Tax Cut Clusterfuck

Goddamnit, Senate Republicans. What are you thinking? Your tax plan flies in the face of your most treasured goal—reducing the national debt. It stimulates the economy when it is already nearing full productive capacity which is likely to cause inflation and recession. Token, ephemeral tax cuts in the near

And why is all this happening? You are afraid of losing your donor base! Oh, dear. That would be terrible, wouldn't it? No doubt, it would be maybe the worst thing ever that could happen. So that justifies bypassing Regular Order and thorough vetting of the bill's provisions to enact a jury-rigged bill developed in secret whose provisions are unknown to many senators even as they are called to vote on it. Sure it does. You already have your own set of “facts” and ignore the non-partisan and professional analyses that strongly suggest that your tax plan is a bad idea.

As of this morning, it looks like you may get your wish. I can only hope that I am wrong. Regardless of the bill's fate, I know one thing: Senate Republicans (along with House Republicans and our alleged president) only care about passing something, anything to “prove” that Republicans can govern. Americans' economic security and future opportunity? You talk a good game but it's mostly hyperbole and re-cycled voodoo economics. Real economics suggests that you are doing the wrong thing at the wrong time just to keep your party alive.

Party first! Damn the consequences. 

The Republican Party in 2017.

A Social Success.

Friday was Social Security's 80th birthday, an anniversary worth celebrating.  Due to Social Security, poverty among senior citizens is greatly reduced, especially so following the Social Security Amendments of 1965.  (Courtesy of Lyndon Johnson before Vietnam destroyed him.)  Social Security survivors' benefits were a mainstay for my family after my father died.  That monthly stipend covered living expenses for my first three years of college (I turned 22 in the fall of my senior year and lost my eligibility).  I expect to receive an above average Social Security pension based on my 40 plus-year career.  In all, I am very supportive of a system that has worked well. 

Social Security an important component of our national and inter-generational social contract.

“Social Security creates a strong link between the aged and the working-age population. The idea behind the program is that today’s workers create the capital, the technology, and the wealth that will support tomorrow’s generation. Embedded in its formulas is the notion that those of us who came before, whether they were teachers, accountants, homemakers, mail carriers, barbers, cashiers, or lawyers, have built up the productive capacity of our nation.

When the children of these workers come of age (along with new immigrants), they will earn their living from this infrastructure while also making their own contributions. As they do so, we will peel off some portion of their earnings to provide pensions for their forebears, just as those forebears did for their own predecessors. If this were a Disney movie, music about the “Circle of Life” would swell up here, but suffice it to say, Social Security is an elegant collaborative solution to a universal challenge.”

This, to me, is one of those fundamental values that demands the nation's attention and resources.  For those resources I would look to the wealthiest to surrender some portion of their wealth to ensure that the system remains sustainable and available to future generations.  It's that important and the wealthy have plenty to spare.

Social Security was the topic of Bernie Sander's speech to a Socialist gathering in Seattle last Saturday to celebrate the 80th anniversary, the speech he never gave.  (The Stranger has some excellent coverage of that event.  I also got a first-hand report from Maggie who attended the event while I was in Seattle videotaping a friend's wedding.)  One of the reasons Sanders has always appealed to me is his unwavering support for raising taxes, possibly even mine, to keep Social Security solvent.  

In the 70's I and my fellow Boomers wondered if we would actually receive Social Security benefits.  Reforms in the 80's increased the retirement age for people born after 1937, increasing the age for full benefits to 67 for people born 1960 and later.  That made the system solvent but it produced a surplus that was all too convenient for politicians trying to minimize annual deficits so those surpluses are now US Treasury bonds that the current crop of politicians don't want to pay.  After all, it might cause some of their wealthy supporters some financial discomfort. 

That's why I'm happy to see Bernie Sanders running for president.  He may not stand a chance but he may just keep his opponent from selling out to the fat cats who fund her campaign. 

What Elizabeth Says

Senator Elizabeth Warren has an op-ed piece in the Washington Post today that lays out a strong case against the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement now being negotiated, largely in secret, by the US and Asian trading partners. 

Warren sums up the whole thing nicely:

Replacing the U.S. legal system with a complex and unnecessary alternative — on the assumption that nothing could possibly go wrong — seems like a really bad idea.

Nothing But Your Chains

Steven Pearlstein had a long piece in the Washington Post that asks some hard questions about the morality of a capitalist economy that distributes rewards so unevenly.  Pearlstein notes that both left and right have some serious misconceptions as the basis of their perceptions of capitalism.  The entire column is worth the read but I was struck by his his strong focus on inequality, not to mention seeing this idea addressed so prominently in a MSM publication.

In our current debate over capitalism, too much attention is focused on whether, how or how much to redistribute the incomes that markets have produced, with too little focus on the institutional arrangements that determine how that income is divided up in the first place. Such a focus would take in everything from minimum-wage laws to labor laws to the rules of corporate governance. At this point, the markets’ uneven distribution of income has become so dramatic that it threatens to overwhelm the ability of a progressive tax-and-transfer system to keep up with it.

Capitalists assume that their rewards a ordained by the Invisible Hand of the Free Market (aka God) when in fact capitalism is a man-made system that gives capital vastly more power and reward than it gives to labor.  In our overheated capitalism on steroids, that imbalance leads to a small owning class and a much larger owning-far-less-or-nothing class.

You'd think that, rich as they are, the owning class would understand the perils of inequality, that hoarding all of the wealth leaves far too many with nothing to lose.  Karl Marx may have been wrong about the  Communist Utopia but he was dead-on correct about what people with nothing to lose can do.