Via TPM: “It doesn’t address in any serious or courageous way the issue of the near and medium-term deficit,” David Stockman told [Brian Beutler] in a Thursday phone interview. “I think the biggest problem is revenues. It is simply unrealistic to say that raising revenue isn’t part of the solution. It’s a measure of how …
Tom Levenson
Because It’s Not Their Fault You Don’t Own Your Own Gulfstream
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Free Markets Solve Everything, Republican Stupidity, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue
Take a look at the GOP ‘s vision of Galt’s heaven, air travel division: PASSENGERS fainted when a 5-foot hole opened in the roof of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 flying from Phoenix to Sacramento last week. The most frightening moment may have been when, as one passenger said, “You could look out and see …
Because It’s Not Their Fault You Don’t Own Your Own GulfstreamPost + Comments (92)
Outsourcing, under which airlines shift repair and maintenance work from union employees to low-wage workers overseas and in the United States, compounds the already existing burden on safety inspectors.
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Dozens of F.A.A. inspectors have told me that they no longer have enough money to conduct inspections at repair stations in China, Singapore, El Salvador, the Philippines and Mexico and other distant locations at which major fleets of American-based airlines undergo maintenance.
…The number of foreign repair stations hired to service American planes more than doubled, to 731, from 2004 to 2009. There have been alarming revelations: the Department of Transportation reported the discovery in 2003 of a worker with ties to Al Qaeda at an overseas repair station. In 2005, immigration agents arrested 27 undocumented immigrants working at a North Carolina shop that airlines had contracted for repair work.
Well, maybe McGee’s just a DFH — what’s with this Consumers Union nonsense anyway? Which would be why the current House is acting in such disregard of reports from the Department of Transportation — under George Bush:
…testifying before Congress in 2007, the inspector general of the Department of Transportation, Calvin Scovel III, described instances in which repair work has been contracted out by subcontractors to uncertified shops and unlicensed mechanics. These phantom shops sometimes consist of a sole mechanic who works from the back of a truck … Though drug and alcohol testing is standard for all mechanics who service planes in the United States, a Senate committee found that some overseas repair shops don’t bother with such testing.
Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome your modern Republican Party.
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A conscious decision to weaken an already fractured governmental capacity to perform basic regulatory functions is not part of a dispute on the best way to operate government. The only way to explain the choice to cut FAA budgets at present is if you think the government has no role to play in society at all. When you believe in your heart that the market itself can do no wrong, then the minor matter of airplanes turning into convertibles is insufficiently real to shake your faith in John Galt.
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That’s why, while I agree with just about every complaint about the inadequacy of the recent budget deal and much else besides, we have to remember (a) our folks are fighting an asymmetrical war against political terrorists — and it’s damned hard to deal with thugs who are fully willing to destroy the village in order to save it…
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…and (b): if we don’t stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood, these same sociopaths will be running the whole damn government next time out.
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If you weary of the endless compromise and seeming partial surrenders — as I do — it remains important to remember that we are up against those who, just for this example, see some number of exemplary deaths in the air as just the price you pay for the privilege of living in Galt’s America. If we rage against Obama or any other Democrat for their (admitted and regretted) inabilty to be the perfect expression of our visions of a just society whilst they wrestle with the madness that used to be the Republican party, we take our eyes off the prize: avoiding rule by the worst among us.
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That may not be a grand and uplifting vision of progressive improvement in the human condition, but the avoidance of wretchedness is better than the alternative — much, much better.
Just ask anyone who’s seen the sky through what used to be the roof of a 737.
Image: Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Fall of Icarus, before 1569. (Apropos of nothing, a print of this picture was on the wall of the bedroom in which I slept from zero to about 14. I’m not sure what my parents were trying to tell me, but I still love it.)
Sunday Conundrum…What the Hell Does This Mean?
This post is in: Open Threads, WTF?
This being the following statement from unsuccessful national candidate and half-term former governor Sarah Palin: “It’s not America’s role not to be out and about nation building and telling other countries how to live…” This isn’t snark. (Or rather it is, but I am also experiencing genuine bewilderment.) __ Treat this as a self-amuse open …
Sunday Conundrum…What the Hell Does This Mean?Post + Comments (64)
Children With Matches, Playing in the Powder Magazine.
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, The Party of Fiscal Responsibility
…That would be your present-day Republican party. The just concluded budget skirmish was a mere amuse bouche to the gluttons-for-(other people’s)- punishment that is your modern GOP. The New York Times reports today on what looks to be the mother of all budget battles to come over the vote to raise the debt limit. I’m …
Children With Matches, Playing in the Powder Magazine.Post + Comments (71)
In fact, the debt was created by both parties and past presidents as well as Mr. Obama.
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Of the nearly $14.2 trillion in debt, roughly $5 trillion is money the government has borrowed from other accounts, mostly from Social Security revenues, according to federal figures. Several major policies from the past decade when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress — tax cuts, a Medicare prescription-drug benefit and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — account for more than $3.2 trillion.
The recession cost more than $800 billion in lost revenues from businesses and individuals and in automatic spending for safety-net programs like unemployment compensation. Mr. Obama’s stimulus spending and tax cuts added about $600 billion through the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
The Times is being unnecessarily bipartisan here, certainly. The two great leaps in debt as a percentage of GDP over the last several decades came under Presidents Reagan/Bush the former and then again, with turbojets, under Bush the Lesser, the undisputed heavyweight champion reckless spender.*
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But the Times still got the key point right: Obama-led policy has contributed minimally to the debt — probably too little in fact, when you recall that the stimulus money still hasn’t fully hit the street.
The debt limit is approaching now for two reasons more than any others: years of incompetent, ideologically-driven GOP-led economic and tax policy — largely designed to transfer wealth from public to private hands and from the bottom and middle to the rich — and then the loss of revenue in the recession engendered by that shameful record of misgovernment.
So, to catch my breath, here’s the state of play: we face a debt limit test very soon. Failure to raise it will cause significant harm to most Americans. The GOP is playing Russian roulette with that test. This is not the behavior of people capable of governance. They are hyperactive kindergarteners with a tendency towards pyromania.
There are surely real debates to be had. We’ve got a long way to go to get to a satisfactory and ultimately affordable health care system. We have to figure out how to be and feel secure without spending ourselves into oblivion. It might be nice to figure out how to ease off an oil-centered energy path sometime soon…and so on.
But these are not discussions that can happen when one side is made up of inmates determined to burn down their asylum.
I’m not going to scream at the Democrats for perceived weakness, nor for a propensity to bargain badly. We do not as a rule view damaging America in the pursuit of political advantage to be acceptable. That leaves us vulnerable every time the GOP cozies up to barrel of dynamite, smoldering cigar in hand.
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Even so, I do think that every political move from now to 2012 and beyond has to be considered in terms of how well it frames the GOP as an irreparably shattered institution.
There’s nothing left to save in the party of Lincoln. Whatever we can do to help them go the way of the Whigs, we must…
Update: I see that Ann Laurie and I are but two minds with a single thought.
*The enormous increase in debt under Reagan, marks the point when we first were confronted with the great tax cut lie — what I think of as that huge steaming pile of that which emerges from the south end of a north facing horse captured beneath the Laffer Curve. Reagan inherited a debt level of 32.5% of GDP from President Carter. His tax cuts and profligate spending left us owing 53.1% of GDP at the end of his second term, and the Bush extension pushed that total to 66.1%. Bill Clinton’s combination of tax increases and constraint on the rate of government growth (and, for the most part, a policy of minimal military recklessness) enabled him to leave office having pushed the debt back down to 56.4% — which model of prudent, small “c” fiscal conservatism was so wholly abandoned by Bush the Minimal that he left office having blown the debt up to unprecedented heights: 83.4%.
To sum up: both parties have certainly played a role in the expansion of US national debt — after all, Democrats controlled one or both houses of Congress throughout the Reagan-Bush years. But as far as presidents go, it’s all GOP since 1980…all except that spending undertaken in the last two years to dig out from the financial crater left by the utter failure of Republican governance. So whilst I give props to the Times for highlighting the minimal contribution to the debt driven by Obama policy choices, they are a little too fair and balanced on the rest of it for my taste.
Image: Henry Holiday, The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits by Lewis Carrol, Fit the Seventh: The Banker’s Fate, first published 1876.
Hieronymous Bosch, Extraction of the Stone of Folly, (detail) before 1516.
Because There Is No Shortage of Folly…Why Not Waste Bytes on McArdle Too?
This post is in: Open Threads
What follows is all small potatoes in the great scheme of correctly identifying the couture of Emperor Ryan (and the delusions of his many media courtiers, to be unnamed here) — especially in light of James Fallows magnificent dismembering — see John’s post below — of Ryan’s Budget Against America.™* But still, one must pick …
Because There Is No Shortage of Folly…Why Not Waste Bytes on McArdle Too?Post + Comments (28)
In the same post she writes that the paltry sums to be raised are
hardly going to be enough, given that the big idea for entitlement cost control in the “People’s Budget” is . . . making Social Security more generous + public option for ObamaCare and quasi-price controls for pharmaceuticals. Whether or not you think these things are a good idea, they are not, all by themselves, going to solve Medicare’s cost growth problem. [ellipsis in the original]
Leave the founding error aside and focus instead on the rhetorical sleight of hand within that little passage…
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To start with, did I miss the memo from DFH HQ that we were supposed to claim that the public option and the bargaining over drug prices would solve all of Medicare’s problems in one swoop? Passed me right by, along with just about every one not made of straw that I can remember reading.
Of course, such measures would be useful — but as everyone engaged with the health care reform effort in any kind of sincere way has repeatedly argued, actual cost growth issues turn in large part on the incentive structure of the fee-for-service model…which is exactly what many of the programs in the health care reform law are designed to address. (Thanks, Kay.)
But I don’t want to re-argue HCR just now. Instead, just keep your eyes on McArdle’s hands as she swipes her cards across the table.
Look, she says: something is imperfect. It is therefore worthless.
Well, that’s an old trick, updated for the occasion: health care reform measures may not be actually worthless. But they are hopelessly inadequate to the task, negligible, of no consequence…which allows, nay requires, McArdle to conclude with this:
No, if you want to get the budget under control without meaningfully cutting into entitlements, you’re going to need to hike taxes substantially on the middle class.
Of course! The solution to any policy challenge is to f*ck the middle class.
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Unfortunately, McArdle’s key claim here is what we technically call untrue.
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Nah: my inner George Orwell corrects me:
This is a lie.
You don’t even have to be a wild and wooly wonk to figure this out. As E. D. pointed out a few days ago, and I did with all y’all’s help way back last November, this handy budget calculator put out by The New York Times permits anyone, even Megan McArdle, to test approaches to the budget. When you do, you’ll find that it is surprisingly easy to come up with plausible budget approaches that raise taxes on the rich — but not the middle class — cut spending on defense modestly, and end up in surplus by 2015.
More rigorous reporting would lead one to more sophisticated analyses, but the underlying point remains: restore tax levels to the Clinton years; reduce military spending on unpopular, unsuccessful foreign wars; cut weapons systems that in some cases the Pentagon itself has said it doesn’t need, and you’ve gone quite a considerable distance towards getting the budget under control.
It remains true, of course, that over the long term we will have to figure out how to control medical cost inflation — but as just about everyone with a working brain (and calculator) has noted, simply shifting who pays for care onto the poor and the middle doesn’t do a thing to address that issue. By contrast, single payer models among other approaches provide a host of policy levers on which one could pull.
So why does McArdle assert that the only way forward on the budget is to soak average Americans?
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I can think of only two explanations:
Either she really doesn’t know that the Bush tax cuts and military adventurism cost what they do, which means she’s irredeemably lazy and careless in her writing, (would her editors please take note?)…
Or she does understand that there are plenty of ways to think about the budget that could yield satisfactory results without major tax hikes on the middle class, in which case the lie is deliberate…
…and again, her editors — and especially her readers — should take note.
And with that, I promise no more McArdle for a considerable time (unless provoked)…and I’ll do my best to avoid talking about that former colleague of hers who must not be named.
*I gotta say. Fallows’ was such fun to read that at its end I mentally reached for a cigarette.***
**Yes. I know I’m guilty of title creep. What are you going to do about it?
***Doug J. and others here pointed out that E. D.’s being too kind, in that McArdle misstates the difference between the two budgets, but even though we may all wish to chip in a couple of bucks to buy her a calculator that can actually subtract 18 from 22, that’s not what I’m getting on about here.
****Just to be tediously and moralistically clear: never smoked. Lost dear folks to the cancer sticks. Hate ’em. But you know what I meant, amirite?
Image: Pieter Breughel the Younger, Paying the Tax, between 1620-1640
Aksel Waldemar Johannessen, Card Players, 1918.
I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot
Late to the party (I think I’m going to let that become my middle name), but just to add one thought on the Paul Ryan lovefest by the innumerate and/or the malign: With this story, we’ve welcomed into English a new term of art. Just as “charm” to a physicist means something quite different than …
I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It MeansPost + Comments (87)
As far as I can tell, it has become a modifier to describe any proposal that transfers a financial burden or the balance of life’s risk from society and or its best-off to middle and the poor. If a suggested change in the social contract doesn’t f*ck the poor, it can’t be serious.
Syryosly: the word has become code, several posts here have already pointed out. Its use signals that the weaker party to any bargain is about to get screwed. The claim that enduring others’ pain is “serious” is as archtypical an example of rhetorical deceit as one could hope to find.
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Which thought leads me to two conclusions.
First, that as Dean Baker says via John, any pundit caught using the word has told you how to rate their opinion on anything.
Second, this disdain for language is one of the central fronts in the GOP and friend’s assault on the whole idea of a social contract. That”s the point in the debasement of language: to make it as near impossible as it can be to discuss the reality struggling to escape out from under a fog of meaning-denude verbiage.
There is no one better on this subject than George Orwell, whose 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” has much to say to anyone interested in how to use and abuse language as a tool to convey experience.
In that essay, Orwell captures the modern GOP and its handmaidens — the Brookes, the Sullivans, the Slate contrarians and all the others — with perfect prescience:
…it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
Who can tell what drives people capable of better to rhetorical drink? But those “serious” writers who now find themselves writing both falsely and badly have drunk deep of some bad hooch, to the point where the hunger to cuddle up to the powerful has led them to spiel dreck despite what they know — or should — to be true.
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Let me give (almost) the last word(s) to Orwell, here from the last sentences of the essay. It is, characteristically, a message of some succor.
…one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.
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Amen, George, and amen.
Images: Publicity photograph of Fred Astaire and Adele Astaire in 1921.
James Henry Cafferty, Sidewalks of New York, or Rich Girl, Poor Girl, 1859
The Collapse of the American Empire Won’t Be Televised…
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Clap Louder!, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own
…because we’ll want the juice to light up the last pixels on our flat-screens. Let’s begin with this: The world may have no more than half a century of oil left at current rates of consumption, while surging demand from the developing world threatens to create “very significant price rises” before substitutes like biofuels can …
The Collapse of the American Empire Won’t Be Televised…Post + Comments (126)
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