Tag Archives: rich

Raise the Minimum Wage? What Are You, a Nazi?

“Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany.  You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”

Ken Langone, billionaire founder of Home Depot and huge Republican donor, on income inequality.

So if you hate carried interest and want to raise the minimum wage and extend unemployment benefits, well, heil to you, you despicable Nazi.

We’re going to give the Senate back to these people in November?  Really?  But of course they’re emboldened — they brought down our whole economy and no one went to jail.

Have/Have Not = Alive/Dead

If you live in the Washington, DC suburb of Fairfax, Virginia, home to lawyers and lobbyists, you can expect to live to be 82 if you’re a man and 85 if you’re a woman.*

But if you live 350 miles away, in McDowell County, West Virginia,  where people shovel coal, not bullshit, for a living, you can expect to live to be 64 if you’re a man and 73 if you’re a woman.  That’s about what life expectancy is in Iraq!

Rich people don’t just have more stuff, they get to enjoy it far longer.

* “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap,” Annie Lowrey, NYT

Quote of the Day 2

“The debt ceiling fight of 2011 represented a kind of zenith (if you can call it that) of Tea Party craziness, intransigence, and hostage taking.  Obama lost that battle, but he bounced back and won the presidency.  Now, even more so than the fiscal cliff battle, this year’s debt ceiling fight is shaping up as a kind of epic final confrontation – perhaps the Tea Party’s last chance to force Obama to do what the American people emphatically declared in the election that [they]don’t want, i.e., solve the country’s fiscal problems primarily by dramatically shrinking government, unraveling the safety net, and sparing the rich more sacrifice.”

Greg Sargent, “The Tea Party’s last stand?,” WaPo

“Job Creators” –That Lying, Orwellian Phrase Fox New Loves

From “In Talks, G.O.P. May Have To Just Say Yes,” Robert H. Frank, NYT:

“That realization appears to have led some Republicans to resurrect their time-honored claim that because many top earners own small businesses, higher top tax rates would severely compromise job creation.  But that argument flies in the face of the basic cost-benefit test that governs rational hiring decisions.  As every economics textbook on the subject makes clear, a business will hire additional workers whenever, and only whenever, their contribution to the bottom line promises to exceed their pay.  If that criterion is satisfied, hiring makes economic sense, no matter how poor the business owner might be.  And if it isn’t, no hiring will occur, even if the owner is a billionaire.”

Since it doesn’t sound good to oppose raising taxes even slightly on the rich, Fox News doesn’t call them “the rich,” they call them “job creators.”

But this economically false notion prevents us from having an honest debate about what’s fair for the top two percent of earners to pay.

 

More Revenue, But Far From Redistribution

So how much does that Commie redistributionist in the White House want to soak the rich?  Not so much, it turns out.

From “Tax Talks Raise Bar for Richest,” David Kocieniewski, NYT:

“If all Mr. Obama’s tax proposals for wealthy Americans were enacted [ain‘t gonna happen], they would raise $1.6 trillion over the next decade.  And an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research firm, found that the increases would be heavily weighted toward the wealthiest. … Those with adjusted gross incomes from $200,000 to $500,000 would face a tax increase averaging $4,446, with people toward the lower end having only a modest increase….

“A married couple with two children earning $300,000 would see its effective tax rate increase to 21.1 percent from 16.5 percent, ….  A married couple with two children earning $2 million would see its effective federal income tax rate rise to 26.8 percent from 21.6 percent.

“About four million of the 114 million American households face a possible tax increase.

“If all of Mr. Obama’s proposals are enacted, those with adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 to $500,000 would see their after-tax income drop an average of 1.3 percent.  Taxpayers with incomes over $1 million would face a decline in after-tax income of 8.8 percent….”

So we’re not talking Marxism-Leninism here, despite what Rush and Sean and Grover would have you believe.

Two Words from the Election Results — Patience and Contradictions

I’ve been reading thousands and thousands of words about the election results, but I come away with two — patience and contradictions.

Obama won because voters were willing to be patient with him about the economy.  They realized that we had an economic meltdown, not a garden-variety recession, and so we weren’t going to have a garden-variety recovery.  More voters still blame Bush for the current economy than blame Obama.  And people vote trend more than current conditions.  The economy is getting better, albeit slowly.  This patience won’t last till 2016, but that’s Hillary’s problem.

Mitt lost because aside from that patience with Obama, he was stuck with his party’s contradictions.  They said they wanted to save Medicare by destroying it (that worked really well with those villages in Vietnam).  They said we had to drastically cut Medicaid and food stamps, but we could easily afford more tax cuts for the rich.  They said we needed more personal responsibility, but not when it came to expecting Americans to buy health insurance.  They said they wanted to get government off our backs, but they had to get government into our vaginas with their ultrasound wands.

The GOP talks about being “common sense conservatives.”  They make no sense at all, common or otherwise.

People Who “Want Stuff”

Bill O’Reilly is grumping that Obama won because of people who “want stuff.”

Actually, Obama carried eight of our ten richest counties.  In Marin County, CA, our third-wealthiest, O got 74% of the vote.  These aren’t people who want stuff, these are people who have stuff.  What they want is freedom from nut-job extremists.

First Thoughts on the Election

I was pretty confident we’d won yesterday afternoon PST when I saw that early exit polls showed that 52% of voters believed Mitt’s policies favor the rich.  At that point, I knew it didn’t matter if we were looking at an electorate like 2004 or 2008 or 2010 (which was causing dispute about the accuracy of the polls), all that mattered was that more than half of them felt this way.  I believed that single finding was disastrous, and I didn’t see how Mitt could survive.

By the end of the campaign, Mitt reminded me more and more of Sarah Palin.  I know the contrast between a guy with two advanced Harvard degrees and a complete ignoramus is stark, but when I listened to him, he spoke in the same “word salad” we got in 2008 and still get from her.  Palin’s word salad comes from not knowing anything about policy, while Mitt’s comes from not wanting to be specific about policy.  The cause is different, but the effect from both is a complete lack of confidence in their ability to lead.

Even when we thought Mitt was taking a stand on something — like supporting an abortion exception for the health of the woman or promising to keep Obamacare’s coverage for pre-existing conditions — his campaign walked it back almost immediately.  The only time he spoke from the heart was when he thought we couldn’t hear him, when he railed against the 47% percent.

Palin’s lack of a “there there” comes from lack of knowledge, Mitt’s from a lack of courage.

When someone comes across as fearful and nervous while talking about the most basic of domestic issues, as Mitt does, you inevitably wonder how this guy could be commander in chief, how he could deal with Putin if he can’t deal with cuddly Bret Baier.

So he seemed tough as nails in a bad way — when it came to killing jobs at Bain — but then also wimpy, when you’d want him to be tough.

We kept hearing that Mitt was a terrible candidate for the GOP, which was true.  It’s galling to hear someone who pays 14% in taxes talk about cutting Medicaid to poor kids and the elderly in nursing homes.  A “soak the poor” message is never appealing, especially to women, but never more so than when presented by a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars who doesn’t pay his fair share and wants to cut taxes on the rich even more.

But more than a terrible candidate for one party, Mitt is a terrible politician.  He is stiff and awkward, and can’t convey warmth or empathy.  He’s cursed with that nervous laugh and obnoxious smirk.    That’s a bi-partisan problem, one we saw with Al Gore and John Kerry.  He went into politics to finish what George Romney started, but, like many men who follow in their father’s footsteps out of a sense of obligation, he lacked his dad’s innate talent for the profession.

When we fail, we tend to make excuses and to blame others.  I hope that, as Mitt licks his wounds, he doesn’t think he lost because he’s a Mormon.  I really don’t think voters cared.  I also hope he doesn’t think we rejected him out of jealousy and resentment because he’s rich.  That’s not how or who we are.  It was the cluelessness and out-of-touchness he displayed as a result of that wealth, an inability to put himself in our shoes.  You can be rich (many, many politicians are) and still have charisma and connect with people.  Forty-four years after his assassination, it is easy for me to picture Bobby Kennedy radiating compassion as he campaigned, I see that toothy grin, those rolled-up shirtsleeves as his arms reached back in the crowd.  Was it real or fake?  I have no idea.  All that mattered was his ability to do it.

Speaking of failure and making excuses, the GOP should not blame their defeat just on Mitt.  I picture Mitt and his party as two drowning men, desperately clinging to each other and dragging each other down to their deaths.  If Mitt was a terrible candidate, he was also leading a terrible party.  Mitt oozed slickness and smarminess, but his party oozed craziness and extremism.  Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock helped take Mitt down with them.

The GOP should blame Mitt, and he should blame them.  There is plenty of blame to go around.

There is also plenty of hypocrisy that needs to be replaced with humility.  Last night on Fox News, Karl Rove shamelessly accused the President of being the one refusing to compromise and of calling his opponents unAmerican.   It is to laugh.  Sure you can get away with that on Fox, but you can’t win an election just with the Fox faithful.  The rest of us know our rubber from our glue.