You remember how I’ve spent much of the last year ranting about how unserious Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are about dealing with the budget deficit? My main argument: you don’t start a discussion of the budget deficit by making it worse. Tax cuts may be a great idea, but that’s a different issue. You just aren’t being serious if you say, “I want to cut the budget and the first thing I’m going to do it reduce revenue and increase spending.” And that is what both of these guys have said.

It isn’t just partisan Republicans who do this. Remember Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the two Very Serious gentlemen who have been screaming that the sky is falling for the last many years? Two years ago, they had their deficit reduction committee, which came up with a plan that the committee wouldn’t vote for. (Eventually, Simpson and Bowles released their own report that journalists erroneously refer to as the the committee report.) That plan started with—Wait for it!—a reduction in the top marginal tax rate.

But wait! Isn’t Erskine Bowles a Democrat? Yes he is. But he’s not that into it. Or perhaps better: so what? Being a Democrat doesn’t mean you are liberal; it only means you aren’t a complete freak. It is better to think of Bowles as a board member of Morgan Stanley. Not only is that true, but it gets at the heart of who he is and what interests he has. Let me go a little deeper.

Why does anyone care about the deficit? The government must borrow money to finance the deficit. If the economy were not depressed, this government borrowing would reduce the amount of money available to businesses for their own projects. Given that there would be more demand for this money than the supply, interest rates would go up. This is not the situation now and probably for the next couple of years. But eventually, the federal deficit could make the cost of doing business more expensive.

What’s more, it could cause inflation, and if you are a follower of the Austrian school of economics, you just know it will. And this seems to include Erskine Bowles. Two years ago, he claimed that within two years interest rates would skyrocket. It is two years later and interest rates are two percentage points lower than they were when Bowles went all Chicken Little on us. So Bowles was completely wrong. And you know what that means to the fools in media: he’s a genius!

The more important point here is not just that Erskine Bowles is an idiot; it is that people like him care about the deficit because they fear it will cause the rentiers (the owner class) to make less money than they normally would. Certainly, this could also affect workers. But mostly, the deficit is just a concern of the 1% and all their apologists in Very Serious media (who are all pretty much in the upper class).

Fiscal Cliff!

Today, in a Washington Post OpEd, Erskine Bowles argues, Make a Deficit Deal Now. Jonathan Chait dismantles the argument. First, Bowles goes full tilt Chicken Little again by claiming, “Going over the fiscal cliff would mean allowing a massive and immediate cut to nearly every major government agency and activity, including those vital to our national security or economic growth.” Chait minces no words, “That is totally false.”

The whole phrase “fiscal cliff” is a bad one. If we don’t stop the tax increases and budget cuts by the first of the year, nothing happens suddenly. In fact, the government can pass another tax cut and make it retroactive so that there is no tax hike at all. So all this hysteria makes no sense, unless…

Unless these people are worried about something else. And they are. The truth is that the Democrats have great leverage in his battle—especially if they are willing to push the fight into next year. If the Republicans want to keep the top tax rate from going up by 4.6 percentage points to the still ridiculously slow 39.6%, they must get a deal done this year. If they wait until next year, they will have no hope. This is why Erskine Bowles wants to pretend that we must make a deal now. Now! Now! He even makes the preposterous claim that not making a deal now will help the Republicans:

This is simply not true. As Chait notes: who is it that is pushing for a deal now and is so afraid of the fiscal cliff? It’s not the Democrats. It’s not President Obama. It is Morgan Stanley trustee Erskine Bowles. It is the Wall Street Journal. What does that tell you?

Afterword

I have heard word that Erskine Bowles may replace Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. This may just be wishful thinking on the part of conservatives. Anyway, I’m not sure that Bowles would necessarily be any worse than Geithner. The problem with Bowles being named Treasury Secretary is that it would be a very bad symbolic move. Just as bad, it would mean that Obama would be continuing to surround himself with the very people who caused the financial meltdown. It would be nice to think that Obama has learned something these last 4 years. But I’m not counting on it.

Update (9 November 2012 10:27 am)

Sign the petition against Erskine Bowles as Tresury Secretary.

Matt Taibbi has been writing some strange things recently. On election day, he wrote that it was going to be bad regardless of who won. Later that night he admitted that the evening was actually pretty good. Like a lot of us progressives, I think it was just nerves. He wanted to reassure himself that even if Romney had won, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

And he was right, as long as the Democrats had managed to keep control of the Senate. Of course, there was a question about this. If the polling on the presidential race was so wrong as to allow Romney to win, couldn’t it have also been wrong about the Senate races? Anyway, a Romney presidency would have been a very bad thing, but I doubt it would have caused the cities of America to burn. (At least at the beginning of his term.)

Today brings another curious article by the great Mr. Taibbi, Hey, Rush Limbaugh: ‘Starting an Abortion Industry’ Won’t Win You Female Voters. He spends most of it making fun of Limbaugh, which is always worth spending some time on. Taibbi is at his best when he’s being a total asshole.

Finally, however, he gets to his real point which is that a big part of the Republican Party’s problem is its attitude:

This is certainly true, but I don’t think it is a primary reason why minority voters tend to vote Democratic. Republicans have a much more fundamental problem going forward besides their hatred of pretty much everyone other than white Christian men. The poor vote overwhelmingly for Democrats—even in most red states. (I plan to be writing more about this in the coming days.) Over the past 30 years, the Republicans have pushed policies that moved wealth from the poor to the rich. Thus, there are more and more poor people and less and less rich. This more than anything that anyone is talking about is the reason that the Democrats will continue to strengthen their electoral position.

We will see if the Democrats manage to screw this up by “moving to the center.”

Best line: “Like my books, every box of Ayn Bran is unnecessarily long.” This comes via Digby:

It bothers me that supposed liberals don’t see how they assure long term defeat by accepting the conservative framing of issues. The Republicans, by moving very far to the right, still get conservative policies even when Democrats win. The ACA—Obama’s signature healthcare reform—is far more conservative than what we would have gotten from Richard Nixon. Most recently, I’ve noticed this kind of conservative framing on MSNBC.

The best example of this comes from Rachel Maddow. Understand: I really like Maddow. She holds good progressive positions and her circuitous story structures are delightful. But she makes a major mistake when reporting on reproductive rights: she sets the fight over abortion exceptions rather than the rights themselves. This isn’t to say that she doesn’t believe that women ought to have the right to control over their own bodies; I know that she does. But she spends too much time (rightly) ridiculing those who want to force rape victims to carry the resulting pregnancies. And this says to the world: this is the battle line. But it isn’t. And Rachel Maddow knows this.

Another excellent example comes from Lawrence O’Donnell. On his 25 October 2012 show, he did a segment: “CEOs to Congress: OMG, fix the deficit!”[1] In it, he calls for tax increases and spending cuts, as though the spending cuts are a given and ain’t it great that financial types are finally calling for a very slightly less regressive approach to the problem.

I understand that the argument can be made for spending cuts. The problem with O’Donnell’s argument is that he is yielding the liberal ground and fighting the battle entirely on the traditional conservative ground. Up through the 1970s, conservatives supported tax increases and spending cuts to deal with deficits. Now liberals are claiming that if Republicans will act as they did a few decades ago, it is a major victory. It isn’t.

There are lots of very good ways to deal with our debt problem. As Dean Baker writes, if we got our healthcare system to cost as much as Germany (for example), we would have government surpluses as far as the eye can see. I recommend eliminating the Social Security tax cap. There are many other ideas. But we are lost as long as we dance in the streets at the thought of getting the smallest sacrifices from Republicans.

On reproductive rights, the problem is even worse. As much as I hate the “no exception” anti-choice people, at least their beliefs are logically consistent. I’ve written about this before, On Hating Women:

So the “rape exception” framing of reproductive rights is even worse than the extremist position. We should make the extremists define their position so that normal people can see what they are really calling for. That is my opinion. What is certain is that if we draw the battle line at exceptions, the best we will ever get are those exceptions. I don’t find that acceptable.

I hope that in the future our liberal friends at MSNBC and elsewhere will think about these issues. Shows such as The Rachel Maddow Show and The Last Word define liberal opinion as much as they reflect it. This is a war of ideas, and too often liberal commentators seek to win the battle (this election) and lose the war (better policy).

[1] Note the framing in the story headline: the deficit is a problem. But Obama has cut the deficit by a third. Why isn’t the headline “Cut Deficit Faster”? It would appear that not even O’Donnell knows the deficit has been cut, even though he certainly does.

I don’t think the “crazies” of the GOP are any different, policywise, from the mainstream, they’re just a bit more uncouth. They shriek instead of dogwhistle, say what they actually think instead of speaking in code.

—Duncan Black, Taken Over By The Crazies

Ezra Klein notes the irony of the Tea Party. They have helped the Democratic agenda in three ways.

First, they pushed Arlen Specter into the Democratic Party. And even though he was voted out of office soon after that, he was a Democrat long enough to stop the filibuster on the ACA. We would not have had healthcare reform without Specter. Thanks Tea Party!

Second, in 2010, they pushed unelectable candidates in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada. Klein states that these were more extreme candidates, but I don’t think that’s the case. The difference between the candidates that the Republican establishment wants versus those that the Tea Party wants are not so much policy. It is more attitude. It isn’t that Sharron Angle was more extreme than Sue Lowden and Danny Tarkanian. But they would not have called for armed revolt in the event of their losses. They would never have said that 12-year-old rape victims should “make lemonade.” They would never have called for the elimination of Social Security. But I feel pretty sure they were pretty much in agreement. So again: thanks Tea Party!

Third, we have today. A year ago, no one thought that the Democrats could maintain control of the Senate. In fact, the odds were better that the Democrats could take back the house. It was just a matter of math. There were 23 Democratic Senate seats up and only 10 Republicans. But now, thanks in no small part to Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, the Democrats are likely to lose only one seat—and may lose none at all. Thank you Tea Party!

What I find most interesting about the Tea Party is how their candidates never represent what the group supposedly stands for. They always talk about economic liberty. But their candidates seem far more interested in social issues—especially abortion. It really seems that the mainstream media were duped by the Tea Party. They certainly were never a non-partisan group, but even more telling, they were always just the extreme members of the party. If the true progressives in the Democratic Party started calling themselves the Trotskyites, the media would not start covering them as something new. In fact, Occupy Wall Street can at best be described as a splinter group from the Democratic Party. That’s a much bigger story that only got any kind of traction when police started pepper spraying kids.

So I’m grateful to the Tea Party. But I don’t want to hear about them any more. A bunch of old conservatives have banded together to vote Republican? Now that is a dog bites man story!

While voting, I went ahead and voted for Obama. I think the popular vote is important even though it probably wouldn’t mean a thing to Republicans in the event of an Obama win. Cenk Uygur lays out the case. It is interesting that we agree on Rocky Anderson; I didn’t know that.

Oh please! Don’t let this happen. There is no excuse for this. These machines should be error proof. This is what you get when you let the miracle that is private enterprise profit (directly and perhaps indirectly) from elections.

This is disgusting:

The wonderful C. G. P. Grey has made a lot of great videos, but today it seems important to revisit The Trouble with the Electoral College. In this video, he shows that it is possible to win the electoral college vote by winning only 22% of the popular vote. Clearly, this is unlikely to happen. But we are all of us only too aware that someone can win the presidency without winning the popular vote.

Grey is right to think that the electoral college is bad and undemocratic. Our whole political system is undemocratic. Part of this is by design, because people in small states didn’t want the large states lording over them. But it is also due to the limited technology of the time, as discussed in How the Electoral College Works.

Regardless of how good a case can be made against the electoral college, it is unlikely that we will get rid of it. The problem is that moving to a popular vote would require a constitutional amendment. All it takes is one-quarter the states to block an amendment—13 of them. There are more than 13 states who benefit from this antiquated voting system. It might be possible to convince some of these people to go for a fairer system that would hurt them personally. But that’s unlikely.

Better would be to work to get money out of politics.

I could easily write another 5 articles tonight, but I figure I’ve already written a good deal too much. But before going to bed, I wanted to list how I’m most likely going to vote tomorrow.

President: Jill Stein (But I still support President Obama for re-election and I may vote for him in the end anyway.)

US Senator: Dianne Feinstein (I’m not happy about this but there is no choice.)

US Representative: Mike Thompson

State Assembly 2nd District: Wesley Chesbro (I really like Tom Lynch, but California is in too bad a spot to go with him right now.)

Santa Rosa City Council: Banuelos, Carlstrom, Combs, Wysocky

Prop 30: Yes

Prop 31: No

Prop 32: No

Prop 33: No

Prop 34: Yes

Prop 35: No (This just sounds like one of those laws that will be applied in ways no one voting for it imagined. See Prop 36.)

Prop 36: Yes

Prop 37: Yes

Prop 38: No (This is a regressive tax and is only on the ballot to kill Prop 30.)

Prop 39: Yes (“It will hurt the Job Creators!” Any argument based on this myth should be ignored.)

Prop 40: NV (I’m not keen on this whole issue and given no one is opposing it and I don’t know enough, I’m not voting.)

County School Board Area 4: Lisa Wittke Schaffner

City High School Board: Laura Gonzalez, Donna Jeye (Not: Larry Haenel, Brian Noble)

City Q: Yes (Smaller represented bodies are best.)

City R: Yes (I hate binding arbitration, but this looks like something worth trying.)

City S: Yes (Why was I even asked?)

City T: Yes (Ditto.)

Have fun tomorrow. I know I will! (At least until the results come in.)