperately wanted to see filled, so that they could demonstrate their bipartisanship by lavishing praise on the holder of that position. So Ryan did his best to impersonate a budget wonk. It wasn’t a very good impersonation — in fact, he’s pretty bad at budget math. But the “centrists” saw what they wanted to see.
Ryan can’t be ignored, since his party does retain blocking power, and he chairs an important committee. But if he must be dealt with, it should be with no illusions. Fool me once …
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/a-public-service-reminder-paul-ryan-is-a-con-man/ [with comments]
===
The New York Times Reporters Do Not Understand How Marginal Tax Rates Work
11/20/2012
For whatever reason, an article titled "Investors Rush to Beat Threat of Higher Taxes [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/business/investors-rush-to-beat-threat-of-higher-taxes.html?pagewanted=all ]" was published by The New York Times despite the fact that it contains a galling bit of stupidity, which could spread like a supervirus to the general public.
It is these three paragraphs in particular:
"Kristina Collins, a chiropractor in McLean, Va., said she and her husband planned to closely monitor the business income from their joint practice to avoid crossing the income threshold for higher taxes outlined by President Obama on earnings above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples.
Ms. Collins said she felt torn by being near the cutoff line and disappointed that federal tax policy was providing a disincentive to keep expanding a business she founded in 1998.
“If we’re really close and it’s near the end-year, maybe we’ll just close down for a while and go on vacation,” she said."
This is a stupidity as persistent as it is avoidable. Ms. Collins, chiropractor from Virginia, is among the many people of affluence who have somehow survived without understanding how marginal tax rates work. ...
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/20/new-york-times-tax-rates_n_2166967.html [with comments]
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Fox Business on food stamps
Published on Nov 21, 2012 by ThinkProgress TP
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/11/21/1228731/fox-pundit-jokes-food-stamps-could-be-a-diet-plan/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVag_ngxHZs
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Mitt Romney loses election, but still goes to Disneyland
November 21, 2012
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/11/mitt-romney-disneyland.html [with comments]
===
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