Last week, presidential candidate Herman Cain stunned the republican presidential field by winning a quasi-meaningless straw poll in Florida by a landslide. Coming in distant second, Ron Paul. Third place, with a single-digit turnout, went to Romney, and the rest disappeared into obscurity from there. Rick Perry, the leading candidate just a few weeks ago, finished fifth behind Bachmann with a percentage just north of zero.
Part of that outcome was due to Perry's incoherent performance in the debate. I feel like we're finally starting to see the real C student from Texas A&M shining through. Part of that outcome, however, was due to Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax proposal. From NPR:
Most importantly, Cain's plan has a short name that rhymes (I believe the people who need to have political ideas presented to them in short, catchy blurbs will allow nine to rhyme with itself...twice). Beyond that, it would call for a 9% flat income tax, a 9% national sales tax, and a 9% corporate tax rate, thus the 999 Plan, and it proved very popular with the crowd at last week's Florida republican debate.
Obviously taxes are a cornerstone of the GOP platform, specifically lowering them through the floor. Herman Cain states his position in his very first line in the following video:
"Our tax code is the 21st century version of slavery." I'm not sure slavery means what Mr. Cain thinks it means, but that might be secondary to the catchiness quotient the line certainly has. I could easily imagine OUR TAX CODE IS 21ST CENTURY SLAVERY on a rally sign right next to the classic KEEP GOVT OUT OF MY MEDICARE.
Obviously slavery in this country was one human being owning another human being for the purposes of forced labor. I guess Cain is claiming that taxes effectively make us the property of the government because they take everything we work for? And by everything I mean zero for corporations like GE? I'm not really sure how the analogy works, but it is evocative even though it makes the ghost of Harriet Tubman weep openly.
There's no denying that taxes are a burden... that's why they're called a tax, which literally means a burden, instead of being called a "massage with happy ending." But I think to conflate a burden with slavery... well, that seems wrong enough that I don't need to dwell.
From the campaign video:
"My 9-9-9 economic growth and jobs plan is a major step towards tearing the chains off the backs of the American people."
Now by the American people, he means the wealthy, and by tearing the chains off, he means shifting them down to lower income brackets. Some details of the plan:
— Cut the corporate tax rate to 9 percent from its current level of up to 35 percent.
— Replace the six brackets of the personal income tax, which range from 10 percent to 35 percent, with a flat 9 percent rate.
— Institute a 9 percent national sales tax to fund the federal government (in addition to state and local sales taxes).
— The plan would eliminate the estate tax, payroll taxes and taxes on capital gains.
It would leave these provisions alone:
— Deductions for businesses on investments and purchases from other businesses;
— Deductions on charitable donations, up to an unspecified amount; and
— Deductions for businesses that employ residents living in designated lower-income "empowerment zones," as well as income tax deductions for residents living in those zones.
So right off the bat, capital gains taxes and estate taxes are gone. So are payroll taxes, which I assume is more to ease the employer side of the burden. Almost all deductions also disappear, except for two that specifically apply to businesses and one that feels more applicable to people with money (not that they are bad deductions per se).
Cutting the corporate rate isn't the end of the world if you're closing the myriad of loopholes used every year to duck covering their due. I can't say if 9% is a reasonable rate to charge once those loopholes are closed, but I guess 9% is better than the zero I mentioned above from GE.
But the obvious problem I have is one a lot of people have, and that's the regressive nature of flat and sales taxes. Rich people will see their tax rate drop to 9% from its current 30-50%. The poorest tax payers will essentially see their tax rate go from zero when all is said and done, up to 9%. Both the rich and the poor will bear the added burden of a 9% sales tax on top of the state and local sales taxes already paid. The upside to that, form the NPR article:
Economist Will McBride of the Tax Foundation says some of Cain's ideas make a lot of sense. A national sales tax, for instance, would mean taxing people for the things they consume, which means they'd spend less and save more. And McBride says a higher savings rate would benefit the economy long-term.
"When you tax saving and investment you are taxing growth, essentially, and you want to encourage thrift, not discourage it," he says.
The downside is that the poor will now have to spend disproportionately more of their income on sales taxes. There are certain things we just can't avoid buying to get by. Everyone will see those prices rise, but the impact on someone making $20,000 will be far greater than someone making $100,000. Not rocket science.
Beyond that:
There's also the question of how much revenue Cain's plan would bring in and whether it would deepen the budget deficit. Cain says the plan would be revenue-neutral, meaning it wouldn't raise more money in total, and that it would lead to higher economic growth, so revenues would increase over time.
But William Gale of the Brookings Institution says we've heard all that before. He says there's no evidence tax cuts do much to affect economic growth.
"Tax policy is full of these Utopian ideas that have never been tried, but everyone's promising that their idea is going to make the difference," Gale says. "And I just don't see it."
I think we can look at our current economy for proof that tax cuts don't necessarily equal growth or jobs. Taxes have been slashed in order to combat the recession and we currently have essentially zero job growth in the economy. Companies are recording boosted profits, but they are still slashing jobs.
We've demonstrated that cutting taxes are good for profits, but I'm not sure it goes any further than that.
Here's Michael Moore appearing on Piers Morgan over on CNN:
I'm not sure why Michael Moore said "Is it really?" in response to being asked if his success was due to capitalism unless that was in response to the phrase pure capitalism. I'm also not sure what capitalism Moore is talking about when he refers to it in its current form and its "back in the day" form. Sure, today's capitalism involves a large finance industry and the old capitalism made stuff, but it did it on the backs of slaves, children, immigrants and the poor putting in 12 hours a day, seven days a week, monopolies, the Senator from Standard Oil...
He states that America is against greed and income inequality, and I think he's right. Examples like Theodore Roosevelt trust-busting and the rise of the middle class post World War II support this, but I feel like the U.S. government has shown itself to usually fall on the side of pro-greed and pro-income inequality.
But he does bring up the easy point that how we conduct ourselves financially contradicts the fundamental tenets of most religions, and there are chunks of the population who seem fine with that. Those same chunks are often the ones who most strongly identify with religion, who insist on vetting candidates based on their professed religion, who push political debates to have moments like this:
McCain can't even give an unqualified Yes comfortably. Sometimes this chunk of people create the political atmosphere where the next guy is just about dead last in line for the GOP nominee:
I'm always curious what this country would look like if we actually practiced what we preached so fervently instead of just paying lip service to the core tenets of many faiths like Christianity. We seem to put a disproportionate amount of effort into the faith required to believe in religion compared to the amount of thought put into the collective actions asked of us by religion.
I know a few days have passed since Mr. Davis was executed, and I know it's a topic that's been discussed extensively during recent times, but I wanted to chip into that discussion because of how valuable I feel it is. Hopefully something of note comes from it. A word of warning, though, this post is going to be pretty long, so if you want to skip ahead to what I'm trying to get to, I'll mark off where that part begins with **********************.
Most people know the facts of the case, but if you don't, here's a quick recap. Troy Davis was convicted in 1991 for the murder of off-duty police officer, Mark MacPhail. Officer MacPhail was working as a security guard at a Greyhound bus station when he witnessed a homeless man getting assaulted nearby. He was shot and killed while trying to stop that assault.
Troy Davis' part of the story starts at a pool party earlier in the evening. While leaving that party with his friend, Darrell Collins, a car passed by and the occupants shouted insults out the window. A shot was fired and hit a passenger, Michael Cooper, in the face. The occupants of the car claimed that the shooter was wearing a white t-shirt and blue shorts. Troy Davis wore a white t-shirt that night. Some of the people in the car were drunk (Cooper for instance), and they could not identify Davis himself.
Davis and Collins continued on and eventually ran into another friend, Sylvester Coles, who was in the middle of an argument with a homeless man over a beer. The homeless man, Larry Young, was pistol-whipped, allegedly by Troy Davis, which caught the attention of Officer MacPhail in the nearby bus station, leading to his death moments later in a Burger King parking lot.
Davis claimed that he was indeed hanging out with his friends, but that it was Sylvester Coles who pistol-whipped Larry Young. Davis claimed he left when things started getting heated and heard gunshots, never actually witnessing the shooting. Coles claimed the opposite; that Davis pistol-whipped Young, and that it was Coles who left as things got heated and heard gunshots a few minutes later. Davis' defense team unsuccessfully tried to paint Coles as the actual killer.
There was no DNA evidence, no fingerprints, and no murder weapon. There were shell casings at both the MacPhail crime scene and the earlier scene where the car passenger was shot in the face. Forensic experts claimed that the bullets fired at MacPhail could have come from the same gun as the bullet that earlier hit Cooper, but the results were inconclusive. The shell casings at both scenes did appear to match, however.
Coles also owned a .38 caliber handgun but claimed he gave it to someone earlier in the day.
Seven witnesses who were key in convicting Davis have recanted their statements. Some brought up doubt at Davis's original trial:
Darrell Collins, who was with Davis and Coles the night of the shooting, signed an affidavit in 2002 saying police pressured him into pointing the finger at Davis. But the trial transcript shows he'd made that same assertion on the witness stand. The jury heard Collins back off a statement he'd given to police implicating Davis in the shooting.
"I told you that I didn't see Troy shoot at them, or shoot that night, and I didn't see him with a gun that night," Collins testified.
In another affidavit, witness Antoine Williams alleged he signed a police statement identifying Davis as the killer — adding a description of Davis' clothing — even though he couldn't read. But at trial, Williams testified that he was sitting in a car with tinted windows, making it hard to distinguish clothing colors, and that he was only "60 percent" sure Davis was the gunman.
"I was definitely not sure that was the guy, because I was nervous and I was watching the gun," Williams testified.
And some after trial:
Young, the homeless man who was pistol whipped, signed a 2002 affidavit saying he never got a good look at the shooter or what he was wearing. At the trial, Young was unable to ID Davis as the shooter.
"I really couldn't get no visual," he said. "I could about distinguish the colors of, you know, the clothing, but I couldn't, you know, see no faces."
At the trial, Harriet Murray, a friend of Young's, emphatically identified Davis as the officer's killer, testifying: "When he was shooting the police, he had a little smile on his face, a little smirky-like smile on his face."
In 2002, Murray signed a statement prepared by Davis' attorneys that gives a much vaguer eyewitness account, with no mention of Davis being the gunman.
During the trial, Dorothy Ferrell identified Davis in the courtroom as the shooter, saying she saw him from across the street and was "real sure, positive sure, that that is him."
But in December 2000, Ferrell signed a handwritten statement saying she was telling police what they wanted to hear, because she was on parole for a shoplifting conviction and feared returning to prison. "I don't know which of the guys did the shooting, because I didn't see that part," Ferrell wrote.
Jeffery Sapp testified at the trial that Davis confessed to him hours after the shooting — though he told the jury he'd made up part of a prior statement to police when he'd said Davis told him he shot the officer a second time to make sure he "finished the job."
Years later, Sapp signed an affidavit saying he'd fabricated the entire confession.
So did jailhouse informant Kevin McQueen. In jail when Davis was arrested, McQueen testified that Davis told him he'd shot the officer. But McQueen took it all back in a signed 1996 affidavit, saying: "The truth is that Troy never confessed to me or talked to me about the shooting of the officer."
Witness Steve Sanders told the jury he saw the shooting from inside a van and was certain Davis pulled the trigger. But before the trial, when asked about the suspects, he had told police: "I wouldn't recognize them again except for their clothing."
Some witnesses even signed affidavits stating that Coles later confessed to the murder.
For years, Davis' defense team worked through various levels of the court system. Often the court rulings against Davis cited that the new information should have been brought up earlier in the process or that the new information wasn't convincing enough to demonstrate innocence or render the original trial unconstitutional. Further complicating the process was the Anti-Terrorism and Death Penalty Act of 1996 that was drafted and passed in reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing. The act makes it more difficult for the federal courts to get involved with state rulings and tightens the rules on habeus corpus. The intent was to prevent people like Timothy McVeigh from abusing the legal system to avoid carrying out death penalty sentencing, but that necessarily restricts the options of someone legitimately fighting a death sentence. Part of the act was to bar death row inmates from presenting evidence after the fact that could have been presented at trial, something that applied to Davis.
Davis was first scheduled to be executed on July 17th, 2007. On July 16th, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles granted a 90-day stay of execution in order to evaluate all the new evidence presented. The Georgia Supreme Court accepted Davis' application for an appeal where Davis' defense team sought a new trial. That appeal for a new trial was denied in March 2008.
Davis was then scheduled to be executed on September 23, 2008. Two hours before he was to be put to death, the U.S. Supreme Court halted the procedure because they would not be able to review Davis' application to have his case heard in time. The Supreme Court decided not to hear the case in the middle of October 2008.
Davis's third execution date was scheduled for October 28, 2008. On October 24, 2008, another stay of execution was granted in order to consider a recently filed federal habeus corpus motion. That was also later denied for reasons like...
As bad as it would be to execute an innocent man, it's also possible the real guilty person who shot Officer MacPhail is not being prosecuted.
... and while there was no DNA evidence to prove Davis guilty, there also wasn't any to prove him innocent. Obviously our legal system doesn't require proof of innocence, just reasonable doubt of guilt.
Finally, in August of 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the lower courts to hear testimony about whether evidence not available at the original trial would clear Davis. That occurred in June of 2010. At that hearing, the court heard about recanted witness testimony, police interference and threats during the investigation, and they even heard from one witness that Coles had confessed to the killing.
And here's where a tragic misstep occurs. The court stated that they couldn't give much weight to the Coles did it theory without Coles there to answer those accusations, but Davis' defense failed to get Coles to the court. In the Seattle PI article, University of Georgia Law Professor Donald E. Wilkes Jr described that failure as...
...the most astonishing blundering and goofing that I've ever heard of in a post-conviction case.
He goes on to state:
"Because of that mistake, the trial judge would not allow them to introduce a lot of the witness recantation evidence," says Wilkes, whose specialties include post-conviction relief, criminal procedure and writs of habeas corpus. "There were a number of witnesses who wanted to testify that this other man had admitted that he was the one who was the killer."
Judge Moore, who ruled against Davis in the 2010 hearing, also blamed the defense team for completely cocking up the Coles bit, but went on to say:
"Ultimately, while Mr. Davis's new evidence casts some additional, minimal doubt on his conviction, it is largely smoke and mirrors," he ruled. "The vast majority of the evidence at trial remains intact, and the new evidence is largely not credible or lacking in probative value."
So now we have a federal judge saying that there is indeed some doubt, it just wasn't enough doubt to make a difference. Another law professor, Michael Mears of John Marshall Law School, who is against the death penalty, feels that we might need to go a little easy on Judge Moore.
But Mears — an outspoken foe of capital punishment who even filed a brief on Davis' behalf — says Judge Moore's hands were largely tied.
The "supposed recantations" and "so-called affidavits," as he called then, were either unsworn or included inadmissible hearsay. Aside from offering Coles immunity, there was little else he could have done without becoming "a part of the adversarial process."
"So I think that, for better or worse, the system has afforded Troy Davis a tremendous number of opportunities," he says.
So Davis' defense team failed at the system, and therefore the system had to fail Davis. While the inability to subpoena Coles in 2010 may have been ineptitude, I think it's safe to say that the system itself is extremely complex and could easily prove to be more of a barrier to overturning a wrongful conviction than to protecting someone unfairly found guilty.
Finally:
In its July 2007 order suspending Davis' execution, the state parole board stated that it would "not allow an execution to proceed in this State unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused." Wilkes says the board, with its "brief, little, pablum-like statement" denying clemency, failed to live up to its own standards.
"No reasonable person can look at this case and say Troy Davis' guilt is certain," he says. "It may be probable. It may be highly likely. But his guilt is not certain."
LeBoeuf says the "global question" is not whether Davis or his attorneys successfully navigated a "procedural thicket of technicalities," but whether there was "a strong evidentiary basis to doubt Troy Davis' guilt."
"And the answer to that, for any fair-minded person, is yes," she says.
*************************
So why did I bother with all of that? Partly it was for me... to make sure I wrapped my head around what actually happened a little bit. Partly it was for anyone out there who was curious about some of the basics but hadn't encountered it yet. The main reason, however, was simply to avoid handwaving away the sheer weight of the process as a whole and what is at stake.
I am against the death penalty. My argument backing my position isn't revolutionary, but it works for me. I believe a death sentence needs to be carried out with perfect accuracy. Anything short of 100% success means an innocent person will be murdered by the state. Obviously, we are imperfect creatures and perfect accuracy is an impossibility.
I admit that there are criminals I would be comfortable with killing given the nature of their crimes and the certainty of their guilt, but I'm willing to let them receive life without parole in order to take the death penalty off the table as the only way to ensure a mistake never happens leaving an innocent person to be murdered by the state.
Nothing revolutionary, but I feel it's the only way to tackle the question in a clear manner. You can get involved in process of asking if certain crimes demand capital punishment, but at some point it will get arbitrary. Evidence shows that capital punishment isn't cheap or an effective deterrent, so there's no greater good element to consider. You could argue whether or not the point of justice is retribution, but you still don't address the most important facet... a mistake leading to an innocent person's murder.
But I don't have any direct control over capital punishment in America. Now we get to why I'm happy to see this issue get so much national discussion. Here's Governor Perry responding to Brian Williams who just asked if there's any lost sleep over the high numbers of executed prisoners in Texas.
The fact that Governor Perry responds no isn't a surprise, but what grants his calm about the subject is the thoroughness of the system. I can't site the differences between Georgia and Texas legal proceedings to insure proper application of the death penalty, but they do share the same federal system. If my life hung in the balance as an innocent man facing capital punishment, I wouldn't have much faith in the system correcting a past error unless I could somehow miraculously prove my innocence with certainty.
Beyond that, Perry goes on to talk about the notion of justice. A life for a life when the circumstances call for it. Again, it feels so arbitrary and cruel, especially in the case where a mistake has occurred, a scenario that Governor Perry, and other supporters of the death penalty never really address when they put their faith in the system.
Cutting Medicare and Medicaid by a combined $320 billion ($248 billion from Medicare, $72 billion from Medicaid). This is in addition to cuts already part of Obama's health care reform.
An additional $260 billion in cuts from other entitlement programs.
Eligibility age for Social Security and Medicaid/care remains at 65 (instead of 67 that had been flirted with during earlier negotiations).
$1.5 trillion in new revenue from consisting of closed loopholes and a tax increase on people making more than $1 million a year (called the Buffet rule after Warren Buffet and his raise my taxes speech).
Counting savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The obvious goal of that Buffet rule is to make sure that high-income tax payers actually pay the same tax rates as the middle class instead of finding ways to get around our tax laws. We go to all of this effort to create a progressive tax system and then undermine it back into a regressive system through tax breaks and loopholes.
Obama also rightly calls out the regressive nature of the one idea Republicans have put forward regarding the economy, like Chuck E Cheese animatrons on a loop. Cut spending, lower taxes. From the NY Times:
I will not support — I will not support — any plan that puts all the burden for closing our deficit on ordinary Americans. And I will veto any bill that changes benefits for those who rely on Medicare but does not raise serious revenues by asking the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to pay their fair share,” Mr. Obama said. “We are not going to have a one-sided deal that hurts the folks who are most vulnerable.
Obama also backed his proposal with the full weight of his constitutional presidential stones:
The president made clear today that he will veto any plan that seeks to cut the deficit through spending cuts alone and does not include tax increases as well.
“I am ready, I am eager to work with Democrats and Republicans to reform the tax code to make it simpler, to make it fairer and make America more competitive,” Obama said. ”But any reform plan will have to raise revenue to help close our deficit. That has to be part of the formula.”
The Veto... something Obama has only done twice during his presidency, and one of those times was to kill a bill with the most boring name in the universe: The Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010. You know, if my job dealt with things as mind-numbing as that title and the actual text of the bill, I might tweet pictures of my own junk, too, just to remind myself there was still joy to be had in this world.
Actually, that bill was a pretty underhanded attempt by banks to make it easier to foreclose on homes. From the CNBC Wayback Machine:
Ordinarily, banks are able to get a quickie foreclosure through the courts by having officers swear out statements claiming they have personal knowledge of the details of the loans and the delinquencies of borrowers. But it has now emerged that loan officers at some banks were just signing the statements kicked out by a computer without having reviewed the loan materials.
Hey, it only seems fair that the review process used for so many home loans that should never have been approved be applied to the foreclosure process, right? So the vetoed legislation would have made it possible for banks to get notarized foreclosure statements in a state with loose foreclosure standards and use them to kick people out of homes in states with stricter standards. One favorite quote from the CNBC article:
Proponents of the bill most likely argued that it would help avert a nation-wide slowdown to the foreclosure process that could serve simply to delay a housing recovery by leaving more houses in mortgage limbo.
I get the need to move foreclosures along if a house needs foreclosing on when you hear that some people just stop paying their mortgages after the value of their home tanked.
But it feels cold to see this kind of cry for action about foreclosing without some urgency to helping people refinance and keep their homes.
Regardless, the bill seemed like a good one to veto in retrospect. In this case, hearing the veto threat getting dropped gives me some hope that Obama's upcoming attempts to help right this country won't follow what seems like his typical cave-first-then-start-negotiating approach to getting things done. As it has been said before, I think this is what a lot of people thought they were going to get from Obama based on his 2008 campaign. I guess now that he's quasi-officially campaigning again, it's time to bust out that approach to work its magic a second time.
Or maybe he's sincere in his stance now that the reach-across-the-aisle-to-find-common-ground-like-rational-adults-running-a-country approach has been demonstrated, proven, re-proven, etched on stone tablets, smashed, and re-etched into new stone tablets to not work and it just sunk in. What I like about this stance is that it could force the republican hand a little bit.
The nice thing about being a bleeding-heart liberal is that it can be easy to couch the opposition's side as cold or evil, even if it's not always fair. The core of Obama's plan, if you cut from the poor, you have to take from the rich, does just that while actually feeling fair. Sure, republicans will attempt to parry with their usual blurbs like (from the ABC News article):
Class warfare will simply divide this country more. It will attack job creators, divide people and it doesn’t grow the economy. Class warfare may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics.” Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
"If he’s (Warren Buffet) feeling guilty about it, I think he should send in a check. … But we don’t want to stagnate this economy by raising taxes." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
and from the NY Times article:
“The administration’s insistence on raising taxes on job creators and its reluctance to take the steps necessary to strengthen our entitlement programs are the reasons the president and I were not able to reach an agreement previously,” Mr. Boehner said. “And it is evident today that these barriers remain.”
Specifically to the Buffet rule, it seems like the distinction between a job-creator and someone who gets paid a lot of money still hasn't broken through to some congressional leaders.
But the Christian Science Monitor offers this interesting insight into the Obama plan:
The article points out that while Obama's efforts should be commended, they actually accomplish less than if the Bush Tax Cuts had been allowed to expire. So if Congress had done nothing, meaning if they had not actively pushed to extend those cuts, the economy would be better off than under what Obama has proposed.
We could have avoided the incoming drama months ago and be in a better place, but apparently that's not how America rolls in the Jersey Shore Era.
Regardless of why Obama had some backbone surgically installed over the weekend, I take some satisfaction in knowing that Boehner et al may actually experience some resistance to the bully tactics they have relied on for the last few years.
Anthony Weiner, former congressional representative for New York's 9th District, failed at using his smartphone in spectacular fashion. With a penchant for taking lewd photographs and sending them off to various women that were not his wife, you think Weiner would have read the instruction manual on that phone twice.
But alas, he took a shot of his own soft-on through the boxer briefs (picture can be found here if you're curious) and instead of texting it, he inadvertently posted it to his Twitter feed. Honestly, I could see myself making that same mistake on my iPhone (as opposed to Mr. Weiner's Blackberry), hastily thinking I had read the different posting options, or accidentally overshooting the SMS Text Button and hitting Twitter... which is why I don't take pictures of my own junk and send them off to various women.
In Chaos Theory, there's something called the butterfly effect. Essentially, the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world triggers a series of events that lead to some massive change on the other side of the world. In this case, Weiner depressing his Blackberry's button on Twitter instead of Text was the proverbial flapping of the butterfly's wings.
Yesterday, we saw one of the next steps in that series of events that could lead to something massive. New York's 9th District held its special election this week to replace Weiner and gave his old job to republican Bob Turner.
What's interesting here is how the two candidates approached their campaign platform. In typical fashion, Weprin ran on the idea that Republicans want to kill Medicare and Social Security. Turner ran on the idea that electing him would send a message to Obama that he's failed our country and that he's turned his back on Israel. The last point was specifically relevant to the 9th District given its high population of Orthodox Jews.
John Boehner immediately, and not expectedly, took this headline and ran with it, saying
"Tonight New Yorkers have delivered a strong warning to the Democrats who control the levers of power in our federal government," House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement. "It's time to scrap the failed `stimulus' agenda."
Now I'm not sure Boehner should interpret the smudge of localized tea leaves to represent the will of the entire nation, but I'm wondering if this "deliver a message" might have some truth to it.
Next year, Obama's going to run for President and there's a good chance that a certain state called Florida might have a big impact on his chance to win. Florida went to Obama in 2008, but check out this picture to see how the state breaks down.
A lot of red scattered around there, but the dense population center down south can tip the entire state. Of course, that population center has a significant Jewish population as well as a significant aged population.
In New York, the Jewish population seemed to turn their back to the Medicare threats and side with social conservatism and Israel. Curious to see if something similar can be achieved by the Republicans in Florida in 2012 if people remain as disgruntled as they are today because of the nonexistent economic recovery. Could the national republican effort take anything away from the 9th District to help it shape its national strategy in 2012?
Could one man's dong change the course of American history? I know, stupid question since it's probably already happened a number of times.
Maybe the Republican strategy to torpedo anything Obama wants to get done is starting to pay some dividends.
Alex Bloomberg and Robert Smith take a look at the new congressional super-committee from the perspective of game theory, which is a way economists study the choices of two parties working against each other in some capacity.
They set up the metaphor by saying game theory is like a game of chicken... two cars barreling toward a head-on collision. At the beginning of the game there are three choices for each side. First, drive and never swerve, thereby winning, and letting your opponent chicken out. Second, swerve, lose, and chicken out, but live. Third, crash into each other and explode.
Now at the start of the game, you'd probably rank the outcomes as 1) win, 2) lose but live, 3) explode and die. The strategy to winning is to prove you are more crazy than your opponent, more willing to cast aside self-preservation for a victory. But as the game goes on and you realize your opponent doesn't seem to be changing course and bringing his own level of crazy to the fight, you might change your rankings to 1) lose but live, 2) win, 3) explode and die.
Planet Money says that's basically what happened this summer with the debt ceiling debate. At first, people stared each other down and we got speeches from President "Two Steps Back" Obama and John "Not Going To Happen" Boehner. The democrats rank their top choice as protecting favorite entitlement programs. The republicans make their top choice cutting taxes. Okay, so those two choices create a situation where the cars will smash into each other.
Their second choices, on both sides, might be doing something about the deficit, and the third choice is deadlock and defaulting on the debt. So the debate rages on, both sides seeing how long they can go without swerving, and as the debt ceiling deadline got closer, both sides shifted their priorities just like in the game of chicken. Suddenly the second choice rises to the top because it's the only way to guarantee that the third, disastrous, option doesn't happen.
The wrench in the debt ceiling game of chicken, according to Steven Smith, a political scientist from Washington University, is that one faction in the debate didn't believe they were playing a game of chicken at all. He says:
The Tea Party types are saying that a crash isn't all that harmful. We think both cars are made out of rubber. We have experts who tell us the cars are made of rubber and that we'll survive this just fine... so it's more important that we stick to our guns and plow straight ahead then it is to cave in on the basis of these threats.
Smith went on to describe the car the republicans were driving in this game of chicken as having two people fighting over the wheel as they sped toward a collision. Boehner and the more moderate republicans trying to swerve while the Tea Party tried to keep it straight. In the end, Boehner et al won out, both parties swerved their cars at the last second and declared victory for their side.
The super-committee sets out to change the stakes of this congressional game of chicken. Smith says:
This time they decided to up the ante. This time they decided that not only will the driver die, but the driver's family is going to die.
The super-committee is tasked with cutting $1.5 trillion from the deficit by Thanksgiving, and if they fail, tough cuts automatically go into effect. Those cuts slash each side's pet projects... medicare and medicaid for the democrats, defense for the republicans. These pet projects are now the family riding in the car for this game of chicken. And to make sure there aren't too many hands fighting for control of the wheel, Congress has stepped back and left the debate to twelve people. A smaller groups of drivers with more incentive to swerve.
In general, the podcast says, there are two schools of thought in the social sciences when it comes to winning in a negotiation. Psychologists believe that minds can be changed through strong persuasion. Make that great speech, come up with that brilliant ad, and you will win people over to what you want. Economists believe that preferences are fixed... you want what you want, and getting what you want is more about your strategy in forcing your position than convincing people to join you.
What's interesting is that none of this applies in a small group. Small groups allow for people to come around to someone else's viewpoint with necessarily forgetting what they want. It allows for actual, honest debate with the chance to achieve real compromise partly because you know the person you're attempting to sway. Essentially, it gets a lot more specific and filters out the noise that comes with the full Congress blustering about in sound bytes.
It's a simpler game of chicken, a more patient game of chicken.
It begs the question. Given how ineffectual Congress has become, are super-committees going to be the only way we get meaningful legislations worked on in the future? Will each super-committee have to face a doomsday deadline in order to motivate them not to act crazy? What's the role for the rest of Congress in light of these super-committees with their doomsday deadlines? Do they handle the light work while the adults get to sit around the table and talk over the real issues? Does that relegate most of Congress into becoming a bigger joke than it already is on many levels?
And if you let Tea Party members onto that super-committee, does putting their family in the car change their minds that they still aren't playing a game of chicken, that the cars are indeed made of rubber? Will it always be that simple to scuttle a political debate?
Just because I'm such a nerd, I'm going to recycle this clip:
As a lead in to this next clip, taken from last night's Republican debate:
In the clip, Wolf Blitzer asks Ron Paul, a former physician, the following hypothetical question... a 30 year old guy with a decent job decides he's young and healthy and doesn't need health insurance. Something catastrophic happens, requiring massive amounts of health care. Who should pay? Paul starts to dance around the question by saying that freedom requires people to take responsibility for their actions. The crowd cheers what they're hearing. Then Wolf follows up with "Are you saying that society should just let him die?"
The crowd shouts Yes.
You would expect human beings to shout no, but that's the Tea Party for you.
But okay, the man in the example did make a conscious decision to opt out of insurance despite having a good job that probably offered him a decent health care package, so maybe there are some genuinely hardcore libertarians out there... all of which just highlights that Wolf Blitzer is one of the dumber mouthpieces working in the national media today.
Why would you couch the health care debate into such a stupid example? Mr. Tea Party... let's consider reckless irresponsibility? How say you?
Why not make the Red Meat answer questions about people who have shitty jobs that don't offer health care as part of the package and can't afford to get reamed by for-profit health insurance companies? Why not make them answer questions about how people die from insurance company paperwork mistakes? Why not make them answer questions about Randy Shepherd from the Wayback Machine, who couldn't get private health insurance because of a pre-existing condition and then lost his heart transplant when Arizona Medicaid slashed budgets (which is exactly the kind of death panel Palin described in her Obamacare Facebook Fear-a-palooza)?
A make-believe 30 year-old with a good job turning down health insurance feels so disconnected from reality that Blitzer's question seems irrelevant. I want the Tea Party to answer questions about real, heart-breaking, avoidable situations that their own members could potentially face.
Before the crowd's disturbing shouts in response to Blitzer's "just let him die," Ron Paul made the point that "freedom is all about taking your own risks."
Maybe freedom is all about that in the most literal sense, but who does that benefit? Mitigating risk is an important part of modern society. Handling an issue so that the collective can move on and deal with other things is the whole reason we domesticated animals, tamed fire, and learned to grow crops. Wouldn't it be nice if that family of four right at the poverty level didn't have to choose between getting their sick child life-saving medical care and getting their financial lives completely obliterated?
It's a genuinely stupid consideration that I believe is holding us back as a country. This isn't something we need to deal with on an individual level given our nation's collective wealth. Other countries have given us a possible framework that could work. Hell, some of our own states have as well (what's up Vermont and Massachusetts?).
Health care is not a right, it's a social good and we should start treating it as such.
To summarize, at a recent toddler beauty pageant, one of the mothers dressed her three year old daughter in the Julia Roberts hooker outfit from Pretty Woman. She said that since Julia Roberts was her favorite actress of all time, she wanted to pick a Roberts costume that wouldn't sexualize her toddler daughter... so she went with the hooker outfit.
The mother defends herself pretty well in the Joy Behar interview clip, stating that the outfit wasn't too revealing, especially compared to the bathing suits people put their toddlers and young kids in. She also mentioned that the daughter had no idea that the costume was a hooker outfit, just that it was worn by Julia Roberts. Not sure if this helps the mother's case, because it kind of implies the daughter doesn't really know why she's constructed like a doll and put up on stage (hint: the answer involves the Mom and the word vicarious).
So on some level, this controversial moment seems to be a non-starter, but it doesn't change the fact that the concept behind the show is pretty disgusting and merits cancellation on its own.
The little girl in the clip seems like a perfectly normal little girl, holding up her doll at one point and exclaiming "purple!" because that's the color of the doll's clothes. She goes on to do all sorts of adorable three year old things during the interview. So to see this cute little girl doing the pageant catwalk with gobs of make-up in a modestly cut hooker outfit seems off. It's clearly not the little girl driving the desire to do pageants.
I feel I should admit a bias here beyond my typical bleeding liberal heart. I have no patience for rednecks and toddler pageants fall squarely into my "things that rednecks do" preconceived notions. These pageants are creepy at best, and at their worst, they are a peek into some dark, disturbed corners of red neck high society.
So that's it for the latest news article asking the Tough Questions.
Senate democrats introduced measures yesterday to provide relief funds to help recover from hurricane Irene. Senator Reid's stance:
"I don’t see how we — this great nation we have — can stand on the sidelines while our people are suffering,” said the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid.
Okay, fair enough. Response from Rep. Eric Cantor:
"I am not for holding up any money,” Mr. Cantor said. “I am not for taking any hostages here. I just think we can act responsibly.
To be fair to Rep. Cantor's point, the article goes on to say:
Mr. Cantor complained that in the past “there have been games played with disaster money.” Lawmakers, he said, often provided too little money at the start of a budget year, knowing that Congress would later provide whatever was needed, free of annual spending limits, in the event of a catastrophe.
Ok, I can see that. You don't want to take advantage of a situation in order to push through a spending agenda... unless you're Eric Cantor from the debt ceiling debate this summer.
I guess the word "responsibly" is a nuanced creature. It could mean not spending money you don't have, but it could also mean not taking the country's credit rating hostage during a world wide financial crisis. It could mean not spending money you don't have, or it could mean not slashing necessary expenditures in order to cover massive devastation just because balanced budget blinders seem to sexually arouse tea-party members, or it could mean working with President Obama to get this country going again economically rather than opposing all efforts just to sway the 2012 election.
The truth of the matter is we are still shamefully behind on Katrina repairs, and while I can understand the fear of something becoming a runaway cost, national disasters are one of those things where you just have to roll up your sleeves and get it done. Throwing up your hands in defeat really isn't an option under certain circumstances just because an arbitrary FEMA number has been hit.
And let's talk about that out-of-control number of seven billion dollars to respond to and recover from national-level disasters. Back in the day, the Congressional Budget Office predicted our Iraqi ventures would cost about $9 billion a month during the war, and between $1 billion and $4 billion a month during subsequent occupation. Cantor ponied up for that with a Yea vote.
The Iraq War seemed like the motherlode of open-ended costs. If there was ever something that fit Cantor's "lawmakers providing too little money at the start of the year knowing that Congress will provide whatever is needed" litmus test, it would be the Iraq War. But Cantor felt compelled to go along with that expenditure, but now balks at the comparatively inconsequential $7 billion to repair damages domestically. So international war-mongering is okay, but repairing destroyed infrastructure and aiding US citizens is irresponsible.
Begs the question... why does Rep. Eric Cantor hate America? And babies? And Freedom?
Dammit, Rep. Cantor seems to have avoided being photographed eating phallic food. so no go on an image.
After health care, bank bailouts, the debt ceiling debate, killing Osama Bin Laden, birthers, ending Don't Ask Don't Tell, saving the auto industry, and volunteering to disclose all visitors to the White House after ninety days, it looks like our government is finally ready to get serious about jobs. I guess you don't want to rush headlong into an issue as important or sweeping as jobs until an election looms on the horizon, otherwise you completely waste any political clout from success. So to all of those affected by the ill-timed economic crash that occurred right before a regime change, we're sorry it took this long to get to your unemployment issue... it just wasn't politically convenient before now.
But now that it is politically convenient, just try and stop the candidates from dropping economic plans that are sometimes vague, sometimes unrealistic, sometimes packaged in a way involving a low number of steps for the simple (like Sarah Palin, who is totally not running for president, and her Five Point Recovery Plan), sometimes packaged in a plan involving a lot of steps that bombard you with just how awesomely comprehensive and unstoppable it is (like Romney's 59 point plan with 10 things he could put into action on Day 1 as he fast-roped out of a hovering chopper, crashing through a skylight into the oval office like a man who gets things done!!!), or sometimes announced at a rescheduled time so as not to interfere with the start of football season.
But make no mistake, talking about jobs is absolutely going to get done. Except that on the republican side, most of the people talking assume that government can't create jobs, so what they'll actually discuss is cutting taxes... again. Because apparently that's the only tool in the entire universe to get an economy moving.
Of those plans, I actually kind of dig a small part of the Wall-Street-Journal-endorsed plan from Jon Huntsman. Here's a synopsis from Business Insider:
Overhaul the federal income tax with a modified version of Simpson-Bowles' "zero" option, which would eliminate tax deductions and credits — including the popular home mortgage deduction — in favor of a three-bracket tax rate at 8, 14 and 23 percent.
Reducing the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 25%
Eliminate capital gains and dividends taxes, and end the Alternative Minimum Tax
Repeal Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reform act passed under the Bush administration.
Streamline the FDA approval process
Rein in the EPA's "gross regulatory overreach" and expedite environmental permitting, particularly for oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
Restrict or replace the National Labor Relations Board
Privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Approve trade deals with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, and pursue new trade agreements with Japan, Taiwan, and India.
Like I said, I agree with a small part of it, specifically the first two points. I like the idea of a simplified, progressive system. Some might not go so far as to eliminate all loopholes, but I feel like if you're going to do it, why not go all the way? The caveat here is that I'm assuming the deduction bullshit also gets eliminated for the corporate tax system to go along with point two. Point three... I wouldn't mind repealing Obama-care as well, but I'd want to do that in favor of something more disgustingly socialist that severed the tie between employers and health insurance (a relic from the World War 2 era that needs to disappear).
Point is, the Huntsman plan seems relatively specific, relatively doable, and relatively logical from a conservative perspective, unlike Palin's plan to eliminate corporate taxes entirely and hope closing income tax loopholes make up the difference. From CNN:
Palin, who raised taxes on the oil industry while Alaska's governor, proposed eliminating all corporate income taxes and making up the lost revenue by closing corporate loopholes in the federal tax code.
"This is how we break the back of crony capitalism," she said in sounding a new campaign theme that evoked memories of her Alaska days when she took on an entrenched and sometimes corrupt Republican political class that was in cahoots with the oil and gas industry.
Feels flimsy at best and the fact that it's all in service of selling her latest brain-damaged sound byte (crony capitalism... I wonder if there is an -ism she won't stick "crony" in front of?) makes it seem all the weaker.
"I am so tired of his speeches, it's going to be hard for me to watch," said DeMint, who is hosting a forum of GOP front-runners on Monday in South Carolina. " ... Without sending something in writing, the president makes all of these grand gestures, and then it doesn't appear in any legislation, and then he will blame Congress for not passing something he never sends over."
I'm mostly tired of what the process has become. Talk, posturing, out-of-touch priorities, wealthy people talking over the problems of everyday Americans. One plan that could affect a lot of everyday Americans, but one you never hear anything about, is the Perry Preschool Project. From NPR's Planet Money:
Economist James Heckman studied job-training programs and discovered they accomplished next to nothing. People attending these training programs lacked certain soft skills necessary to landing and holding a job.
They involve things like being able to pay attention and focus, being curious and open to new experiences, and being able to control your temper and not get frustrated.
All these soft skills are very important in getting a job. And Heckman discovered that you don't get them in high school, or in middle school, or even in elementary school. You get them in preschool.
And that, according to Heckman, makes preschool one of the most effective job-training programs out there.
Heckman referred back to the Perry Preschool Project that followed two groups of disadvantaged children. The first group received two hours of daycare, five days a week. The second received none. After preschool, they were left to themselves.
Yet when researchers followed up with the kids as adults, they found huge differences. At age 27, the boys who had – almost two decades earlier – gone to preschool were now half as likely to be arrested and earned 50 percent more in salary that those who didn't.
And that wasn't all. At 27, girls who went to preschool were 50 percent more likely to have a savings account and 20 percent more likely to have a car. In general, the preschool kids got sick less often, were unemployed less often, and went to jail less often.
I'm not trying to say that James Heckman's approach is the end-all to our nation's problems, but it does something that I can't seem to find in any of the other jobs plans... it invests in the people of this country. The politicians' plans often focus on top-down, incentive-driven measures that assume all Intel needs to innovate and prosper are lower taxes. But those top-down approaches ignore the fact that Intel was originally able to innovate and prosper because three exceptional people came together with a plan. Simply lowering taxes places the entire innovative burden on the current institutions and ignores the fact that talented individuals were originally behind the formation of those institutions.
Businesses are just corporate shells without good people to fill them, and I wish I heard more of that from today's politicians.
