Robert Rubin and The Fiscal Cliff

Writing in two consecutive posts on the Huffington Post, Robert Rubin argues, as I understand him, that Democrats and President Obama may be ill advised to push too hard for a "compromise" with Republicans in the House and Senate. 

The fact is, those Republicans who feel honor bound by their pledge of allegiance to Grover Norquist--No new taxes--may not be able to give much on the revenue collection side of the equation. They are already staking out their territory: Oh, we can go along with cutting back on allowable deductions, like the home mortgage interest deduction, but we cannot agree to raising the tax rate on billionaires back to where it was under Clinton. So they are stuck.

To get the meager concessions the Republicans in the box are willing to give up, the Democrats will have to slash Medicare and maybe Social Security.

Rubin argues we've been through this scene before: The Secretary of Treasury, Geitner gave away the store to Wall Street last time around: He did not demand a reinstatement of the Glass-Steigall Act which would have prevented the debacle in the banking sector and prevented much of the financial collapse; he did not insist on a limit to the size of the biggest banks to prevent the "too big to fail" scenario from playing out again; he did not insist on a purge of guilty bankers from positions of wealth and power. He was, in a phrase, simply not a traitor to his class. He was of and for Wall Street, not Main Street, not because he is an evil man but because that is all he knows. 

What Rubin suggests is to allow the deadline to expire and then to come back in January and pass what even the Republicans know they must pass: Tax cuts for the middle class, i.e. for anyone making up to $250,000. This way the Republicans have not voted to raise taxes; in fact, they can claim to have voted for another round of tax cuts. The Democrats get what they want by default--they have the tax cuts which have expired for the billionaires still expired, an effective raise in their tax rates. 

Republicans can claim technical purity--they haven't technically violated their pledge and Democrats get higher taxes on the rich, after January 1.

Win, win.

Now, we have to ask ourselves: What would Grover Norquist do?

Well, we know that already, but we can't really ask what would Jesus do, so let's just drop it there.

Who Is Grover Norquist?

One thing about an absolutist is he can be consistent and he can look brave and pure hearted. 

Grover Norquist, who runs an organization in Washington called Americans For Tax Reform, has drawn a clear line and he's somehow attracted 218 Republican members of the House of Representatives and 34 Republican senators to his clearly delineated pledge: I will never vote for a tax increase.

Grover says, "I don't want to kill government. I just want to shrink it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in my tub." 

Very catchy, don't you think?

His book is titled, "Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives."  Can't you just see a throng of white supremacists in Idaho,  sitting around a campfire and holding a book club with that one?

He holds a weekly seance with Republican members of Congress in an amphitheater with rows of seats surrounding an oval table where Mr. Norquist sits, king of the roost.

He has never been elected. He is above elections. He is the high priest of the Republican Party. He has the keys to the golden handcuffs for which, for some reason, Republican lawmakers willingly extend their wrists.

If he has not shrunk the federal government to the size he can drown it in his bathroom, he has at least managed to drown the Republican Party there.

What this means, of course, is that a substantial portion of Congress has agreed not to govern, if what we mean by governing is compromise, voting to enable the government to reduce its own debt, provide for FEMA and Coast Guard helicopters to rescue citizens in distress, sustain armed forces, send out Social Security and Medicare checks and do all the essential things which have become so much a part of our lives we hardly realize they are government services at all. 

The federal government has got so good at doing things even its detractors fail to appreciate how essential it is--which is where the famous remark, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare," comes from. 

Not having been elected, Norquist does not have to provide constituent services, respond to flooded parts of his district, serve or protect. He can sit, fat and happy, at the head of his oval table during his weekly audiences with those who do have to govern and he can remind them what his commands are. He is a sort of Brody from Homeland, the Marine Sergeant elected to Congress whose mission is to destroy the government from within. 

But unlike Brody, Grover's power does not derive from a foreign terrorist--he is a homegrown terrorist, determined to return our government, if not our nation, to the 19th century, to the time before the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, who Grover considers the first of America's long line of socialist presidents.

He is, and he can be, mad as a Hatter, but it doesn't matter because he has no real duties or responsibilities, other than to hold forth, like a slightly higher brow Rush Limbaugh, expostulating pithy, quotable burbles, entertaining the resentful masses, those people who will not give up their guns until they are pried from their cold, dead fingers, because their guns make them feel...Big, and important.

Grover is truculent, and he is bold and sure of himself , and there have always been men like him, and likely always will be. 

The mystery is: why do all these Republican congressmen charge like so many lemmings to the precipice of his office?

Of course, the one New Hampshire politician who decried "Pledge Politics" was asked at every forum why she had not taken the pledge--in this case a pledge to never sign into law a state income tax--and she was defeated in the primary by Ms. Hassan, who had signed that pledge. And at every forum, Jackie Cilley explained this would hand cuff the governor who signed the pledge, that an income tax had to be a viable option, even if you intended never to use it,  if only to intimidate unruly representatives who refused to compromise.  And at every forum, some old goat would croak, "Then you're for an income tax."

So, I guess I have discovered who Grover is. He is that dark side of ourselves, the nasty demon in  our soul who simply does not want to think things through, who just wants to stamp feet and throw tantrums and spit and scream.

He is the ultimate Trojan Horse. Just reel him into the city, past the gates of compromise and good governance and when night falls, the hell cats of destruction will pour out of his belly and rampage through the city and bring down the government in flames, and be happy about it.

McCain, Rice, Ayotte and Benghazi: Rice Pudding

Kelly Ayotte looks like such a nice lady. She has, even Democrats must admit, a sweet face. She has a son in the Army. And she chooses for friends some of the Republican party's most unsavory nasties.  

She embraced Sheriff Arpaio, of Maricopa County, Arizona, who did "sweeps" of Mexican looking individuals who had the misfortune of driving down Arizona roads while looking Mexican. He threw these unfortunates into open aired concentration camps and dressed them in pink underwear and marched them down the streets while American looking Arizonans laughed. Senator Ayotte loved the man.

Now, she is rubbing shoulders with Lindsay Graham and John McCain as they try to win some sort of frat boy contest to deny President Obama Ambassador Rice, just in case President Obama decides to appoint her Secretary of State.

Apparently, Ms. Ayotte, Senators Graham and McCain need to be reminded, unless Mad Dog has got this wrong, President Obama won the election on November 6, 2012.  The Republicans lost even more seats in the Senate. 

Gerrymandering saved Republicans in the House.

But, here's the thing:  Nobody out here cares what Ms. Rice may or may not have said on Sunday morning talk shows. Up here in New Hampshire,  we do not watch those shows. It's not that we are in church, mind you. We are out murdering deer or moose or building a garage, or sitting around eating breakfast at the Depot Square breakfast place, or rocking in chairs around the pot belly wood burning stove at the hardware stores, but we are definitely not wasting time watching Meet the Press or Face the Nation and we are definitely not  listening to Charles Krauthammer or even Rush Limbaugh (although we may tune into Rush during the week.) No, we are not concerned if the CIA gave Ms. Rice a flawed script and she read it. We have better things to do.

Like maybe thinking about voting out Ms. Ayotte, who has become an embarrassment. She was swept in as a Tea Party favorite in 2010, when the Tea Party was all the rage. She took the Norquist pledge to never vote for a new tax, and if Jesus Christ returned tomorrow saying we really ought to tax the rich to save the poor, so the rich could get through the eye of that needle into Heaven, why Ms. Ayotte would still cleave to the pledge and she would vote against Jesus himself, because she feels she owes it to Grover.

Actually, we are not, most of us all that over awed by Jesus,  in the Granite State. He may have been a fine prophet, but all that stuff about giving away your possessions and supporting thy neighbor, gets you onto some pretty slippery slopes--next thing you know, you'll be giving your neighbor things you worked pretty hard to get yourself, and you'll be creating a culture of dependency, which we definitely do not like. Up here, you fend for yourself, and if your neighbor does not chop his own wood, why he'll freeze come winter. 

So, we like that no tax faith Ms. Ayotte talked about. But, really, why is it whenever you look around, she is rubbing shoulders with men who go way beyond all that. Just because you like your good rifle doesn't mean you have to have to run around with guys who like shooting at people in deserts...or theaters.

Pass me that coffee and put some maple syrup on those pancakes.

Harmony of Opposites

--Augustus Sherman, Photographer, Ellis Island

It is not an original observation that the red states, in which people are overwhelmingly likely to erupt with fulminating  resentment about the federal government, and where it is an article of faith that the feds take your money and you get nothing for it, are the very places where the return from those taxes is most intense. So Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama are all states where for every $1 sent to Washington $1.5-$2 come back to these states.
Oddly, New Hampshire is a net donor state.  Taxes in New Hampshire are among the lowest in the nation, overall; we rank #47 in taxes, without a state income tax or sales tax.
Of course, in New York, taxes are high, but look what they get for them!  Mad Dog is in New York City today. Three days ago he hiked to top of Mount Major and today he wanders around the magnificent (but not free) Museum of Natural History, Central Park and the streets of the Upper West Side.  This is a city which has much to teach Mississippi and New Hampshire.  They believe in public spaces here, and the result is a community, a harmony of opposites.

Down below Houston Street on the lower East Side is the haunting Tenement Museum, with its photographs of immigrants getting off the boats at Ellis Island in all their native costumes, which were not costumes to them but ordinary dress. The faces looking into the camera are Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, Scandinavian, Orthodox Jewish, Irish and they flooded into New York City and built this throbbing, working metropolis into what it is today. You still see that variety on these streets.
E.B. White said there are 3 types of New Yorkers:  The native, the commuter, and the refugee, whether that is a refugee from overseas or from Alabama and it is the refugee, for whom establishing a life in this city is an accomplishment in itself, who loves the city most.

Walking among the panoply of types here is like walking around  in a Jackson Pollack painting--a harmony emerges out of the disorder and colors and shapes.

We don't have this variety in New Hampshire. But we separate ourselves even so.
When people resist community effort what often emerges is a conviction that "we" work hard for what we've got, and "they" are going to be given a free hand out.

Somehow, if this country is to get anywhere, we all have to get past that conceit.

What Would Jesus Do? True Believers, The Desperation of Belief

In today's New York Times Paul Krugman reacts to an interview in GQ with Marco Rubio, one of the most earnest voices of the Republican Party and Krugman is struck by Mr. Rubio's answer to the question: "How old is the earth?"  Mr. Rubio replied, "I'm not a scientist, man,"  which is manifestly true, but then he goes on to say "it's one of the great mysteries," putting it in a category along with eternal questions like, "why do bad things happen to good people" and "where do we come from and where are we going?"   

In fact, the question of the age of the earth is a question about measurement and we can, in fact, get at least an approximate measurement.

Of course, the reason Mr. Rubio is afraid to answer this question is he is afraid of offending the creationists who deny/doubt evolutionary theory. The vast eons of time required for evolution to explain the almost incomprehensible variety of life forms on earth require vast time. Creationists, for reasons Mad Dog is unfamiliar with, need the earth to be only a few thousand years old to fit with whatever they have found in parts of the King James version of the Bible.

As Mr. Krugman observes:  "What was Mr. Rubio's complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children's faith in what their parent told them to believe."

Mr. Krugman is a numbers man. This is not to say he is a scientist--he is an economist, which may be the  "dismal science" but it is no science, because you cannot do hypothesis-test-measure thing, i.e., you cannot do experiments with sufficiently few variables.  And he is a professor, so he is familiar to with the problem of teaching students, younger people things which may conflict with what their parents taught them.

My own son told me a story about being in a class at Vanderbilt when the professor posed a knotty ethical dilemma for the class and then called on a student for his analysis. How would you solve this problem? How would you weight the competing claims and values here?  The chirpy, bright faced, well scrubbed student replied, without a moment's hesitation:  "I'd just ask myself, 'What would Jesus do?'"

At which point, half the class groaned, slid under their desks, tossed wads of paper at the Jesus disciple, laughed, cried and generally grumbled about transferring to another college.  

Vanderbilt is a very interesting institution, founded by a Vanderbilt (a one percenter) in 1873 to create an atmosphere expressly designed to bring together young people from North and South int he aftermath of the Civil War to reason together, to learn from each other.  The student body, to this day, is about 50% from the South, and Southwest (Texas mostly) and the other half from the Midwest (Chicago mostly) and the Northeast (the Washington to New York corridor.)  The faculty is now predominantly from the North.

The professor smiled and asked, "Well, but how would you know what Jesus would say about this particular question--as far as I know, and I've read the Bible since I was a child, Jesus was never presented with this question,or anything remotely like it.  This woman, who was impregnated by rape, and whose pregnancy threatens her life owing to eclampsia asks for an abortion.  Should she be allowed an abortion? Find the text in the Gospel which addresses these circumstances."

Now, Krugman reports a Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain has reported "the now extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations."

Ya think?

You need "extensive research" to appreciate this?  

When Mad Dog  was growing up, he found himself attracted primarily to Catholic girls  because Catholic girls had the most to rebel against. It made them more interesting.

Look at the Supreme Court--the four horsemen of the eighteenth century Alito, Scalia, Roberts and Thomas are either Catholic or fundamentalist--grew up hearing "all the answers are in the Good Book." And now they are "originalists" who look to all the answers in that Good Book called Constitution, as if its authors, those  18th century gentlemen, some of whom were slave owners, some of whom were brilliant, but who among them could have anticipated the microphone, television, the internet, public education, the land grant college, automatic weapons, nuclear power plants and all those forces which make the 21st century such a different world from the 18th?

We all want to clutch on to something in the swiftly moving current of life. We want to believe we know things, immutable truths. And we find it hard to give up old beliefs. Mad Dog has occasionally complained that 90% of what he was taught in medical school turned out to be wrong or at least subject to heavy revision. That the heart pumps blood to the brain, that the pituitary gland controls the thyroid gland's release of thyroid hormone (except when it doesn't)  are still verifiably true, but those are the few boulders in the stream, still firmly planted as the roiling currents of change sweep past.

So Republicans refuse to hear new evidence, refuse to believe new things, refuse to give up cherished beliefs.  Don't we all, in some ways? The problem is, the Democrats know we have to be willing to go forth boldly into worlds where man has never gone before. The Republicans would rather curse the darkness than light a candle.

Financial Future of Medicare, Social Security. Glass Half Empty

Report from the New York Times Re: The Financial Future of Medicare and Social Security:

The Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in 2033, three years sooner than projected last year, the administration said. And Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund will be depleted in 2024, the same as last year’s estimate, it said.

Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue, a trustee of the two programs, said Social Security’s disability insurance program faced the most immediate threat, with its trust fund expected to run out of money in 2016, two years sooner than predicted last year.

For the disability program, as for Social Security over all, tax receipts would be sufficient to pay about 75 percent of promised benefits after the trust fund was exhausted.

In the past, Congress has occasionally shifted revenue from one trust fund to another to avoid any interruption of benefits. But if the disability trust fund borrowed money from Social Security’s old-age trust fund, the loan would have to be repaid, officials said, and the measure would not solve the programs’ problems.

Richard S. Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, said the projections in the report, based on current law, “are probably poor indicators of the future financial status of Medicare.”

 But, the public trustees said, “the reported long-term financial outlook has grown worse,” primarily because the government accepted advice from technical experts suggesting faster growth in Medicare costs.

In explaining changes in their Social Security projections, the trustees cited slower growth in average earnings of workers and the persistence of unemployment in the slow recovery from the recession. They lowered their projection of average real earnings in the future, primarily because of a surge in energy prices and “slower assumed growth in average hours worked per week after the economy has recovered.”

Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the panel’s health subcommittee, said, “Today’s report continues to show Medicare on a sound financial footing,” mainly because of the 2010 health care law. Still, Mr. Stark said, Republicans keep trying to “end Medicare as we know it, not because the program is unsustainable, but because they want government out of the business of guaranteeing health care.”

What Mad Dog infers from this report of various experts, trustees and actuarials is that both Medicare and Social Security would run out of money, unless new money is provided , sometime in the next 20 years.  That is, if things stay static for the next 20 years, and we do not pump any more money into these programs, these programs will start to run out of money. 

That new money could come from an improved economy, with more taxpayers paying more into the programs, or from, Heaven forbid, higher tax rates to support these problems. That is, we might solve the problem of the bank account, by depositing more money into it. What a novel idea!

But, because Republicans have taken a no tax pledge, the option of generating more money for the programs does not exist for them, which means the only thing to do is to cut expenditures.  That means, coupon care, abandoning the promise to pay for your medicare expenses and abandoning the promise to pay out pensions under Social Security. It's the only way, the Republicans say.

And it is, if you vote Republican.

.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 24, 2012, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headli

Ms. Maud Instructs

I am working on the cartoon, but until it is done, a few cogitations on Ms. Biddle's salient points.

Let us begin with the most important articles of faith, i.e. #12 (see previous post):  Medicare and Social Security are about to go bankrupt and can only be saved by Paul Ryan, his Coupon Care and the Republicans efforts to slash these programs down to a splintered shadow of their former selves.

There are different ways of knowing, and we can do the citing of references, examination of numbers, but my understanding, which is based on what I have read from the Congressional Budget office and from what Mr. Biden, Mr. Obama and virtually all the Democrats (but, significantly, not from a single Republican) is this:  Medicare is actually quite healthy. It is in great shape until at least 2030. The Republicans, Mr. Ryan in particular, have tried to rumor it into a fatal illness, but none of the scientists can find anything to indicate poor health. It seems robust and hale and hearty at nearly 50 years of age.

Social Security has been in similar robust good health, and in fact it's main problem has been it's very prosperity, such that all it's friends, relatives and neighbors have been borrowing from it at a prodigious rate, which has diminished Social Securities own account over the years.

The standard line from the Tea Party Republicans is that the numbers don't lie: There will be fewer and fewer young healthy, working people coming along to pay into the program which supports that big part of the population, the baby boomers now entering retirement. But, contrary to what the Republicans say, the demographic does not mean the Social Security program is or will be in the foreseeable future, in financial  dire straights. Enough people have paid into it for long enough, it's doing just fine.

I did make a cartoon about this, with Paul Ryan pushing the head of the dolphin under water so he can claim it's drowning. 

Oh, we have to save Flipper. He's drowning!

But nobody commented on it, so I guess it didn't make the point.

Mad Dog must admit, he has not gone over the numbers recently. He is guilty of what Rush and Sean and Paul and Glenn are guilty of--simply repeating something heard because you want to believe it--a la Karl Rove--a sort of math that makes you feel better. 

Mad Dog will endeavor to bring some references to bear on this point.