If at First You Don't Succeed, Cheat!

Just as I finished lamenting the sad state of our nation's broken political system, and placing the onus on both parties, each of which has failed to govern responsibly, I was reminded once again why Democrats - despite their flaws - are the only viable option for running the government. I really wish that weren't the case. The absurdity of the Republican party has let Democrats become complacent, and so while one party is full of idiots, the other is stagnant, and neither is offering forward-thinking solutions.

But Republicans are actively trying to make America a worse place, envisioning a world that no longer exists and that isn't coming back, and then stooping to lies and cheating to compensate for their failure to think, lead, legislate, or govern. For the first four years of Obama's presidency, Republicans went with lying and obstruction, characterizing Obamacare as government-run healthcare, which it isn't, and refusing to work with the President on anything; Obama could have proposed a bill requiring Republicans to hold majorities in the House and Senate and they would have balked, we are talking about a group of people who totally and completely abdicated leadership. Of course it didn't work. The Republican base - the inmates - is a collection of un or undereducated fools, but the American public is not, and so we re-elected the President, recognizing that he has plenty of shortcomings, but seeing that there wasn't anything close to a viable alternative.

So the new Republican strategy is to cheat, to undermine the very democracy they purport to love, to undermine the values in the Constitution they worship. If most Americans vote for Democrats, the obvious solution is for Republicans to find a way to make the votes of the few count for more than the votes of the many. They are trying to gerrymander the electoral college! It is shameless and transparent tactic from a group of people who have ceded morality, integrity, and intelligence to the opposition which is sadly lacking in those categories as well. But imagine the audacity, this is quite literally un-American. So much for power of the people.

The tactic will probably fail, just as Republican attempts at voter suppression failed in November, but this is just one more desperate attempt by a group of morally and intellectually bankrupt people to impose an outdated ideology on our country. The nationwide distribution of electoral votes may not always reflect the popular vote - although the last person to be on the wrong side of this equation was Democrat Al Gore - but the distribution of electoral votes from a state DO reflect the popular vote of that state. President Obama received more votes in say, Ohio, which is why he received the state's electoral votes, gerrymandering those electoral votes is shameless ploy to grab power by a group that is incapable of doing it with ideas and solutions.

The tragedy of all this is that it doesn't have to be this way. It shouldn't be this way. Democrats are better in a comparative sense, but thoroughly mediocre in an absolute one. A forward-looking and tolerant Republican party would probably roundly trounce Democrats in a national election, and might even sway me. This of course, would force Democrats to adapt or face the same dilemmas Republicans themselves are now confronting, but the best of one party brings out the best in the other and Americans benefit, as it is now, the Republicans have hit rock-bottom, and so Democrats can sit around not doing much at all and still be a vastly superior alternative. Many Republicans recognize this. Just this week, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal admonished his peers: "We've got to stop being the stupid party." Scathing words from one of their own, but will Republicans heed his warning? I doubt it. The party marches in almost lockstep opposition to anything Obama does rather than thinking about their own solutions, and how to take Obama's ideas and make them better. Meanwhile, they are ceding the future by isolating voters of my generation who understand that global warming is real, that gay people should have equal rights, that plans that add to the deficit do not decrease the deficit, and that smarter gun regulation would save lives...among other things. But this is where we find ourselves, Republicans are the stupid party, and they don't seem to have any intention of changing that. They'd rather cheat to win.

Can We Really Do Nothing?

House Republicans agreed to extend the debt limit without holding the nation's credit hostage. I suppose we should all be thankful for that, but lost in that little bit of encouraging news is all the bleakness underneath, the debt limit ceiling showdown that wasn't has given way to the budget and sequestration battle that will soon be as our elected officials, Democrats and Republicans alike, perform another sobering and embarrassing political dance while the nation waits for the policy that neither side is willing or able to produce.

Both sides deserve the increasing ire of the American people though I suppose we need to blame the collective (wo)man in the mirror since we put these clowns in office.

On the one hand, Republicans have some good ideas which have been co-opted by extremists, and while they have produced budgets in the past, the plans they have offered have been so unbelievably bad it's hard to fathom someone who actually loved America - or was capable of basic math - could support them. Paul Ryan's "plan" is the closest to credibility Republicans have come, but even his plan didn't hold up to scrutiny, and was nothing put a feeble attempt to lower taxes for the rich by cutting spending on everything else. Ultimately it made the deficit bigger rather than smaller.

On the other hand, Democrats don't even have a plan to be co-opted. They've simply refused to come up with a budget blueprint, instead pretending that we can just go on spending and borrowing indefinitely. Democratic priorities are not as horribly misaligned as Republican priorities, but what Republicans fail to do arithmetically, Democrats make up for in a failure to understand scale. One side can't add and subtract, the other has an issue with depth perception; Democrats seems to think the growing mountain of debt is smaller than it actually is.

What's worse, neither side seems to show an inkling of being willing to cooperate with the other. President Obama and John Boehner are the possible exceptions to this rule, but Boehner is an intellectual lightweight who kowtows to his party's extremes, and President Obama vacillates between a pragmatic centrist who wants to do what's best and a man who is rightfully angry at his political opponents and slams them at inopportune times. He seems to be politically bipolar. And those are our best hopes. Eric Cantor and Harry Reid would probably both be willing to determine who will win the political fight with a duel to the death a la Hamilton and Burr. Certainly neither of them wants to compromise. Democrats won't even pass a budget and Republicans keep passing ones they know Democrats will reject outright. It wouldn't take much for one side to make even a little bit of an effort. Democrats could try doing SOMETHING, and Republicans could try doing something that wasn't deliberately designed to provoke Democrats. Wishful thinking I know, but it doesn't seem like too much to ask for these people to do their jobs, does it?

The American government has shown us time and time again that it is incapable of desperately needed action. Right now we are in such dire straits that the problems we are trying to solve are self-created dilemmas designed to force us to make tough decisions. We can't even do that! It is truly an embarrassment. I'm almost at a loss for what to keep blogging about. Everyone I talk to even if their political beliefs differ from mine agree that our government is where action goes to die. Everyone is disgusted, and almost everyone acknowledges that there is a center path that combines responsible tax hikes with sensible spending cuts. If everyone I talk to knows this, how do the people we voted for not understand it? I really don't know what else to say.

Bidness Ties

The party of big business is no longer so, they have recast themselves as the party of small business, and admittedly, their policy proposals are much better for small businesses, but still economically ruinous as a whole. I'm talking, of course, about Republicans, the party of bidness in America, although bidness ain't so good for Republicans right now.

The inspiration for today's post comes from a New York Times article about Republicans and their business ties, ties that are fraying as Republicans prove that they aren't actually the party of business after all. In an attempt to gain support for his policies, the President has enlisted the leaders of "big business" to lobby Republicans for higher tax rates for the sake of deficit reduction and to avoid holding the nation's credit hostage again. It says a lot when the people whose tax rates you are trying to protect are lobbying you to raise them, but as I've mentioned time and time again, Republicans don't seem to care much for reality when they have ideology to fall back on.

Back in August of 2012, I blogged about Ted Cruz, or the next great conservative intellectual hope. This same Ted Cruz, who is anything but an intellectual, now seems to be leading the charge as Republicans to rebrand themselves as the party of small business. Certainly Republican priorities do more to help small businesses than big businesses. For example, perhaps a small business owner making $275,000 a year would reinvest in his business if his taxes were lower whereas it's ludicrous to imagine that lowering Bill Gates' tax rates will have any great economic effect. And small businesses are also less equipped to deal with regulations than big businesses which have huge legal and compliance departments. So perhaps Republicans are the party of small business, at least in their minds, although small businesses still rely on infrastructure and educated employees and Republicans have shown no interest in ensuring America has either of those things.

But regardless of whether Republicans see themselves as the party of big business, small business, or just business in general, their polices are not going to do anyone in the global business community any favors. Republicans may now eschew their former big business ties - although given their willingness to accept campaign contributions, I hardly think their public posturing is anything but that - but they still purport to be the party of job growth and fiscal responsibility. So then why are they refusing to heed the calls of business leaders who are begging them not to do anything to throw the economy back into turmoil like forcing a default or pushing immediate and ruinous spending cuts?

The answer is quite simple. For all of their bidness ties, Republicans understanding of the economy is actually fairly limited. They're right that low taxes are good, but we have long passed the tipping point of when low taxes help spur growth. The whole "You Built It" campaign rolled out by Republicans at their convention last fall further revealed their fragile understanding of how the economy works. Yes, an entrepreneur had an idea, took a risk by acting on it, and hopefully succeeded, but he or she did it using communally available resources and infrastructure paid for by everyone to help facilitate success that we hope will lead to better lives for all of us. Furthermore, the good ideas Republicans bring to the table - low taxes, sensible rather than copious regulation, smaller and more efficient government - have been hijacked and taken to the extreme by a new breed of Republicans who view themselves as the protectors of small business, but want to undermine the very infrastructure on which those small businesses rely.

As long as the inmates are still running the asylum, we're not going to make any progress. It's indicative of the state of the party that they are unwilling to listen to business leaders who are telling them that their policies are bad for business, bad for growth, bad for the economy, and bad for America. But this should not surprise us, Republicans have created an alternative reality and wrapped themselves in the cloak of ideology. Until they show themselves to be willing to accept facts we will have to rely solely on Democrats to govern, and alas, Democrats have proven that they are good by comparative measures, not by absolute ones.

Saving and Spending

I found a recent op-ed in the New York Times to be very revealing as it highlighted the need for America to enact both Democratic and Republican priorities. The piece was actually about why it's difficult to save money, but the data included was very indicative of the issues our nation faces, and how if we were sensible about legislating and compromise, we could address the issues with a mix of both Democratic and Republican ideas.

Let me start by highlighting two of the statistics and points I found to be most critical to the crux of my arguement:

1) Wages and salaries have failed to keep up with inflation, meaning that consumer purchasing power is decreasing, and people are forced to spend most of their paychecks on their needs. According to the Credit Union National Association, almost half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. This is obviously more of Democratic priority, embodied most recently by the Occupy Wall Street protests. I have repeatedly stated that the gross income inequalities that exist in America are bad for the economy as well as being morally unjust, but the data shows it is true. Unless we enact policies that empower the middle class and help grow it by bringing people out of poverty, we will never recapture the economic boom that followed World War II and solidified our status as an economic superpower.

2) The average baby boomer has only $42,000 in his savings account, but the average medical costs for a baby boomer couple is around $240,000. Put simply our country is hemorrhaging money on Medicare. This is obviously more of Republican priority (though you might not know it based on the party's recent history), we simply cannot spending $200,000 public dollars per couple on medical costs, and of course, that disparity doesn't include the other costs of living retired couples must still address.

So if we look at our individual saving and spending problems, we can get a feel for what must be done on the national level to address our fiscal woes.

For starters, we must reverse the detrimental concentration of wealth in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of individuals. I've made the point time and time again that the problem with trickle down economics is inherent in the name, the wealth trickles down meaning that more and more of it is given to the people who least need it. Consequently, the vast majority of us are only able to save enough to cover 20% of our future medical needs. Do we really find that morally equitable? Do we really find that it is fiscally responsible to foot 80% of the medical bills for most retirees? Clearly our taxing and spending priorities have been misplaced for decades.

Conversely, while our spending priorities have not necessarily been misplaced, our rate of spending certainly leaves much to be desired. It is a worthy moral and economic endeavor to provide a higher standard of living for our citizens, and the welfare state we have created is not in need of dismantling, but it is in need of reformation. Healthcare for the elderly is great, but not when taxpayers have to foot 80% of the bill. We do need to find a way to make government spending more efficient and lower costs. If any semblance of medicare is going to be there for me and my future children - not to mention if we don't want to go bankrupt - then we must find a way to lower costs and reduce spending.

You would think that something that is so obvious would be a magnet for cooperation. How can we tax equitably and spend thoughtfully so that the wealth is spread in a manner that allows everyone to save and pay for their own healthcare and other needs, while at the same time cutting spending in the right places so that our future obligations - not to mention our current ones - are affordable?

But we aren't having these conversations, we are instead caught up in trivial ideological fights, embarrassing ourselves by missing self-imposed and economically harmful deadlines, and even when we throw together a last minute bill it really doesn't address either the long-term or the short-term problems. If America can figure out how to save and how to spend in a thoughtful manner we can easily right our fiscal ship. Alas, we don't seem to be capable of doing so.

Running the Asylum

While Thomas Friedman's article is now a few weeks old, his message is a good one. The Republican Party has an inmate problem. Republican politicians are horrible, put they didn't magically appear, they were elected, and for that, we must blame the Republican electorate.

I've said countless times that it's not that all Republican ideas are bad - though many are - it's that the party is currently caught in a moral and intellectual void in which they are incapable of presenting forward-thinking ideas, and instead cling to outdated ideology and too often lies and stupidity. Republicans could propose market-oriented solutions to address climate change, but instead they deny that the world is getting warmer. The Republican base has been lied to by its politicians, and has ensconced itself in an alternative reality choosing to get its information from outlets like Fox News and people like Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck. Instead of finding a way to make their good ideas relevant, they have chosen to to construct a world in which facts and data are irrelevant.

This has disastrous consequences for our country. The Republican refusal to cope with facts has put all the onus on Democrats to govern, but that is neither ideal nor possible. America would be better off if we were able to have a debate about alternative proposals for how to address our nation's problems, but instead we are stuck with Democrats trying to push their ideas through a Republican House that won't even vote on those ideas, and a Republican Party that can't even bring its own ideas to the table. The recent bill to raise taxes on the wealthy included some limited Republican priorities, for example keeping the estate tax at levels lower than those proposed by Democrats, but did not include any spending cuts. Why? Because Republicans didn't propose any! Rather than proposing spending cuts, Mitch McConnell put the onus to do so on President Obama. Would I like to see the President propose meaningful cuts? Of course! But he didn't campaign on that, and the American people did not elect him because he promised cuts. If Republicans want their ideas to be included in laws, they need to actually have ideas, present them, and make a case for why they are necessary. Instead, Republicans have abdicated this responsibility, and sit grumpily on the sidelines whining. Note to Republicans: if you want to have a say in how the nation is governed, you need to have ideas about what we can do to fix our problems. Be solutions-oriented.

Until the Republican party acknowledges reality and begins proposing solutions it will be doomed. In the wake of their crushing defeat in the November elections, much was made of whether Republicans can recover politically, specifically in terms of the demographics shift America is experiencing. But demographics don't determine the fate of the Republican Party, reality does. And Republicans have done a notoriously pathetic job of accepting and addressing reality. They either cannot or will not analyze Democratic proposals on merit and counter with their own ideas, rather they have embraced the notion that everything President Obama says is an attempt to strip us of our freedoms and make America socialist or something like that. They cannot fathom a deal that would attempt to address the budget deficit even if it includes $10 worth of spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. Their mantra has become "my way or the highway," even though the Republican "my way" isn't reflective of the complex world in which we live and the complex problems our nation faces.

I will continue to lambast Republican politicians for espousing policies that fail to address our nation's problems, but the Republican Party's issue is that the inmates are running the asylum. The Republican base is out of touch with reality and no one thinks that is a problem. If that doesn't change the Republican party is doomed, and we should all wish for a healthy and sensible Republican party rather than its disintegration.

Plunge

The fiscal cliff has come and gone and in its place we got another short-term stepping stone. While Democrats can more or less celebrate a win, the country really cannot. In lieu of a deal, we got a stop-gap. It's not a bad stop-gap, but even a good stop-gap is well short of a good deal which is what the country need.

The specifics of the deal have already been detailed, so rather than focusing on what the deal gave us, I'll focus on what it didn't. And what we didn't get is, sadly, a lot of what we needed.

Higher taxes on the wealthy are a great start, although admittedly, they don't raise a ton of revenue. The deal does a good job of raising some revenue, but a poor job of raising an adequate amount, and it makes permanent tax rates that are probably too low when times are good. Of course, permanent tax rates are only permanent until a new law changes them, but the economic reality is that taxes should rise or fall with economy, so making them "permanent" is more of a political stunt than a responsible policy move.

Furthermore, the deal does nothing to address either short-term austerity or long-term deficits. The deal does nothing to address the automatic spending cuts that went into effect along with tax hikes on January 1st, it only delays them. For all of their blustering about the deficit and spending cuts, Republicans proposed none, and Democrats reciprocated, crafting a bill that didn't even give us tough decisions on tax increases, instead choosing to raise the income level for those who would be taxed higher. Far from being a bill that should have taken this long to negotiate, what we got was a cop out from both parties. Democrats folded on taxes and Republicans didn't even pretend to have ideas for spending cuts.

What we need is more revenue and substantial reforms on entitlement programs. It is imperative that we avoid the sequester which would cause immediate damage to the economy. Anything that appeases the Tea Party is almost by definition bad for the country, and what America needs right now is more, rather than less spending. Of course in the long run we must find ways to lower the bills, and that means addressing entitlement and military spending. There have been numerous proposals for how we can go about achieving these goals: raising the medicare or the retirement age; means testing privatization measures; reducing payments; trimming military spending by making the military more nimble. Obamacare is good attempt to help control future medical spending. But these are long-term things, in the short term, we need spending. Instead we got modest tax hikes on a small handful of people.

It's not that the deal is bad, it's that the deal isn't good. Not bad deals keep delaying the inevitable. Not bad deals necessitate future not bad deals while doing nothing to repair our economy nor put us on a fiscally responsible path. If this was our attempt to avoid going over the cliff I think we plunged. We wasted another opportunity to actually do something real about our problems. Here's to next time.