Replies to post #148836 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

YOWZAH! .. label .. the deficit library with oddles of good deficit
diagrams .. don't think we have one of those yet, so just to link to ..

F6 libraries .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=62056458

and to the others that one is in reply to .

[PegnVA]

The fed deficit and balancing the nat'l budget are TWO distinct issues and they NEVER should have been incorporated into one discussion - I fault the admin for this as it gave House teabaggers the opening they wanted to gut gov't programs most Americans use at least one of and, like children, if House teabaggers do not get what they want they have a tantrum and hold their breath.
House Speaker John Boehner looks pathetic...not only did the House plan he announced Monday evening on nat'l TV blow up in his face the next day when the CBO judged the savings Boehner claimed were NOT as advertised, but Boehner also no longer controls what happens in the House.

[F6]

GOP's Tea Party wing bungles Ronald Reagan legacy, dashes hopes for end to debt crisis


Tea Party members convene at a rally at the Texas state capitol in January.
Ben Sklar/Getty


Former President Ronald Reagan
Scott Stewart/AP

BY Matthew Dallek
Wednesday, July 27th 2011, 4:00 AM

One quip now making the rounds is that the Republican Party has moved so far right that even Ronald Reagan couldn't win his party's presidential nomination. That claim is not without merit. The debt ceiling deadlock has made it especially clear: Reagan's actions as President might not have have passed the smell test in today's Tea Party-driven Republican Party.

After all, Reagan signed tax hikes when he was both California governor and President of the United States. He agreed to bipartisan legislation in 1983 that actually strengthened Social Security, one of the pillars of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1986, Reagan agreed to a deal that reformed the tax code, raised the capital gains tax rate and closed tax shelters - in contrast to today's Republican leaders, who refuse to consider any revenue increases in the debt negotiations.

Reagan evinced a pragmatic streak as a sitting governor and President. Yet "pragmatism" is a dirty word in the ranks of today's Tea Party activists.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) reportedly had an offer from President Obama that would have included a tax reform package generating some new revenues along with significant cuts in government spending. While Reagan, as President, signed a somewhat similar deal, Boehner, as speaker, has balked - under pressure from his right flank.

But differences aren't the only part of this story. Reagan isn't completely estranged from Tea Party Republicans; in fact, the former President and his successors have more in common with one another than we often acknowledge. Republicans of 2011 have absorbed arguably the most destructive features of Reagan's political legacy. They have taken up his blind allegiance to cutting government spending, sounded his anti-government rhetoric and followed in his deficit-making steps.

Remember, Reagan's policies led to a near-tripling of the national debt during his two terms as President. His administration, according to historian Sean Wilentz, "never submitted a balanced budget" to Congress.

Republicans now - despite repeated attempts to blame Obama for today's deficits - are as responsible for current deficit woes as any other politicians; just as Reagan produced deficits in the 1980s, his heirs have contributed mightily to the 2011 red ink. Take one well-known example: Many of Boehner's rank and file voted in support of President George W. Bush's spending initiatives without identifying ways to pay for these programs. From cutting taxes for the wealthy and adding a Medicare prescription drug benefit to supporting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Reagan's GOP heirs in the past decade helped turn Clinton-era surpluses into Bush-and-Obama-era deficits.

Reagan famously joked, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' " Tea Party activists, often lacking Reagan's sense of humor, brashly attack America's "gangster" government (Michele Bachmann's adjective). Such rhetoric has helped shift the nation's culture to a place where it's hard for almost any major national politician to voice a full-throated defense of federal action as a positive force.

The parallels don't end there. Neither Reagan's presidency nor the Republican-run House of Representatives in 2011 have governed with charity in mind toward those at the bottom of America's economic ladder. Reagan's first budget, for example, cut food stamps, school lunches and student loans. House Republicans in more recent times have endorsed cuts to almost all major government programs, including Medicaid and Medicare - which would disproportionately affect access to health care among the nation's poor and elderly.

And so, the breakdown of the debt talks must be seen both as a Republican rebuke to Reagan and as his revenge: His successors have shown little of his flexibility, but they've been busy channeling his anti-government anger and hard-line ideology. Reagan is still a force to be reckoned with.

Matthew Dallek, an associate academic director at the University of California Washington Center, is the author of "The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics."

© Copyright 2011 NYDailyNews.com

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2011/07/27/2011-07-27_breakdown_of_debt_talks_can_be_seen_as_republican_rebuke_to_ronald_reagan.html [with comments]


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By Any Means Possible: Republican Threats and the Debt Ceiling

Geoffrey R. Stone
Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago
Posted: 7/27/11 12:53 AM ET

A threat is an expression of intention to inflict harm on others unless the target of the threat agrees to do what the person making the threat demands. A threat uses coercion rather than persuasion to effect change. As a general rule, democratic governments do not negotiate with those who threaten their people with harm. The reason is simple: Democracies should not make public policy in response to threats, and those who threaten should not be rewarded for threatening harm to the nation.

This is the dilemma facing President Obama in the current debt ceiling crisis. The debt ceiling has never before been used as a leverage point for partisan political demands. As Mr. Obama observed in his address to the nation on July 25, presidents from Eisenhower to Bush II have regularly raised the debt ceiling without controversy and without facing anything like the current Republican intransigence.

But what makes that intransigence an immoral "threat" rather than an ordinary political disagreement? The answer is that the current controversy really has nothing to do with the debt ceiling. Rather, Republicans who do not have the votes to enact their preferred policies into law are threatening to throw the nation into economic chaos by refusing to increase the debt ceiling unless the President accedes to their demands. By threatening to wreak havoc with the national interest, they are attempting to coerce rather than persuade the nation into doing what they want.

The key point is that this controversy is not about the debt ceiling itself. All the issues about deficits and spending and taxes can be hashed out entirely apart from the debt ceiling issue. But the Republicans are exploiting the need to increase the debt limit in order to hold the nation itself hostage to their demands. It would be no different if the Republicans threatened not to raise the debt limit unless the President agreed to nominate Grover Norquist to the Supreme Court or to repeal of the Civil Rights Act or invade Pakistan or pull out of the United Nations. This is not democratic governance. This is not even political obstructionism. It is blackmail, plain and simple, where the threatened victim is the nation itself.

Of course, the President could temporarily avert disaster by giving in to those who are threatening to bring about chaos. But if he does so, he will invite similarly destructive conduct in the future. As the President warned in his speech to the nation, if he gives in to the Republican demands now, "in six months they'll do this again."

The Republicans have every right to try to get their preferred policies enacted into law and they have every right to refuse to raise the debt ceiling (though that would be calamitously stupid). But what they cannot morally do is to attempt to get their preferred policies enacted into law by threatening not to raise the debt ceiling. It is the connection between the two that makes their strategy immoral.

In this sense, their conduct is very much like blackmail. Suppose X says to Y, "If you don't give me $1,000 I will tell your boss that you voted for Obama." X has every right to tell the boss, but it is unlawful for him to threaten to tell the boss in order to coerce Y to give him the $1,000. That is what the Republicans are doing here.

By threatening to destroy the economy if they don't get their way, those Republicans who are pursuing this course may be honoring their pledge not to raise taxes, but they are also dishonoring the very spirit of their oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post used the word "terrorism" as metaphor, contrary to our policy of avoiding such characterizations. The author has therefore revised the post to read as it does now.

Copyright © 2011 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/by-any-means-possible_b_910493.html [with comments]


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[F6]

The Meltdown’s True Villain


Former President George W. Bush looks on from his seats prior to the Texas Rangers playing against the San Francisco Giants in Game Three of the 2010 MLB World Series at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington on October 30, 2010 in Arlington, Texas.
Ronald Martinez / Getty Images

With a double-dip recession looming and attacks on Obama mounting, it’s amazing the GOP is still setting the U.S. agenda when its own George W. Bush ran up half the debt we’ve accumulated since Reagan.

Michael Tomasky
Aug 5, 2011 8:52 PM EDT

As we thunder toward a double-dip recession on a possible worldwide scale, let’s step back and remember how all this happened. I’ve been pretty hard on Barack Obama [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/31/obama-s-capitulation-on-the-debt-ceiling-marks-a-new-conservative-era.html ] lately (and will be again on Monday, as you’ll see). But Obama is not the villain in this story. Every time I step back and ponder this sordid history, I am amazed that the Republican Party has any credibility and even 100 members of Congress, let alone a sizable House majority and enough juice to be driving the nation’s agenda as it is.

The Boston Globe ran a chart [ http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2011/07/31/the_debt_crisis/ ]

last Sunday that I’d buy billboard space to reproduce in every decent-size city in America, if I were running the Democratic National Committee. The premise of it was very simple: It showed how many trillions each president since Ronald Reagan has added to the nation’s debt. The debt was about $1 trillion when Reagan took office, and then: Reagan, $1.9 trillion; George H.W. Bush, $1.5 trillion (in just four years); Bill Clinton, $1.4 trillion; Obama, $2.4 trillion.

Oh, wait. I skipped someone. George W. Bush ran up $6.4 trillion. That’s nearly half—44.7 percent—of the $14.3 trillion total. We all know what did it—two massive tax cuts geared toward the rich (along with other similar measures, like slashing the capital gains and inheritance taxes), the off-the-books wars, the unfunded Medicare expansion, and so on. But the number is staggering and worth dwelling on. In a history covering 30 years, nearly half the debt was run up in eight. Even the allegedly socialist Obama at his most allegedly wanton doesn’t compare to Dubya; and Obama’s debt numbers, if he’s reelected, will surely not double or even come close as we gambol down Austerity Lane.

In percentage terms, the case is even more open and shut. This table tells the sad tale. The percentages in question here are debt as a chunk of the GDP. It was more than 100 percent after World War II ended, for defensible and obvious reasons having to do with financing the war effort (the government buying all those tanks and planes from GM, and everything else). But after it went back down, it had tended to hover in the 40 to 50 percent range during good times. Well, Reagan raised it 20 points, to 53 percent from 33 percent. Bush Sr. a gaudy 13 points more. Clinton lowered it by 10 points, back down to 56 percent. Bush Jr.? Up 28 points, to 82 percent of GDP. Obama has raised it nine points. Once again: In a 30-year increase from 32 percent to 93 percent of 61 points, nearly half, 28 points or 46 percent, happened under Bush.

When I haven’t had to leave the room to avoid smashing the television, I can only laugh when I hear Tea Party conservatives avow today, with all the credibility of Larry Craig explaining his wide-stance technique, that they have no love for Bush. Nonsense. What did they have for him in real time? Were there protest marches, mass donnings of tricorn hats, nullification threats from states regarding federal legislation? Of course not. In real time, there was a little polite caviling, but in the end they voted for all this debt. After all, Bush was defending freedom.

It is truly an incredible record when you stack it up. First, the party fought tooth and nail against every single move Clinton made that ended up putting us in surplus. Then it got power—and let’s not get into how that happened—and ran up completely unprecedented debts and deficits. Then it put the foxes in command of the henhouses at the SEC and OTC and brought the world to the very brink of total economic collapse. (The economic “growth” rate in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to recently revised Commerce Department figures [ http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/08/fiscal-policy ], was negative 8.9 percent; even during the Depression rates were typically higher [ http://www.marketobservation.com/blogs/index.php/2011/02/17/title-282?blog=10 ].) Then a guy from the other party got back in, tried to do what the vast majority of economists would say should be done in such a situation (the government should spend money while the private sector couldn’t), and they fought him tooth and nail. And now they’ve forced him into a deal (which he should not have agreed to) that will help ensure that the economy remains stuck in neutral until, oh, November 2012, to pick a date out of the air. Next, that guy will identify tax cuts to spur job growth, and they will invent reasons to oppose these measures, just as they once invented reasons why “deficits don’t matter [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/11/republicans-false-narrative-as-the-party-wanting-to-balance-america-s-books.html ]."

A football coach with a similar record would be selling cars. A movie director with one would be lucky to be making instructional videos. A bank president would likely be in jail. But here we are. It just goes to show what you can accomplish when the richest 1 percent of the country pays you (and pays you, and pays you) to lie, and to believe fairy tales. But it’s hard luck for the rest of us.

© 2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/05/economic-meltdown-villain-george-w-bush-s-staggering-debt-numbers.html [with comments]


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The baffling paranoia of rich guys who resent Obama

The president who preserved a system rigged for the haves now faces their (confused) wrath
Aug 3, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/08/03/langone_rich_dumb/index.html [comments at http://letters.salon.com/politics/war_room/2011/08/03/langone_rich_dumb/view/?show=all ]


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