For most of establishment media, “both sides do it” is an axiom. And if you begin from this axiom, you may conclude that Democrats (not just Republicans) were at fault for the recent government shutdown. This conclusion takes place not in the physical world, but in a Platonic/Aristotelian universe of pure logical deduction.
Later on some reporting comes in. Given that one knows in the abstract that Democrats were at fault for the recent government shutdown, it is always possible to find concrete examples of what they did wrong.
A lot of so-called human reasoning works this way — you begin with an unsubstantiated claim that you nevertheless believe, and then you find examples that support this claim. Never mind if most of what you observe seems to contradict this claim, you can just cherry pick the evidence.
The value of a “grand bargain” may be deduced from “both sides do it” in various ways. The US may face long-term budgetary problems. Ergo, Democrats are wrong to resist cutting Social Security, and Republicans are wrong to do some other thing (I think this varies, but often involves taxes). Elias Isquith makes a good point: Ron Fournier doesn’t deduce “Obama can’t lead” directly from “both sides do it” (though he could), but through the intermediary step of “a grand bargain would be good”.
For those who don’t know: The way the grand bargain is generally understood is that Democrats agree to cut Medicare and Social Security (aka “entitlements”) while Republicans agree to raise taxes on the wealthy. Essentially, both sides decide to do what their most loyal supporters hate the most, and as a result the U.S. reduces its long-term debt. And maybe everyone gets a pony.
Anyway, once you understand what Fournier’s ultimately after, his words take on a different meaning. “Can Obama lead?” loses its slightly mystical, heroic character and becomes a rather more prosaic question: “Will Obama please agree to cut Medicare and Social Security for many Americans who rely on it?” And this is the question that, in his exhortations for Obama to “lead,” he’s been asking over and over again.
This is exactly right. And it shows you why these No Labels types like Fournier will never go anywhere beyond Aspen and other very serious venues. They want to cut popular programs and raise taxes. Outside the establishment media greenrooms, that’s a political nonstarter.
Jeff Spender
In my many dialogues (I don’t use the word debate because most “debates” are facile nonsense factories) I have discovered that this error in human reasoning is quite common.
At one point I became convinced that a lot of the beliefs I’ve heard suffer from a begging the question fallacy at their very core because of a base belief in an unsubstantiated claim that they nevertheless regard as true. Once you strip that base claim away (and it can be anything–god is real, Democrats are evil, communism is *insert word*) the rest falls apart.
It’s actually pretty frustrating when you can demonstrate the flaw, but the double-down on it.
Spaghetti Lee
I keep coming back to a poll-I don’t remember where it was from-where 4% of people polled said that the deficit/debt was America’s biggest challenge. Or maybe it was 2%. Up higher? Jobs, energy, taxes, economic growth, etc.
Like comparing summer home leases or finding a good hedge fund manager, the deficit is a problem in the minds of people who don’t have anything else to worry about: namely, people who are so rich that the country’s credit rate declining (in theory) would hurt their wallets more than deindustrialization or a real estate crash, which only hurt the little people.
schrodinger's cat
Where were these grand bargain bozos when Bush was the President?
aimai
I hate these windy abstractions like “can Obama Lead.” The guys been leading. He’s the fucking leader. He led us out of Iraq and into the ACA. If he doesn’t play his assigned role in your fantasy football rotisserie grand bargain that doesn’t mean he can’t lead. It means he doesn’t want to lead in the direction you want him to lead. He’s heading off somewhere else. Probably better.
Mullah DougJ
@aimai:
Heh.
schrodinger's cat
@Mullah DougJ: What did you with Doug Milhous J?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@schrodinger’s cat: Deficits didn’t matter then.
I heard Harry Reid correct a pundit yesterday, saying “you say ‘entitlements’, I say ‘mandatories'”. I’m glad to see some pushback, but I don’t think swapping distorted wonkspeak for uglier wonkspeak is gonna work. Social insurance, safety net, how about “citizen insurance programs”, or something like that.
FlipYrWhig
@Spaghetti Lee: Sure, if it’s listed separately from jobs, taxes, economy, etc. But VERY often “deficit” gets used to mean “excessive spending on lazy moochers that requires raising taxes which will invariably kill jobs and wreck the economy.” So “deficit” RHETORIC is thoroughly entangled with all other questions of money and livelihood. Which means, IMHO, rightly or wrongly, that more people are worried about _something amorphous having vaguely to do with “the deficit”_ than the polls will ever tell you directly.
scav
Well, if both sides do it, aren’t the Press as much complicit in the disfunction in the nation and government as other actors? ‘Fess up Villagers, disfunction is your bread and butter!
FlipYrWhig
@aimai: “Leadership” in political news media seems like it basically means “the ability to get other politicians to do unpopular things.” If you’re a cynic and see politics as just self-interest and graft, then “leadership” fills a void by explaining how someone could replace those base motivations with nobler ones. It’s total bullshit of course but I think that’s how it’s supposed to work.
Baud
I think it’s simpler than that in this case. “Can Obama lead?” means “Can we hold Obama accountable for Republican intransigence?”
polyorchnid octopunch
Fundamentally, the US doesn’t have an entitlements problem, it’s got a revenue problem. It wouldn’t take taxes rising very much to fix it. However, the PTB don’t want that because they’re where the money is going to come from, and they’d rather stick it to a different group of people. You know, those people.
The sad thing is they’ve completely missed why the US was able to become so dominant in the second world war and in the post war era; it’s a large country that had significant buy-in by the vast majority of its people, because after FDR people knew that the rewards of their nation doing well would be widely shared by the people in that nation, as opposed to now when only a tiny sliver of people get to benefit from the wealth of the nation.
That lack of equitable treatment for their work is why people don’t want to bother participating anymore; why work hard when all that it’ll get you is living paycheque to paycheque, with no prospect of improvement for one’s offspring?
aimai
@FlipYrWhig: Even worse, “leadership” means doing the unpopular things your opponents want you to do but are unable or afraid to do themselves. This is the logic of what Digby and Atrios call “the pain caucus.” You can’t be called a “leader” by these schmucks unless you are throwing granny from the window while tearing her zweiback from her nerveless grasp and giving it to the Koch Brothers. And even then they’ll call you a leader and praise you for five seconds and then turn around and screetch “he pushed granny from the window and cut her medicare, too! For shame.”
Leadership in this sense is an accolade that can only be awarded to Democrats who are willing to fuck over their own coalition to win the evanescent approval of their enemies.
El Cid
Furthermore the ironclad assumption is that cutting Medicare & SS are GOOD policies, thus people who oppose those cuts are opposing GOOD policies for BAD (but perhaps understandable) reasons.
However, it looks very different if those cuts (and/or privatization style schemes) are SHITTY policies, then Democrats showing that they’re BOLD and willing to challenge their liberal and or interest group (aka, senior citizens and people who someday might be senior citizens) voters & backers sounds a lot less desirable.
The assumption is the ironclad DOING THIS IS GOOD POLICY.
If it’s GOOD POLICY, no one has a good reason to oppose it. If it is HARMFUL or SHITTY policy, then you’re trying to persuade people to accept harm to themselves for no good reason other than that it would make certain political types feel happy about a compromise (as well as lots of rich people thinking they can get out of taxes and maybe grab some of that SS/Medicare cash before it vanishes).
BruceFromOhio
… which is the one of the few ways out of the unsustainable set of circumstances we live in and under. Where it gets ugly is, I want to cut the popular programs like those in the DoD, and raise taxes on the 1%. Whacky Uncle Teabagger wants to cut anything to do with the poor and the elderly (except his Medicare and VA bennies, of course) and cut taxes because freedom. YMMV.
@aimai: Right on, citizen. Preach it!
ETA @schrodinger’s cat: My favorite is still Arkon DougJ.
Mullah DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
Obama will only negotiate with mullahs, hence the new name.
Perfect Tommy
Not long after the deal was struck, stories appeared claiming that Obama and a senior policy advisor forced the Republicans to shut down the government. It was the refrain of the abusive spouse. “look what you made me do” Sickening ….
Richard
A lot of so-called human reasoning works this way — you begin with an unsubstantiated claim that you nevertheless believe, and then you find examples that support this claim.
Confirmation Bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_Bias
schrodinger's cat
@Mullah DougJ: You are like one of the gods of the Hindu pantheon, DougJ of many names. Many of them have multiple names, some popular gods have names numbering in the hundreds. How many names have you had so far?
Villago Delenda Est
Well, frankly, the concept of the scientific method is totally beyond the limited intellects (and I use that term with some regret) of Villager fucktards like Ron Fornier. Fournier is of the “if that facts don’t support the narrative, then the facts must be gassed with Zyklon-B” school of “thought”.
Mullah DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
Maybe 15 or so.
divF
@BruceFromOhio:
I first read that as “Akron DougJ”, which works in an entirely different way. It also brought to my mind a compilation album of pop bands from the late 70’s called “The Akron Sound”. (I have loose associations issues).
Also: +Aleph_1 to aimai’s comment.
FlipYrWhig
@aimai: agreed. By this standard, what would be the quintessential (recent) act of Leadership! ™ genuinely achieved? Bush getting Democrats to vote for his wars? Clinton and welfare reform?
Richard
@Perfect Tommy:
Not long after the deal was struck, stories appeared claiming that Obama and a senior policy advisor forced the Republicans to shut down the government.
Not really forced them, but “tricked” them. The thing is, what their silly conspiracy theory about Obama maneuvering them into disaster amounts to is a “Don’t blame us! We’re morons!” defense.
J
Apart from being grotesquely unfair to Plato and Aristotle, this post is spot on.
Frankensteinbeck
@BruceFromOhio:
Wacky Uncle Teabagger has gotten so wacky that he wants to cut his Medicare and VA bennies, He has convinced himself that somehow he is not receiving them, and only other lazy people will suffer if they’re cut. This must be true because Liberals.
schrodinger's cat
@Mullah DougJ: That’s all? I am surprised, I thought it would be at least 50 by now. One popular form of Hindu prayer is reciting the various names of your favorite god.
Hanuman Chalisa ( 40 names of Hanuman, the monkey god)
Vishnu Sahstranam (1000 names of Vishnu) and so on..
I guess you have a long way to go.
Villago Delenda Est
@Richard:
Well, Obama is a Svengali puppet master who strokes a white persian during even hours, and a guy who can’t find his ass with both hands and a platoon of telepromters during odd hours.
pzerzan
I think when it comes to the “Grand Bargain” stuff you really see the effects inequality has on our establishment media. Ron Fournier is never going to need Social Security. His friends are never going to need Social Security. He won’t know what it’s like to be 67 with the many aches and pains that come from a life of hard physical labor and worried about if he can buy groceries this week. Also, the fact Social Security is better and more secure than 401(k)s or even pensions is irrelevant to him. This is just a program he doesn’t need and his friends don’t need so therefore should be cut.
The irony is Ron Fournier needs the government to survive. In this new global information economy, there are plenty of people who can provide just as good if not better commentary on major political topics for a fraction of the cost of a Ron Fournier column. The only way Fournier gets money is if certain government employees who hold positions of power read his columns. Call it “Scarborough Welfare.” I was told from someone who worked on the hill and at TNR that every Congressional Office has Morning Joe on their TVs. This is the only reason Joe Scarborough stays on the air given how bad in the ratings his program is. These centrist pundits are failures by any metric in the “free market” or a meritocracy and exist on government handouts.
If only they could see the irony in their attacks on governmental assistance. Then again, if they could, they wouldn’t be centrist pundits…
Corner Stone
DougJ, I’m a little confused why you’re stepping on the concept of a Grand Bargain when it’s clearly been a major legislative goal of President Obama.
Some sort of inoculation?
RareSanity
Every time I hear someone pop off about entitlements being “out of control”, that they’re going to bankrupt us, I always respond the same way…Is it possible that these programs only require some adjustments in their implementations, that won’t necessarily require cuts in benefits?
Their answer is usually some form of “I don’t know”, or “I don’t think so”…then usually follow up with, “Don’t you think that question should be answered before jumping right to cuts?”
It’s like @Jeff Spender says, every “argument” for cutting entitlement programs is a different form of the begging the question fallacy, that those entitlements just need to be cut. If the greatest trick the devil ever played, was convincing the world that he did not exist…the greatest trick the GOP ever played, was convincing working/middle class families, that the programs that are there to help them are bad, so they need to be taken away.
Frankensteinbeck
@RareSanity:
That was Reagan, and it’s why they want Reagan back so badly. People are starting to not believe it.
FlipYrWhig
@aimai: To come at it a slightly different way, I think “leadership” is supposed to be the semi-mystical explanation for how to make politicians do something other than the baseline their party’s traditional beliefs demand. “How’d he make them go along with THAT? He must be good. He must be a Leader!” thus morphs into “If he made them go along with THAT, he’d be a Leader, but he hasn’t made them, so he must not be, which is too bad.” This is also the fetish media machers always have for taking stands against your own party, although as you point out they’re much more aroused when Democrats do that than when Republicans do, which they don’t.
Villago Delenda Est
@RareSanity:
If these assholes were serious about going after “entitlements”, they’d demand the confiscation by the state of every dime of every inheritance in the country.
BruceFromOhio
@Frankensteinbeck: … which is why I have no problem whatsoever with Obama shoving it right back up these mo’fo’s asses, collectively or individually. When the Cleek Paradigm is the protocol, and your party’s sole objective is burn it all down, it ends badly for everyone. I regret that so many of us get smoked out while WUT-B gets his burn on.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: I’d say that deficit reduction is a goal of the Obama administration and that some sort of grand bargain is the means to that end, rather than the end in itself. Why is that their goal? Probably misplaced cause-effect thinking about the Clinton era of both reduced deficits and broad prosperity. That would be my guess.
Yatsuno
@Villago Delenda Est: I think you’re ascribing too much order to that. Obummer can be both ebil Islamocommunistfascist mastermind and bumbling doddering fool in the same instant. No Schrödinger necessary. Hell wasn’t there an example from Ewick ibn Ewick where he accomplished that feat in the same sentence?
@Villago Delenda Est: Hell I’d be more generous: half of any estate is the heirs tax free but the other half goes to the government. No exceptions. No blind trusts to hide the money after the estate holder dies. And I’m sick of family farmers whinging that this is unfair. You didn’t work that land, your parents did. Most of the time it’s the kids sweeping in after death to grab the goods with no intention of keeping the farm. I’m sick of that shit.
schrodinger's cat
New shocking revelation by Snowden, guess who the NSA is using to spy on you.
ETA: To be read in the gigantic red font Huffpo lubs.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: Based on this, is Nancy Pelosi a leader, or not?
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: Just so I am clear, deficit or debt?
Baud
@FlipYrWhig:
Based on my reading of what they’ve said, I don’t think is reduced deficits they care about per se, but providing some sort of economic certainty on fiscal matters, which they believe will help the recovery.
RareSanity
@Frankensteinbeck:
Which is exactly why there will no “split” in the GOP with the teatards.
The GOP needs extremists that will allow hatred, religion and idiocy to cause them to support things that are not in their best interests.
@Villago Delenda Est:
Amen, brother…
They’d also be deafening in their yells for raising of the salary limit on payroll taxes, and higher income taxes on the 1%.
eemom
Yo Dougster — how come I’ve never seen this in a post title?
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
And I would put forth the argument that this is a damaging narrative for the nation. No one gives a shit except as a talking point, and the policies damage real people and our economy.
TG Chicago
Obama often (correctly) refers to the economy as having suffered the worst downturn since the Great Depression.
That, of course, means that social safety net programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are right now needed more than they ever have been in their history.
Thus, this is clearly not the time to be cutting these programs. I hope Obama makes this connection.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: I think Pelosi is a leader, because she does a good job maintaining discipline in her caucus, but I think the Fournier-ish mystical idea of leadership (i.e., convincing politicians to do something they’d rather not do in a spirit of sacrifice) doesn’t apply, because it never applies. But if you’re suggesting that Pelosi is doing battle against Obama’s deficit-hawk tendencies, I don’t know. I don’t think either one of them wants to jeopardize the social safety net. I would guess Obama would be more open to fiddling with things like means-testing for Social Security than Pelosi would, because I think Obama trusts wonks and technocrats more than Pelosi does.
schrodinger's cat
@Corner Stone: I have to agree with you, this tightening our belts rhetoric and austerity mongering is bad policy and politics.
RareSanity
@Yatsuno:
I think it’s more of a Heisenberg principle of Obama.
He can either be an evil genius, or an bumbling idiot, but not both at the same time…his state depends on the argument being made.
MattF
I won’t link to George Fucking Will’s column from this morning, but, for the record, it’s a case of ‘both sides do it’ raised to a level of abstraction that’s really pretty remarkable. Will starts out badly with a passing mention of Obama’s ‘self-regard’, (you all know what that means, right?) and then goes downhill from there, if you can imagine that.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: annual deficit and also long-term debt, no? I’m going by what I remember of the graphs for the health-care debate and “bending the cost curve.” Why bend the cost curve? To prevent health-care costs from overtaking the federal budget. Clearly that’s something they worry about, and it’s included in the general area of deficits and debts.
Jeff Spender
@RareSanity:
I agree. But these kinds of fallacies are insidious because it’s hard for us to recognize them in our own thinking, and once you become invested in the conclusion, you resist rethinking the fallacy it is built on.
Like a Christian I know who says, “Everything that begins to exist has a cause of that existence.” He’s completely invested in the conclusion because the ultimate conclusion of this argument is Universe began, needs uncaused cause, therefore god.
He won’t entertain the fact that he can’t possibly know or prove that original statement.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: No, no. You always also bash on team “chemistry” as well. So you can’t get this all the way done going where you like to go.
Leadership is on display in politics. Chemistry is not just an excuse for why some teams win when they maybe should not.
Pelosi puts her people in the most likely chances to win. She gets some to make hard votes and releases others. It all depends on what she or the caucus needs.
Leadership can’t make a fractious number of self-interested individuals do anything that self-terminates their career, and it isn’t some mythical green lantern effect either.
But it exists, and to whatever degree it does, it can’t be put on to one politician but not some other one.
KG
@schrodinger’s cat: they were supporting NCLB and Medicare Part D with no revenues, because of the dynamic scoring of tax cuts for all!
Craig
Platonic, okay. But not Aristotelian. And “Spinozan,” “Cartesian,” or “Leibnizian” are really the words you want. Aristotle was the great systematizing empiricist, and you shouldn’t take Bacon’s trash-talk at face value.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: I haven’t perceived that they’ve been all that concerned about prioritizing it as a problem that needs to be addressed. In my view, they have brought it up only in the context of health care costs and tax rates. Still, I think they do probably validate the rhetoric/politics of The Deficit too much, because they, like most policy wonks and technocrats, focus on the narrow technical meaning while forgetting that a huge part of concern the media and Republicans express about The Deficit is really class-war Randian racist bullshit about free goodies for darkies.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: uh, that’s what I said. Leadership, whatever it is, isn’t the mystical quality Fournier wants it to be. (And he wants it to be that principally because that we he can bash the president for not having it.). I don’t even know what you’re arguing with me about. Old times?
rikyrah
Fournier is a GOP hack clown.
Benen pointed this out just this past week.
I don’t have a PhD in economics, but isn’t the problem with SS is that the limit for taxable income is 105,000?
Why not raise it to 2.5 million?
PsiFighter37
Wasn’t Fournier offered a job to be McCain’s spokesperson on the 2008 campaign, but was too chickenshit to take the job because he knew McCain was going to lose?
That may not be the exact reason, but that’s how I like to remember it. Ron Fournier, just another stenographer with well-worn kneepads.
PF37 +5 Nitro Milk Stouts
TG Chicago
@polyorchnid octopunch:
Is that true? I’d certainly like to believe it is, but I’m not convinced.
How much in tax increases would it take?
sharl
DougJ, you’re not the only fan of Mr. Fournier. Meet Ron Fournimeh:
PsiFighter37
This whole ‘both sides do it’ can be boiled down to Cole’s legendary AVERAGE((Tire Rims + Anthrax), Democratic Proposal) = ?! observation / function.
I want that John Cole back in my life.
FlipYrWhig
@rikyrah: I would raise that cap too, but IIRC the thinking is if you have rich people paying in vastly more than they’ll get out, they’ll feel gouged about “redistribution” and will turn against the program, while if they can feel like it’s more on balance as “social insurance,” they won’t balk. My opinion is, too fucking bad, but, you know, I LIKE redistribution.
FlipYrWhig
@polyorchnid octopunch:
Also a health care costs problem.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: The world may never know.
Bill Arnold
@Villago Delenda Est:
One occasionally-seen idea for medicare reform is to have inheritances taxed 1-1 for every dollar spent on medicare on behalf the the deceased, maximum of all inheritance. (I don’t know how inheritance by a window or widower would work) Currently, long term health care is the middle class inheritance tax. Subtracting medicare expenses from inheritances would be an approximately 100 percent middle class inheritance tax, unless one’s parents died young or were unnaturally healthy. For the wealthy the tax would have less bite.
I haven’t been able to tell whether this idea is being proposed in jest; the incentives are perverse and children would be reminded of them every time their medicare-age parents went to the doctor. There would be stronger incentives to lower medicare reimbursement rates too.
RareSanity
@sharl:
For all we know, that is DougJ…that’s definitely in his range for trolling.
MomSense
@aimai:
So much awesome in that post, aimai!
I had a really nice chat with Rep. Michaud, who is running for governor, today. We were talking about public employees and their pensions and it was just so refreshing to hear a politician who understands how important it is to safeguard their retirement benefits. Wowie zowie could we please elect moar former union reps?!
ETA: They did have enough votes to pass the clean CR/debt limit the whole time. Boehner was caving to 35-40 people. Even Republicans were pissed about the whole thing.
Patrick
@TG Chicago:
Perhaps no increases at all. If we can get unemployment and underemployment down, those people will now pay taxes or higher taxes instead of no taxes at all due to being unemployed.
Like the other poster said, we don’t have an entitlement problem, it is a revenue problem. And we should also ask ourselves, is it really necessary to spend as much on our military as the next 15 biggest countries in the world combined?
Mullah DougJ
@eemom:
I’ve used it twice before.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
As I understand it, the problem with that is it was set up to be a public pension system such that you draw out of social security an amount that relates to what you paid in. The concern is that if we decouple those things, it could actually open the program up to be undermined.
Lawrence O’Donnell did a great series on Social Security in which he discusses that very idea at some length.
FlipYrWhig
@Patrick: let’s bend the military cost curve! It should be a techno-wonk’s dream. Most importantly, by using low-risk, low-cost preventive measures early rather than high-risk, high-cost, heroic measures late.
MattF
@MomSense: Not really. It’s a pay-as-you-go system. Please read:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_09/its_a_payasyougo_system032253.php
sharl
@RareSanity: Heh, good point. Once his targets at WaPo figured him out, Twitter would make for an almost ideal new home for his trolling skills.
Patrick
@FlipYrWhig:
It drives me nuts when the military itself says they don’t need as much money. Instead it is driven as pork by states like Virginia, who want higher defense spending so that it will create jobs in their state.
FlipYrWhig
@MomSense: See, OK, I know that’s the thinking, and I know the history, but, still, it seems weird to me that if you’ve been in low-wage jobs your whole life you get a lower level of benefits in retirement than someone with high-wage jobs does. The poorer person needs _more_ help! Yes, the scaremongers would deride it as welfare, but I would happily make a higher floor under the poorest beneficiaries and a lower ceiling over the richest.
Regnad Kcin
@Jeff Spender: has a cause, sure; just not necessarily a reason.
FlipYrWhig
@Patrick: If I were economic emperor I’d be pumping military spending away from weaponry and towards cool shit like the Army Corps of Engineers.
catclub
@aimai: “that can only be awarded to Democrats ”
Paul Ryan was hailed as brave for making the painful decisions – that only hurt the voters on the other side, and did not hurt his backers at all.
aimai
@TG Chicago: Raising taxes on the very wealthiest and, say, putting a tax on financial transactions to make them a little slower/stickier would have the added benefit of making the very wealthy actually need to turn over their money to make more money. Turning over their money means making it work harder which would employ more people. So raising taxes on (some) people would have the paradoxical effect of putting more people to work.
Patrick
@aimai:
How would make sure that the financial transaction tax doesn’t end up hitting the middle class? Anybody with a 401k would be hit, even if you make 401k’s/IRA’s exempt, due to bigger spreads as a result of less liquidity.
Jeff Spender
@Regnad Kcin:
I don’t think anyone could honestly make the claim that the universe had a cause of its existence at this point (not just the cosmological horizon, the entire universe).
Which is why it’s not a sound premise.
But I get what you’re saying.
I don’t ever tend to rule things out unless they’re logical impossibilities, but the flip side of that is that I don’t assume anything without reason to think the assumption is justified. Everything is a lot of something that includes things I can’t even possibly fathom.
trollhattan
@schrodinger’s cat:
Resigned, then pardoned by Harold Ford.
Chris
@Baud:
This.
The “both sides meme” is problematic if you take it at face value, but it’s not really something you can take at face value, because at the end, the people who say “both sides do it” always have a corollary, “but liberals are worse.”
The Village may have some problems with Republicans and not just Democrats, they may prefer some kinds of Republicans to other kinds, but when it comes down to a showdown between Republicans and Democrats, they’ll pick the Republicans. That’s why even their worst behavior will always invite “why doesn’t Obama lead?” “maybe if he wasn’t so extreme…” kind of comments.
catclub
@Patrick: “due to bigger spreads as a result of less liquidity.”
Yeah, right. Why do I think this answer comes up before the tax is tried to find out.
Long term investors don’t care about a transaction tax. 401K investors are long term investors.
catclub
@trollhattan: I think it was Harold Pinter.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Chris:
This.
“Both sides” is just a way to let Republicans off the hook for their egregious and undemocratic behavior.
catclub
@FlipYrWhig: Atrios has been beating the drum that 401K’s have been an almost total failure and that the solution is to make SS even bigger and stronger. He gets this opinion in USA Today on a regular basis. maybe it will start to resonate.
trollhattan
@catclub:
Think I saw that on Pinterest.
Patrick
@catclub:
The US imposed a financial transaction tax from 1914 to 1966.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax
From the same link, how it went when Sweden tried it:
The revenues from taxes were disappointing; for example, revenues from the tax on fixed-income securities were initially expected to amount to 1,500 million Swedish kronor per year. They did not amount to more than 80 million Swedish kronor in any year and the average was closer to 50 million.[43] In addition, as taxable trading volumes fell, so did revenues from capital gains taxes, entirely offsetting revenues from the equity transactions tax that had grown to 4,000 million Swedish kronor by 1988.[44]
MomSense
@MattF:
I understand how it works. There are many types of pension systems and Social Security is considered to be a public pension plan like National Insurance in the UK.
sharl
OT, just fucking lovely: TED front-man Guy Raz has a lot of good stuff, but now he is interviewing Niall Ferguson, and (apparently) actually taking him seriously, on NF’s “Six Killer Apps of Prosperity”.
If you wanna know the real NF, it’s hard to beat this.
I guess Michelle Rhee wasn’t available.
MomSense
@FlipYrWhig:
I agree with you but we have never lived in a United States without the uber wealthy assholes feeling taken advantage of by us moocher plebes.
drkrick
@Corner Stone:
Beautiful example of confirmation bias. Because the “Obot following dear leader blindly” thing couldn’t possibly be wrong.
RareSanity
@catclub:
Man…I’d sign up for that yesterday.
catclub
@Patrick: I did not see any evidence that the middle class was harmed by it, or that liquidity was harmed by it. Wasn’t that what you were stating?
Jeremy
People forget that Medicare spending has been reduced through the ACA. 700 Billion + to be exact. I think we need to raise taxes and find savings in order to make Medicare more efficient.
aimai
@Patrick: The financial tax on transactions is vanishingly small. People who just have a few stocks that they sell occasionally are not the target and wouldn’t even really be affected–we are talking pennies on the transaction. People who make a living shifting money fast and buying and selling fast would be affected. We are talking hedge fund guys, not people who sell a block of stock once in every few years.
eemom
@Mullah DougJ:
oops, sorry. I must have missed it.
Sweet old tune, so it is.
rikyrah
or hold the President responsible for the obvious racism pointed towards him.
same thing..
Chris
@RareSanity:
Yep.
I know a couple of Republican 1%ers who have this fantasy of a “reasonable” Republican Party, purged of all its cultural nutjobs so that it could focus only on Very Serious issues (e.g. cutting their taxes and ending their regulations). Totally missing the point that if you take away the Republican Party’s cultural base, that leaves you with fewer voters than Ross Perot.
I bring it up because I think that fantasy is in large part shared by the Village and the other elites like that, and it’s a big part of what fuels the “both sides do it” myth. The idea that a perfect country is one in which brave politicians could say “fuck you” to both the scary economic radicals and the dimwitted culture warriors, and still get elected.
(Though like I said, they’ll almost always pick the same side of that fight when push comes to shove).
aimai
@catclub: I think Patrick mistakes a tax on stock sales with a tax on financial transactions. This is what was suggested to slow down trades and also to recompense the countries which ended up having to backstop bad trades and cascades of bad trades.
Jeffro
OT but you know what I think after reading this?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cruz-wants-voters-to-hold-gopers-accountable-for-opposing-defunding-effort
I think Cruz is going to try and bully his own party into getting the nomination in 2016 (or at the very least, the VP nod)
Jeff Spender
@Jeffro:
He gives me the creeps. Like the kind John Smith got off of Greg Stillson in the Dead Zone.
? Martin
@Patrick:
Any 401K worth its value wouldn’t be hit. The point of the transaction fee is to hit those funds that make thousands of transactions per day. If your 401K is doing that, then you’re fucked anyway.
My main fund investment is an S&P 500 index. Let’s say that fund buys and sells each equity each day in order to maintain balance. 500 transactions per day. Let’s say that costs $125 in fees each day in transaction fees. That’s not a cost passed on to me, but to every investor in that fund – which is tens of thousands of people. The cost to me is well under $.01 per day, and if the result of the fee is to eliminate the market benefit of the electronic traders, then I’ll make that back easily in better returns.
But as catclub notes, there are few 401K funds that beat Social Security on returns. Everyone believes they’re the lucky ducky that will beat the average, but they’re more likely to come out worse.
Jeremy
I agree that the village obsesses over the grand bargain because of their privilege, but I think we need to make some minor changes to medicare because benefit cuts will happen if it reaches insolvency. The reforms to medicare through the ACA did not reduce benefits, and I think we should continue to promote those kind of reforms.
Villago Delenda Est
@FlipYrWhig:
Well, the problem there is that the shit the Corps of Engineer builds benefits everyone, to include “those people”, and by Mammon and Jeebus we CANNOT HAVE THAT!
Money spent on weapons, warships, warplanes, etc is money down a fucking rat hole. Those things have no utility except to be used in destruction. Well, it has the utility that Orwell identified…it destroys the fruits of human labor so that they don’t advantage human labor, and maintain the pyramidal class structure. The fear of egalitarianism that a strong middle class implies terrifies the 1%…they’ll no longer have a function. They’ll be ordinary, like all those proles.
They hate that idea.
RareSanity
@Chris:
Exactly.
The support of radicals is the only thing keeping the GOP competitive. Lose them, and there is no more national Republican Party, period. They would still wreak havoc at the state and local level, but they would be done at the Federal level.
Villago Delenda Est
@Patrick:
The purpose of the financial transaction tax is to kill the Vegas mentality of too many on Wall Street. They’ve forgotten their original role in the economy, and now it’s all about the benjamins flowing to them, not the efficient allocation of capital to grow the economy.
They are parasites. They need to be stopped.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
There’s an interesting example of this kind of thinking on the cover of TIME’s Asia edition, now on newsstands. The cover story, about the shutdown mess and its effect on Asia-US relations, is blurbed “Asia’s Obama problem”, as though the problem were Obama himself — which it plainly is not, for the obvious reason — rather than the US as a nation.
RSA
@schrodinger’s cat:
Every single person I’ve asked this or a comparable question (for example, on financing the war in Iraq) has told me that they were just as adamant during the Bush administration.
I’m thinking it’s like Woodstock.
RareSanity
@RSA:
Same here.
I say, to end all of this foolishness, find a way to bind military retirement benefits to SS. Then when the cut SS brigade comes around, we can say, “Why do you hate our veterans? Why do you want to cut their benefits? Haven’t they sacrificed enough for America?”
Because the only thing these nuts seem to hold sacred is the military. Well, unless a Democrat is Commander in Chief…then there seems to quite a bit of flexibility.
Baud
@RSA:
They hated it on the inside.
@Amir Khalid:
We’re counting on you to set the record straight in Asia.
Amir Khalid
@Jeffro:
I too think that Cruz thinks that’s what he’s doing. But Cruz is showing that he can’t distinguish between aggressive political tactics and being a bull in a china shop. Sooner rather than later he’s going to piss off his last allies in the party, and then you’ll start seeing various unlikely combinations of Republicans plotting to fuck him over.
Yatsuno
@Jeffro:
No way. Cruz wants top dog or nothing. I’m hoping on nothing.
sharl
@RSA: I have similar suspicions – and I love your Woodstock reference. But until TPC-NSA-Google MegaCorp commercializes The CC – which would probably be invented by someone who ends up getting screwed out of patent royalties – and then noble operatives can steal and re-purpose it, we won’t be able to prove this. For now we’re left with only circumstantial evidence (although there’s a wealth of that, IMO).
gene108
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yeah but Reagan was preaching in an era where there was measurable social deterioration compared to a generation or two earlier.
Violent crime kept going up and then the crack epidemic hit and it jumped even higher.
Teen pregnancies, for example, were going up.
Recreational drug use was going up.
Divorces were going up and up.
There was some level of cause-and-effect thinking that could under lie the idea that despite the massive expansion of government programs for the 15 years prior to Reagan’s inauguration, in 1981, some of the basic measures of society were going down; therefore government was not the solution to everything.
Whether it was the right cause-and-effect correlation is a different matter, but I can see why someone would make that connection.
Unfortunately the Republican Party still thinks it is 1980. The media also thinks it is 1980.
Crime is at a 50 year low, despite high unemployment and an increase in the poverty rate.
Teen pregnancies are down.
The social problems that scared people 30 years ago are just not there.
Kids aren’t doing drugs as much as their parents did at the same age.
Kids are going to college in record numbers.
There’s been a huge improvement on so many of the social issues Reagan ran on, over the last 20 years, for whatever reason, but the media keeps blowing up the negatives, so we can never celebrate reduced crime rates, reduced teen pregnancy rates and children, who by every measurable metric are better educated than their parents and grandparents.
There’s a reason no one runs on a “tough on crime” platform anymore, because violent crime is not ravaging the country. It has become a non-issue for most folks.
I really wish we could get out of this time warp and focus on the problems of the day and not continually reliving what Baby Boomers went through, when they were younger.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@? Martin:
lolwut
If yer 401K if doing that, then yer prolly one of the only SOBs making money in what is a completely rigged game.
RareSanity
@Jeffro:
Shorter Cruz: We need the people to elect officials that believe “clap louder” is an effective political strategy.
I for one support Ted Cruz in his cruzade to primary these cowardly lions, these RINOs, of the GOP, they are not sufficiently committed to the
nutjobconservative cause.Please proceed, Senator.
gene108
@FlipYrWhig:
Maintaining large deficits is not something that should be maintained over the long run. Once interest rates start going back up debt servicing will start crowding out other spending.
The grand bargain will be to address long term budget problems.
Depending on what form it takes, I’m generally O.K. with the idea that we should set up how we are going to tackle long term budget issues now.
I just hope that if we ever get a balanced budget again that voters realize, who blew up the last surplus on tax cuts for the rich and vote out Republicans, so we can invest it back in infrastructure for the future.
Chris
@Amir Khalid:
Probably a logical consequence of having lived for too long in a bubble where there’s no such thing as “too much” or “too loud” when it comes to ideology.
I’m kind of sorry I don’t have an in-depth knowledge of what the CPSU was saying in the eighties; I’d be interested to compare that madness to the one gripping our GOP right now.
gene108
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s what Medicaid for elderly, Section 8 housing and “Obamaphones” (there’s been a subsidy for telephones for some time), among other government social safety programs, are for – to pick up the slack for poor elderly people, so they can have somewhat decent lives and their children aren’t getting jammed caring for their parents.
Jay C
@RSA:
Yeah, pull the other one! Back in the Dubya Days, most (if not all) complaints about “deficit financing” were met with dismissal or scorn by Administration flacks, who usually either “waved the bloody shirt” of 9/11, questioned the critics’ patriotism, or, occasionally, questioned their faith in the capacity of the American economy to carry a minor couple-of-trillion-dollars-worth of debt.
And said critics’ carps that such a cavalier attitude about deficits would only last as long as there was a Republican in the WH…..?
Chris
@gene108:
The issues didn’t get resolved like they were supposed to be.
Teen pregnancy rates are down, but without any return to the “traditional” (e.g. 1950s) family model.
Drug use went down, but without any return to “traditional values” on the part of the Goddamn Kids.
Crime rates are down, but These People still don’t know Their Proper Place. (Quite the opposite).
The social issues that terrified Nixon and Reagan voters no longer have much bite, but that’s because they lost the argument, not because they won it.
Ergo, a ton of Old White Conservatives are bitching as loud as they ever were, and the media, of course, nods seriously while taking furious notes. Like they always do.
Crusty Dem
DougJ, please tell me you didn’t miss Fournier lauding Applebee’s yesterday (though he didn’t fall for the salad bar line)..
Jeffro
@Yatsuno: I know that’s what he wants, what he gets is another matter. I can easily see (mostly in my nightmares) a Christie-Cruz unity ticket. Christie would do it to shore up his Tea Party support, Cruz would take it – magnanimously, to be sure – and serve as a very useful attack dog while Christie remains ‘above it all’.
Corner Stone
@drkrick:
This comment is like some modern day version of a Minotaur. Two ideas crammed onto one another that should not exist in the same space.
Corner Stone
@efgoldman:
I’m assuming you have some sort of cite or link for this statement?
Bill Arnold
@Jeffro:
Scary thought. However, do you think Cruz would play nicely with anyone?
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@efgoldman: Nonononononono. High frequency trading just front runs the market and steals pennies from everyone, but on a massive scale.
SiubhanDuinne
@BruceFromOhio:
He lives in Oiho?
SiubhanDuinne
@TG Chicago:
If I have a criticism of Obama, it is that he thinks the American people are smarter, or better-educated, than they actually are. I think he assumes that most people will make that connection once the facts are pointed out. I think this is a bad assumption.
gwangung
@Corner Stone: You’re generally smart enough not to be asking such dumb questions.
Corner Stone
@gwangung: Hmmm. Hmmmmm…
MomSense
@efgoldman:
FSM I hope not. Cutler has pretty much been running since 2010 and his poll numbers haven’t broken 20. Also, too his name recognition is up but so are his unfavorability numbers.
Mullah DougJ
@Crusty Dem:
I missed it! Where can I find it?
sharl
@Mullah DougJ: OMFG, just Googled – apparently he co-authored an entire book back in 2006 that lauds that chain restaurant.
I’m assuming the more recent Applebee’s mention by him was this tweet, which appears to be a response to someone who found that old book of his.
“I’m still a [Applebee’s] regular,” he says.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jeffro:
And then, about six months in to the Christie administration, he suffers a “heart attack” and is deemed incapable of holding the office and Rafael reluctantly takes over.
sharl
@sharl: Oh, and here’s the tweet where someone tried to bait him with the salad bar thing. Unlike David Brooks, though, Fournier really IS a patron, so he knew better.
liberal
@Villago Delenda Est: much more importantly, they’d confiscate every dime of real estate appreciation.
schrodinger's cat
@RSA: Fortunately for us, we can check the record for the Punditubby pronoucements.
JoyfulA
@Jeremy: The ACA will definitely cut Medicare costs. No more waiting until your 65th birthday to get that hip replaced that’s had you limping for 3 years! No more decades-long backlog of preventive care!
In another 5 years or so, people entering Medicare will be healthier and not need lots of expensive ASAP treatment.
Jeffro
@Bill Arnold: He’d play nice long enough to get on the ticket :)
Crusty Dem
@Mullah DougJ:
Channeled my best inner DougJ, but narrowly failed on the home run (but there’s a lot of fail in those twits):
https://twitter.com/MadScientistPhD/statuses/391228860353638400
Jewish Steel
@Crusty Dem: Ha! Foiled by some detailed knowledge of Applebee’s geography. Nice effort though.
Matt McIrvin
Like I’ve said before, I’ve always figured this is basically a trap: Republicans want to hound Democrats into cutting Social Security and Medicare so they can then instantly turn around and attack them for doing it. And the attacks would be deserved.
Crusty Dem
@Jewish Steel: I was all ready to deliver the death blow Jon Stewart “McDonald’s Beer Garden” quip + clip, too.