This is starting to border on self-parody.
Also too: using the phrase “radical centrist” is bad enough…it is really necessary to capitalize it?
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The words do not have to be perfect.
Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.
It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.
The next time the wall wtreet journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.
Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard
Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.
We are aware of all internet traditions.
JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?
Damn right I heard that as a threat.
Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.
Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.
An almost top 10,000 blog!
It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.
Technically true, but collectively nonsense
Infrastructure week. at last.
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
No one could have predicted…
A Senator Walker would be an insult to the state and the nation.
It’s the corruption, stupid.
Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.
A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.
The worst democrat is better than the best republican.
The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.
Usually wrong but never in doubt
You are here: Home / I haven’t got time for the pain
Napoleon
Amazing how it is never the rich that need to suffer the pain.
Judas Escargot
Oh please, please, please Matt Miller. I’ve been such a fat lazy GenXer (what with all those gubbmint perks) and I deserve to suffer for my sins!
Maybe we’ll even let Sully and the rest of the Tories watch.
Omnes Omnibus
I don’t know; does one need to capitalize “douchebag?”
Violet
It’s like WWE. Do we need more pain? YES! BRING THE PAIN! MORE PAIN!
kdaug
@Napoleon:
Here’s why.
Ain’t just W, I’m afraid.
jacy
How long till someone suggests cutting off literal pounds of flesh?
It could also solve the obesity epidemic. Win/win!
El Cid
I’m tired of all these people losing their houses and who can’t find a job living off the fat of the land and not being willing to tighten their belts and their children’s future belts as tight as our wealthy political and pundit and corporate class believe they should be.
Joe Beese
Needs the “OBAMA SOLD US OUT” tag.
After all, the Catfood Commission – the pain of whose recommendations are the subject under discussion – is his own baby. Summoned into being by the sole power of his Executive Order. And staffed with his own choices, handpicked for their records of endorsing cuts to Social Security.
But then reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 26% isn’t going to pay for itself.
licensed to kill time
We are all
Mayansmasochists now.Face
How are they going to defend their “no” votes when this comes to light?
Dont get me wrong — they’ll vote no and come up with some reason, but if all the generals are for it, and the Pentagon report is for it, and SecDef is for it…..just what will they use as an excuse?
Mnemosyne
@Joe Beese:
Actually, it’s not the commission’s recommendations. It’s the personal opinion of the two co-chairs.
But there will someday be a commission report — maybe — and I’m sure it will totally be just as bad as this one — possibly — so, yes, shit yourself in fear now about what that phantom report might possibly look like at some point in the future, assuming it materializes at all!
me
So, what is Matt Miller going to sacrifice for that sake of debt reduction? I bet he’s for shaving a few points off his tax rate and giving them to the needy.
srv
As predicted, Wall St. has found a loophole to the Volcker Rule.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=12121496
This is awesome news for freedom.
Mnemosyne
@Face:
Blah blah homosexuals blahbitty blah military readiness blah.
No, really, that’s what it’s going to be. They don’t need to present any kind of rational reason. Just “TEH GHEY!” is more than enough.
Cris
Reminds me of Madeleine Albright . “We think the price is worth it.”
djheru
What does it mean that I saw “pain” as “palin” in the headline?
“More Palin Needed!”
Masochist?
burnspbesq
Wait – so all of you people agree with Ronald Reagan and Dick Cheney that deficits don’t matter?
aimai
@Mnemosyne:
Look, from the point of view of the actual voters there is no difference between “the commission” and “two asshole commissioners.” None. There isn’t going to be a difference that makes a distinction between whatever proposals this totally lopsided commission comes up with and Simpson’s piece of shit. If it ever comes out the baseline of crazy has already been set in the public mind.
The problem for the Obama Administration has always been managing the perception of how they are handling the deficit–not the deficit itself–and by
1) commissioning the commission
2) staffing it with unreliable right wing jerks who can’t even bring themselves to handle the process of their own commission honestly
3) being out of the country when the shit hits the fan
4) not having any kind of coherent plan B to handle a fake report cleverly.
The entire Peterson group is a massive sucker’s punch to SS and the middle class and always was. The right thing to do was either to work with it and simultaneously undermine it, or to refuse to work with it because its just a millionaries plaything. Obama and his team chose to legitimize it, work with it, and now have allowed it to subvert the Administration and its policies by releasing a fake report prematurely. That’s about the size of it. It was stupid politics and stupid policy for Obama to ever have worked with these people and he gets what you usually get for working with Republicans which is royally fucked. The White House should have immiediatly come out with a broadside attacking Simpson et al for releasing a premature and fake report that all the commissioners hadn’t signed onto.
aimai
the Obama administration has screwed the pooch.
Corner Stone
@kdaug: Still stunning that a President could just out and out say that in front of cameras.
Mnemosyne
@burnspbesq:
No, we’re saying that dealing with the deficit by cutting taxes is idiotic, and that Social Security is doing just fine as it is, thank you.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
So the voters are going to remember this kerfuffle two years from now?
Two years from now, I doubt anyone is even going to remember there was a commission in the first place.
Kryptik
Notice how he never addresses the most appalling thing as far as saying ‘The Solution is Painful’, that being the stupidly drastic tax slashing, especially for the top brackets (below the current median marginal tax rate even). But I forgot, the idea that ‘taxes can never be too low’ is sacrosanct.
burnspbesq
@Mnemosyne:
I think you either misread or misunderstood yesterday’s slide deck if you think that it proposed reducing taxes. I understood it to propose a dramatic broadening of the tax BASE, so that revenue could be increased while rates were reduced. That is not arithmetically impossible, although it may be politically infeasible.
Citizen Alan
@Joe Beese:
My understanding is that the “Obama Sold Us Out” tag is only meant for ironic situations. On those occasions when Obama plainly has sold us out, it is considered unacceptably rude to point it out with a tag or by any other means.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
And I know this one keeps showing up, but really:
Isn’t that kind of like blaming the parents if the kids take the opportunity of their being out of town to throw a raging party? Was Obama supposed to cancel a diplomatic trip to visit one of our most important allies on the off-chance that Bowles and Simpson were going to dump their load independent of the rest of the commission the second he left the country?
kdaug
@Corner Stone:
No, the stunning thing is that he felt comfortable saying that in front of cameras.
In the past, it was always “hush-hush, wink-wink”.
Now it’s just so blatant that there’s no need for the subterfuge. (Not that W was very good at that, anyway).
burnspbesq
The monumentally stupid thing in yesterday’s slide deck was the proposal to cap federal revenue at 21 percent of GDP. To me, that shows that the whole thing is unworthy of being taken seriously. At 21 percent of GDP, there is either no military or no social safety net.
Mnemosyne
@burnspbesq:
It also proposed removing two huge programs that mostly benefit the poor and the middle class: the Earned Income Tax Credit and the mortgage payment deduction.
Eliminating the EITC, especially, would be disastrous for a lot of people. Not only that, but it would effectively be a tax increase on the poorest of the poor.
Building a new tax system on the backs of the poor seems like an extremely poor bargain to me.
FlipYrWhig
@aimai: I can’t fathom your reaction to this. Who cares? Does the world hang on the actions of Erskine Bowles suddenly? Why isn’t the takeaway that the 18-member commission was so divided that not even the commission itself was eager to sign onto the report prepared by the chairs of the commission? I don’t see what screwing has even happened, much less screwing of pooches.
Roger Moore
@Face:
That report was ginned up by the Obama administration to support conclusions he already wanted to reach. If you talked to the real soldiers away from the intimidation of the Kenyan in Chief, you’d discover that they really want to apply biblical punishments to all gays.
Kryptik
@FlipYrWhig:
It’s the preemption of anything the commission would actually write off on as well as priming the well for ratfucking everyone except the absolute top brackets, and passing that off as ‘realistic deficit measures’.
You’ve seen all the knobslobbering over the proposals made by the media already, and how oh-so ‘realistic’ and ‘grown up’ they are. No one’s going to remember what the commission said, since Bowles and Simpson have already made the first impression, and anything less is gonna be made out to be some commie sosulizt typical liberal tax-and-spend sellout of teh ‘Merican peeplez.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: Is it true that the commission chairs proposed a public option? I read that somewhere but I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a joke.
Laura W.
Hey!
I was just about to send you a new “integrate this lyric into a title” challenge. Ready?
I survive for the breath
you are finished with.
Man. Can that dude woo the babes with the words or what?
Congrats on finally buying you know who her you know what in the store. And the mug you chose for yourself is perfect, needless to say!
;-)
burnspbesq
@Mnemosyne:
EITC was never anything but a band-aid. I’d rather have a realistic zero bracket for W-2 and Schedule C income. Where do you want it? $35K?
The point is that if you’re serious about doing fundamental reform, then let’s really do fundamental reform. Don’t wage class war, on behalf of any class, and call it fundamental reform. That dog won’t hunt.
Martin
@burnspbesq: 21 percent of GDP is a pretty solid number.
GDP is $14T. That caps taxes receipts at just shy of $3T, or $900B more than they brought in this year. Without TARP and stimulus and the other temporary crap, we’d have a surplus, even with the wars. We’ve never had revenues at 21% of GDP before. We were just over 20% in 2000, and hovered around 20% in the 50s.
21% is a good cap. Dems should be quite happy with that number.
FlipYrWhig
@Kryptik: I think at most it’ll be something that insider politicos bring up, like, “The deficit commission recommended…” or “Do you agree with the deficit commission’s contention that…” We got that once before: “Will you implement all the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission?” Etc. But the commission hasn’t even produced a report, and commissions’ reports don’t become law or policy easily. It seems like a lot of fuss over the kind of Blue Ribbon Panel that most of us are accustomed to scoffing at, and would at any other time, except for the people who are eager to sniff out backstabbings in progress.
Mnemosyne
@burnspbesq:
Current EITC top rate is $43,352 if you have three or more children, so already you’re proposing making poor people pay more in taxes.
Lowest bracket (single person, no kids) is $13,460 maximum. What rate do you want to lower that one to, anyone who makes more than $10,000 per year should pay?
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s what I’m not getting, either. It seems pretty clear that B&S took this action because they were not able to get the rest of the commission to sign on to their plan, and they’re hoping to pressure them into doing it. That’s not something you do if everyone agrees and is on board.
It’s weird that we’re now interpreting signs of internal dissent and conflict that may well mean we’ll never see a report at all as Good for Republicans!
burnspbesq
@Martin:
It may be OK in the current interest rate environment, but what happens when the cost of servicing the national debt goes up by 3x?
aimai
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, I didn’t mean to put that there to ally myself with the “blame Obama for everything crowd.” I put it there because the fake report (and that is what it is) was released when it was *because* its a piece of ratfucking which depends on timing to get to its goal.
You think (I take it) that the voters will forget the commission and this fake report. That’s true, in a sense. They won’t remember why they think that Obama himself is recommending slashing benefits and cutting out the mortgage deduction. It wil just become part of the standard boilerplate “convenitional wisdom” that the independent/swing voters have sitting in the back of their brain pains.
Obama felt forced to commission this commission and then allowed the commission to be entirely staffed by *paid shills for the Peterson foundation* and also didn’t prepare to be stabbed in the back by Alan Simpson, a man of patently bad faith. That’s bad planning, anyway you look at it.
I’m through waiting for some master plan that makes this absurdly bad idea into some kind of winning strategy for the Dems. It was a very bad idea, badly executed, and now its come back to bite us all in the ass. The whole deficit “thing” isn’t something we have to worry about two years from now, btw, as though the only important thing were the next election cycle. Deficit fears and hawkery are at issue right now, in every single vote that the house and the senate take up. Letting the right wing control all the talking points is also letting them control the playing field.
aimai
General Stuck
@aimai: This is really really a very stupid comment. Do you not have any ability to sort of peer into the near future of where our politics are going? This report by two individuals, was an afterthought the moment the election returns confirmed the House would switch hands in Jan. Everything will change from the past 2 years, and it will be Obama V GOP run House of Reps . No one will care nor remember about this issue, save for the firebaggers who will spam up our threads reliving it day after day.
It is kind of sad funny, all this breathless piling onto by leftists, to what is largely faux Obama fail over a stupid commission report that isn’t a commission report, the results of which ,while favoring the rich over the poor on the domestic side, also has equal amounts of military cuts, will look like an FDR initiative compared to the wingnuttery we will see come January next year. And by something that actually matters, a chamber of congress. But an opportunity, apparently is not to be missed, with this nonsense. I wonder if you and the others, like your corner stone and napolean allies have any clue just how disingenuous and transparent you appear pushing this Obama fail meme. And in CS’s case how boneheaded dumb. and don’t give me the “i support Obama and am just doing honest dissent” bullshit.
burnspbesq
@Mnemosyne:
I’m not proposing anything. I asked you where you would put a floor that would make EITC unnecessary. If you choose not to answer, that’s fine, but don’t accuse me of favoring something that I don’t favor.
FlipYrWhig
@aimai:
I don’t really think anyone is going to think this, because I don’t think this thing has any penetration, and won’t get any penetration.
Xenos
The point of the commission was not to come up with a good solution, but to get any solution that would mathematically work, down in one paper which people could look at and argue about. For once the GOP can’t claim they are cutting non-existent programs, or wave a 1/2 page meaningless flow chart and claim it is their secret plan to win a war on the deficit.
Obama can handle the rest of the process… thus this bad-faith leak that pretends it is not a leak. I am sure Obama won’t sort this out exactly the way I would like, but he can certainly put something together that is reality based. And then we can see if the House GOP wants to run in circles with crazy theories. But that will require them to run away from Allan Simpson, of all people.
FlipYrWhig
@General Stuck:
Is this going to be a “public option”-style Thing That Never Goes Away, or a “mortgage cramdown”-style Thing That Never Goes Away?
kdaug
@Mnemosyne:
Ding!
You know what will pass and what won’t, so you float your proposal to the press to move the conversation in the direction you want it to go.
Precisely the same maneuver that the military uses to extend troop deployments – float to the press that the withdrawal deadline is “negotiable”, and prime the pump for capitulation.
Problem is, Obama seems to fall for it. Every time.
Kryptik
@FlipYrWhig:
Wasn’t this said about ‘Death Panels’ before?
This will gain penetration because it’s a right-wing meme. Right-wing memes are always, always, always treated like ‘a very serious concern/issue/idea’.
FlipYrWhig
@Kryptik: Is the right wing saying anything about the deficit commission? All I’ve seen is agitation from liberals on Backstab Watch.
General Stuck
@FlipYrWhig:
Everything I’ve seen is the report is being assailed by both parties, the wingers likely due to military cuts proposed, and the fact it doesn’t come close to what, when, and how much to cut from domestic safety net programs and entitlements.
I did not the Politico standard take, the ‘progressive base” is unhappy. LOL
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
How has it bitten us in the ass? Yes, there are a few breathless columns from the usual suspects, but the story doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere. More people are interested in the broken-down cruise ship than in the B&S PowerPoint presentation.
I’ve seen a lot of gnashing of teeth on the left (see memeorandom), but no one else really seems to care.
Mnemosyne
@burnspbesq:
I want to keep the EITC, so I’m not sure why I’m the one who’s supposed to come up with a workable plan to get rid of it. I think it works just fine the way it is, it’s been working well for over 30 years, and we should keep it.
So I’m really not sure why I’m supposed to be setting the floor where it gets eliminated under this new tax plan. Shouldn’t the person who wants to get rid of it be setting that floor and not the person who wants to keep it?
FlipYrWhig
Ha, I asked about this before, and I just googled it. The deficit commission’s chairs did in fact include the public option:
[ack, stupid formatting]
Long-Term Health Care Savings (page 36)
Set global target for total federal health expenditures after 2020 (Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, exchange subsidies, employer health exclusion), and review costs every 2 years. Keep growth to GDP+1%.
If costs have grown faster than targets (on average of previous 5 years), require President to submit and Congress to consider reforms to lower spending, such as:
Increase premiums (or further increase cost-sharing)
Overhaul the fee-for-service system
Develop a premium support system for Medicare
Add a robust public option and/or all-payer system in the exchange
Further expand authority of IPAB
(source: Physicians for a National Health Program)
licensed to kill time
What’s going on? BJ refusing to load for last 45 minutes. I kept checking with this tool and it says the site’s down. Finally got it to load and am submitting this comment into the netherblogs, most likely to disappear forever :(
eta:so naturally, it shows up fine. FYWP!
danimal
Wouldn’t it be easier to let the Clinton rates become the default before we start hacking away at the safety net? How much of a deficit will we have in the next decade if the Clinton tax rates were reestablished?
Janus Daniels
@ Doug J
“Once again, this
is starting to border onrockets past self-parody and claims new territories of asurd.”Fixed it for you.
Triassic Sands
People in favor of raising the retirement age are health people who don’t do physically demanding work. Even so, some of them will change their tunes as they approach 62 and they discover what aging has in store for them.
Martin
@burnspbesq: Well, then we’ll increase the 21% number, or we’ll make serious cuts.
Let’s put this a different way – if the debt commission got Congress to adopt a tax policy that returned 21% of GDP in federal taxes, we’d be paying down that debt at a monumental rate starting next year. For 2010, we brought in 14.5% of GDP in taxes. If they expired all of the Bush tax cuts, we’re only projected to go up to 19% of GDP, lower than what we had when Clinton left office.
Martin
@Triassic Sands: This is disingenuous. It really is. And it puts the burden in entirely the wrong place.
For workers in strenuous activities, where working past 65 would be seen as a burden, then we need to require that employers provide a defined benefit plan for those workers that could cover the gap between a reasonable retirement age and when SS would kick in. Honestly, this is what unions exist to do, not to organize clerical workers.
SS is not a retirement plan and nobody should act as though it is. It’s designed to keep seniors in the ballpark of the federal poverty level, and that’s about it. But dicking around with the SS age isn’t necessary. If they just expand the payroll tax and means test SS benefits, then we’re golden.
burnspbesq
@Mnemosyne:
EITC is a massive waste of resources. Why collect money in the form of wage withholding and estimated tax payments that you know you’re going to turn around and refund in April?
Why not just say that there is some threshold level of income below which nobody is capable of paying income tax without major economic hardship, and exempt income below that level?
Nick
@aimai:
and the actual voters aren’t going to give a shit about this after January. The only ones who will are the professional left trying to add to their list of “Obama sellouts” as they cry for attention like stray cats.
Triassic Sands
@Martin:
My failure to proofread may have given you the wrong impression:
“…healthY workers…” not “health workers.”
My point is that people working in physically demanding jobs are going to age differently and many will not be able to continue doing strenuous work after they hit sixty. For me, it came well before then. At fifty, I was probably in the top 1% in fitness for my age cohort. By fifty-five, my health had gone to hell and all the decades of eating right and exercising weren’t any help. Heredity, it seems, is a lot more powerful than good, clean living.