In the wake of its failure in Europe, Republicans must sense that being cheerleaders for austerity isn't a big winner in America. So what does Paul Ryan (R-WI) do, since his budget slashes tax rates on the wealthy and services for working people? He just pretends it doesn't.
GREGORY: This question of austerity in Europe. They had failing economies, nearly depressed economies. The answer throughout the region was to slash their budgets. Has it failed?
RYAN: Well, no David. I would say, they've also raised taxes, they have...This is a cautionary tale of what happens when politicians who make a lot of empty promises end up running out of the ability to borrow money at cheap rates and now they're broken promises. It's a cautionary tale of what will happen to us if we stay on the path we're on. What we're saying is let's get on growth and prevent austerity. The whole premise of our budget is to preempt austerity by getting our borrowing under control, having tax reform for economic growth, and preventing Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid from going bankrupt. That preempts austerity, the President, his budget...puts us on a path toward European austerity.
So now President Obama wants austerity? Seriously? I thought he was the biggest taxer and spender EVAH?
Of course, none of this makes any sense at all. Ryan's budget cuts spending by $5.3T over the next 10 years, including basically ending Medicare -- while giving huge tax cuts to rich people. That's the definition of austerity.
Oh, and if Ryan's so worried about "getting our borrowing under control" -- why does his budget make the debt worse?
This is why we can't have nice things. Former Bain Capital executive Edward Conard--showing that the .01 percent have their finger on the pulse of America--wrote a book declaring that massive income inequality is actually a good thing.
Conard understands that many believe that the U.S. economy currently serves the rich at the expense of everyone else. He contends that this is largely because most Americans don’t know how the economy really works — that the superrich spend only a small portion of their wealth on personal comforts; most of their money is invested in productive businesses that make life better for everyone. “Most citizens are consumers, not investors,” he told me during one of our long, occasionally contentious conversations. “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.”
This is the usual defense of the 1 percent. Conard, however, has laid out a tightly argued case for just how much consumers actually benefit from the wealthy. Take computers, for example. A small number of innovators and investors may have earned disproportionate billions as the I.T. industry grew, but they got that money by competing to constantly improve their products and simultaneously lower prices. Their work has helped everyone get a lot more value. Cheap, improved computing helps us do our jobs more effectively and, often, earn more money. Countless other industries (travel, telecom, entertainment) use that computing power to lower their prices and enhance their products. This generally makes life more efficient and helps the economy grow.
The idea that society benefits when investors compete successfully is pretty widely accepted. Dean Baker, a prominent progressive economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value. The Google founder Sergey Brin might be very rich, but the world is far richer than he is because of Google. Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it.
Let's hear it for the Chicago School of Economics claptrap. For thirty plus years we've been hearing this and it yet the economy gets worse and worse for not only the 99 percent, but for the country as well. We went to the biggest creditor nation to the biggest debtor nation. The economy isn't driven by innovation and risk, you selfish ass. Let's stop perpetuating this meme once and for all.
The economy is driven by demand. Period. Full stop. All the innovation and risk in the world means nothing if people can't afford to purchase the products.
As Thom Hartmann puts it:
The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided "conservative" Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts.
I am sick and tired of these wealthy, selfish elites getting a platform to rationalize their avarice when we have demonstrable proof that all this "job creators" and "innovators" driving the economy is nothing but bovine excrement. Where are the damn jobs? Why are wages stagnating? Why is it that in the wealthiest nation in the world 1 in 5 children are going to bed hungry or malnourished?
More to the point, Conard doesn't seem to understand the negative consequences of income inequality, certainly not in any form beyond an abstract red line on a graph. Viewing the economy simply as risk and reward divides the population into rich and not-rich, rather than increasingly wealthy and vastly expanding poor. It collapses the lower and middle classes into a monolith of moral distinction; they're simply "not innovators," a label that occludes everything awful about poverty, from quality of life to its cyclical and self-reinforcing nature. Conard's model also assumes lower prices are a financial salve in and of themselves. But simply because food is cheaper does not mean that someone living below the poverty line can afford enough of it, especially as median incomes decline along with prices. And Timothy Noah points out that while the prices of goods have declined in the past few decades, the prices of other, more important services, like higher education and health care, have gotten drastically more expensive. How a shrinking middle class, having to work longer hours to keep itself healthy and increasingly unable to afford education, creates a greater amount of innovators is something Conard doesn't address. Not only do innovators suffer when an enervated society can't afford to purchase their products, but innovators themselves have to come from somewhere. The income inequality that Conard endorses as the reward for innovators is the very same process that prevents future innovators from coming up. Conard waves many of these concerns away. He came from a solidly middle class family and built up a massive personal fortune, and suffers from the biographical delusions of many self-made men, roughly: I did it, therefore everybody else can, too.
Too bad that Conard's self-serving rationalizations actively prevent that from happening.
MORGAN: I'm curious what you're thinking what (inaudible).
GOLDBERG: I would put it [the Bin Laden raid] at -- I don't know, $50 million, $40 million.
MORGAN: Wow. That's cheap in the Republican world?
GOLDBERG: That's cheap in comparison to what the cost of the war on terror is.
MORGAN: No wonder the country got into the mess it did.
GOLDBERG: I suppose that that's supposed to be a really telling point. I'm not quite sure how it is.
MORGAN: I'm just saying the Republican administration obviously led to a huge financial collapse. You wouldn't dispute that.
GOLDBERG: I would and I would also say Barack Obama has spent much, much, much, much more money than the Republicans.
MORGAN: Would you dispute that after eight years of Republican administration the country went into a huge economic collapse?
GOLDBERG: No, but that's a timeline question.
Don't you just love that last bit where Jonah shrugs off Bush/Cheney's presiding over the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression as "a timeline question"? The party of personal responsibility blaming everyone else strikes again!
But Jonah is, of course, totally, hilariously, absolutely wrong about this supposed spending binge under Obama.
"Obama's record spending spree is bankrupting the nation" is yet another Big Lie right-wingers like Goldberg -- who incidentally was a cheerleader for Bush/Cheney while they were turning record surpluses into record deficits -- are telling about Obama. It's a lie Mitt Romney will tell during the campaign.
And it's a lie that the media will probably them get away with.
Monday was Mitt Romney's 65th birthday. Happy birthday, Mittens. In honor of his 65th birthday he announced that he would not be enrolling in Social Security or Medicare. How noble. Except, it's not.
In deference to the conservative dogs nipping his heels, Romney has endorsed the Paul Ryan Medicare plan which would voucherize Medicare and leave senior citizens floundering on their own with private insurance companies. Of course, if you asked Mitt Romney about it, what you'd get is a bunch of lies. Really awful, cynical, blatant lies. Here is a Romney campaign press release:
“There are two proposals on the table for addressing the nation’s entitlement crisis. Mitt Romney — along with a bipartisan group of leaders — has offered a solution that would introduce competition and choice into Medicare, control costs, and strengthen the program for future generations. President Obama has cut $500 billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare and created an unaccountable board with rationing power — all while America’s debt is spiraling out of control and we continue to run trillion-dollar deficits.
“If President Obama’s plan is to end Medicare as we know it, he should say so. If he has another plan, he should have the courage to put it forward.”
Get the trick here? The Romney campaign is accusing Obama of slashing Medicare, and hence “ending Medicare as we know it,” while simultaneously accusing him of failing to curb entitlement spending in ways that pose grave danger to the nation’s finances. This, even asRomney has endorsed a plan that would quasi-voucherize Medicare and end the program as we know it.
This debate is about to ramp up and yet it seems our press cannot call a lie a lie. They'll call it a falsehood, or as one headline read yesterday, a "mistruth." All of which leaves me nodding my head at Lawrence O'Donnell's rant last night about why it is that the word "lie" seems to be gone from the vocabulary of the Village press.
In his victory speech Tuesday night, in addition to lying about what Obama said about gas prices, Newt peddled the Palinesque fantasy that "drill, baby drill" is the answer to all our energy problems and also added (starts around 2:15):
GINGRICH: The price of gasoline when I was Speaker [ed. and Bill Clinton was President] was $1.13. The price of gasoline when Barack Obama became president was $1.89. All of this gigantic increase came from his policies.
And with the Obama recovery, the price has rebounded, but still isn't as high as it was under the Republican oilmen.
So which of Bush/Cheney's "policies" caused the price of gas to go up so much under their watch? And since Republicans controlled all levers of government for four years, why didn't they enact this brilliant "drill everywhere" plan to lower it?
I deeply love the Netherlands and the Dutch people (although they do have a few politicians that give even our most hate-filled ones a run for their money) . I have spent some time in the country and feel such kinship there. The art, the culture, the history, I soaked it up like a sponge. How can you not love a country that gave the world artists like Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh, and icons like Audrey Hepburn and Anne Frank? I even had a personal opportunity to experience their health care system after I slipped on a rainy street and sprained my wrist. Let me tell you, if most Americans had a chance to see what's it's like to walk into a clinic, get treated and walk out without a big bill, they'd be clamoring for even better Obamacare, not cheering for its elimination.
I promise you, Rick Santorum has never been to the Netherlands. But that pesky little fact wouldn't stop him from opining forth on the dangers of being elderly in Holland. Why, aged people don't even like to go into the hospital because of the rampant euthanasia taking place. No, seriously:
Earlier this month, Santorum brought up the subject of euthanasia at a forum hosted by conservative leader James Dobson.
“They have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the people who are euthanized every year, and it’s 10 percent of all deaths, half of those people are euthanized involuntarily in hospitals, because they are older and sick,” Santorum said. “So elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country. Because they’re afraid because of budget purposes they will not come out of that hospital if they go in with sickness.”
Santorum also said some Dutch wear bracelets saying, “Don’t euthanize me.”Earlier this month, Santorum brought up the subject of euthanasia at a forum hosted by conservative leader James Dobson.
“They have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the people who are euthanized every year, and it’s 10 percent of all deaths, half of those people are euthanized involuntarily in hospitals, because they are older and sick,” Santorum said. “So elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country. Because they’re afraid because of budget purposes they will not come out of that hospital if they go in with sickness.”
Santorum also said some Dutch wear bracelets saying, “Don’t euthanize me.”
Oh holy Flying Spaghetti Monster. Isn't there some rule about bearing false witness for these fundamentalists? Because the lie after lie coming out of Santorum's mouth is guaranteeing him a nice toasty place in hell. In fact, his lies are so outrageous, the Dutch have gotten up in arms:
The lesson the Barack Obama presidency should teach Democrats is the Republican Party has only a glancing relationship to the truth and they will continue to lie on camera as often as possible until their lies become conventional wisdom. That's why so many conservatives believe that President Obama has raised taxes, wants to take away their guns (by pretending he doesn't) and initiated the bank bailout.
It works incredibly well. But you have to know your audience.
If you spout off factually untrue slams against Obama on Fox News, no one will argue with you. In fact, it conforms with their agenda of misinforming their audience.
But you don't want to try that on a show like Real Time with Bill Maher, because the audience and sometimes the other panel guests will call you out. Case in point: Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) who chuckles like it's common knowledge that Obama wants to "gut" the military. But fellow guests Kennedy (no liberal, she, although she's clearly not grown out of her annoying MTV schtick), Martin Bashir and host Bill Maher quickly demanded some badly needed fact-checking. Not that it made an impact on Rohrabacher:
Maher, co-panelests Kennedy from Reason TV, MSNBC’s Martin Bashir and even the audience joined in to collectively chastise the California Republican for his blatantly false claim. “That’s absolutely not true,” Kennedy said, later adding, “I love the military. I like my SEALs groomed and ready to go but you have to tell the truth.” “Can I give you the facts?” Maher asked Rohrabacher. “So far every budget Obama has had has increased military spending,” he said. “This year they’re asking a reduction from $531 billion to $525 billion, 1.6 percent. You mean our freedom is in trouble because of that 1.6 percent?” Maher later added, “How paranoid do you have to be to say that this guy is gutting our military?”
Does it surprise you to know that the truth (which is clearly kryptonite to the conservative mind) is that military spending has increased every year of the Obama presidency and all they've done is ask to reduce the rate of growth of spending? And to put not too fine a point on it, but those mandated cuts to defense that allegedly will happen because of the failure of the super committee to put together a deal, which in and of itself was a cowardly avoidance of the larger Congress (of which Rohrabacher is a member) to DO THEIR JOBS.
In what reads like payback for McCain aides’ disparaging comments about her in the wake of the ticket’s loss to Barack Obama, Ms. Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunder-headed — slow to shift focus from the Iraq war to the cratering economy, insufficiently tough on Mr. Obama and contradictory in its media strategy. She also claims that the campaign billed her nearly $50,000 for “having been vetted.” The vetting, which was widely criticized in the press as being cursory and rushed, was, she insists, “thorough”: they knew “exactly what they’re getting.”
Some of Ms. Palin’s loudest complaints in this volume are directed at the McCain campaign’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt, ironically enough, was one of the aides to most forcefully make the case for putting her on the ticket in the first place, arguing to his boss, as Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson reported in their recent book “The Battle for America,” that she would shake up the race and help him get his “reform mojo back.” Robert Draper reported in The New York Times Magazine that neither Mr. Schmidt nor Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, apparently saw Ms. Palin’s “lack of familiarity with major national or international issues as a serious liability,” and that Mr. McCain, a former Navy pilot, saw the idea of upending the chessboard as a maverick kind of move.
All in all, Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, thoroughly ungrateful toward the McCain campaign for putting her on the national stage. As for the McCain campaign, it often feels like a desperate and cynical operation, willing to make a risky Hail Mary pass in order to try to score a tactical win, instead of making a considered judgment as to who might be genuinely qualified to sit a heartbeat away from the Oval Office
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I'm not sure that "going rogue" is going to endear Palin to the party elders, from whom she must receive support if she does want to pursue a national office. Unless, of course, her plan is to dump the GOP and run like the Palin-endorsed Doug Hoffmann in NY-23 as a Conservative Party member. But then again, being politically astute was never part of Palin's appeal.
Sour grapes between the Palin and McCain factions aside, Palin's book appears to be a little on the factually-light side. Our friends at Media Matters have been reading through the book (better them than me) and have compiled a very interesting list of moments where Palin has gone rogue from the truth:
Steven Pearlstein writes an excellent column in the Washington Post that says what most of the media will never say. Republicans lie every chance they get to try and destroy health care reform. The title of his piece is: Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems...
