Obama {deals | caves} on tax cut extensions

Great Debates
201

Nobody “holds the positions”. It’s not a position. It’s a mindset.

Obviously nobody is going to own up to having this mindset, which is why you see liberals falling over themselves to deny that it exists.

However, I’ve pointed to concrete examples that in my view are evidence of this mindset. You can find these examples all over the place including this MB and (probably) this thread.

No, I’m not going to start debating whether this or that Doper who framed the issues in the manner I’ve noted or used the terminology I’ve pointed to has this mindset. I don’t care about specific cases, plus the correlation could be wrong in any particular instance, plus as I noted at the outset, I don’t have the interest or energy for a long debate on this subject.

That’s my opinion on this matter. You don’t agree, that’s fine too. Might be something for you to consider, though.

202

Ah, so you can read our minds! Even though we never say these things, even to each other, you know we’re thinking them! And (I admit it!) we communicate this mindset to one another via ESP!

I’m sorry you’re too busy or lazy to give us so much as a single for-instance, but thanks anyway for sharing The Truth with us. We are forever grateful. :slight_smile:

203

Nice. In my first post, I gave the evidence for this mindset

I also noted or referenced this in every subsequent post I’ve made on the subject in this thread, including the one you quoted. Though I noticed that you conveniently left that part out when quoting my words. Clever.

204

Senator Warner’s proposal was only meant to address how we deal with Republicans on the top 2% of wage-earners. I apologize if I didn’t make that clear. Any other considerations should also be on the table in addition to that. I just think Warner makes sense that moving the tax cuts to the wealthy over to tax incentives for small businesses to invest in hiring and R&D is an argument we could win over Republicans with. IF it’s sold right.

Thanks, LOUNE. I’m beginning to feel the frustration of losing the game, though. So it would, indeed, help, if some of us weren’t fighting it alone and we could get others on board. The more, the better!

First, I think you’re great, too. :slight_smile: Second, I didn’t know the Making Work Pay credit was expiring anyway, so thanks for educating me. However, the gist of the article is correct, that the working poor really do end up worse off on January 1 than they were on December 31st, even with this deal. The fact that the President didn’t take that into account is. . . strange? unconscionable? outrageous? stupid? all of the above?

That said, I do respect your opinion that this deal appears to be better than nothing. My argument, however, is that there were better deals we could have made, had we messaged them better. If we had been out there for this entire year, making the Republicans look like the hypocrites they are on this issue, pounding home (especially to the Tea Party, who were all about the deficits!) the fact that Republicans are only fighting to make it worse, and in the process damaging our national security by forcing us to borrow money to pay their rich friends off, from Saudi Arabia (home of all the 9/11 hijackers!!! – 9/11, 9/11, 9/11!!!) and Iran, I think we would have had the force of the people behind allowing the tax cuts for the very top tier to expire.

There are very few people who actually know that the tax cut proposal the Democrats put forward, still gave a tax cut to the top 2%, but just not the gargantuan one we’ll have to borrow money from our enemies to pay for.

In the meantime, Republicans just voted down a bill that would give seniors a one-time payment of a measly $250 each for cost-of-living adjustments, because “the nation couldn’t afford the estimated $14 billion cost of the payment”. But adding $900 billion to pay off the über rich, well, that’s okay in their world.

It’s just so unbelievably incomprehensible I’m just gobsmacked that we’ve dropped this ball as badly as we have. And as the undisputed biggest Barack Obama champion on this board during the primaries and general election, propping him up primarily because of his ability to form consensus and work deals; me saying that this “deal” sucks so bad that I’m ready to see a primary challenge in 2012 says volumes. This was not a compromise, this was capitulation and an abandonment of both a serious campaign promise and worse, our core principles as a Party. I find it unsupportable.

But I do respect your difference of opinion.

205

I have tried to find these concrete examples you are talking about. Maybe I’m mising it but I don’t see any concrete evidence that liberals generally believe that everything belongs to the government and that they permit us to own things.

Almost every liberal I know (in the USA at least) believes in property rights and capitalism.

…or the evidence perhaps? Like I said, liberals don’t hold this view but its interesting that you think they do.

If its just your opinion then thats fine but don’t try to pretend its an informed opinion or an opinion based on facts. Its an opinion based on what you WANT to believe.

206

Coulda, woulda, shoulda.

I’m just as filled with white-hot anger as you at the way the Dems have muffed the politics of pretty much everything this year. (We have a difference of opinion on what the Tea Party could be sold on - the notion that they actually care about deficits is largely bunk, IMHO. If I can dig out a link to Brad DeLong’s attempt to reason with a meeting of Tea Partiers, I’ll do so - it’s most instructive on this score. But I digress.) But the question is, lacking a rewind button on the past year or two, what do we do right now, in the situation we’re actually in? Do we call our Congresscritters to tell them to support this depressing compromise, or to deep-six it, and why?

At this point, on December 10, 2010, I don’t see that there’s a route to a better deal. I wish I could say otherwise, and if I thought there was much hope, I’d be burning up the phone lines to tell my Congresscritters to fight for that deal, just the way I made calls to my Congresscritters several times a week between January and March of this year, to tell them to Pass The Damned (health care reform) Bill, when despite the overwhelming sense that all was lost, there WAS a clear route to passing it, if Dems could find the will to act.

Quite simply, the minimum one must do to define a route to a better deal is give the names of two GOP Senators who have indicated that they would be open to such a deal. Because we need 60 votes to so much as bring a bill to the Senate floor.

207

Well, there’s messaged and messaged. Our people are not patient with nuance and complexity, they want the memo to be ten words or less, and none longer than two syllables. And you can’t just hand it to them, you have to staple it to their nose. Our national motto might well be “tl:dr”.

And I think, relying on my antennae, that one message, a very important message, has got through: the Republicans will do anything it takes to get their way for their wealthy patrons. Like a lot of folks, I thought that might be their caving point, that they would look for some way to weasel around that, try not to make it so blatant.

I was wrong. They don’t give a shit. And they will, they will! daub themselves with shit, set their hair on fire, and lie down in the middle of that road screaming “NO! NO! NO!”. I really didn’t think they’d hand us such a gift, such clarity, such truth, but they did. Well, then, being wrong, I have to examine my premise: the presumed sanity of the opposition, the assumption that they won’t pull the trigger and spatter poor Lassie’s brains all over the wall. But they will.

And they have the numbers. If they march in absolute lockstep and disregard any semblance of a conciliatory, compromising stance, they can stop just about anything. They are a disgrace and ought to be ashamed of themselves, but they are not, and that’s it.

If they were going to cave, or even compromise in good faith, they would have done it before the “message” was clarified, they would have begun making such noises before it became apparent who pulls their strings, usually, they are very wary about letting that news get out. But they don’t care about the message, they shrug, and don’t even bother to contradict it!

Which is bad enough. But there’s a new crop coming in, Bachmann-Palin Overdrive. Now, maybe that won’t really matter, the Pubbies are already psychotic, whats a few more batshit baboons? But at the very least, it means things are not going to get better, bi-partisan comity wise.

So, if we were going to get the unemployment stuff, the earned income stuff, all the other things we really, really do need - we get them now, at a disgusting and repulsive cost, or we have to fight them tooth and nail over each and every separate one! With a very good chance of losing.

I don’t see how we can take that risk. Yes, it sucks that holding our people hostage will work, but it works because of who we are, it works because we do, in fact, give a shit. So we will, in fact, make a repulsive and disgusting deal to protect our people.

I voted for Obama because I trusted his judgment a fuck of a lot more than the other guy. And I think that, within the parameters of the political animal, he is inclined to tell me the truth. I think so even more now, since he has told me a truth I don’t really want to hear.

If I were in the halls of Congress, I wouldn’t hold my nose and vote for it. I’d puke my guts out, and vote for it. Andi would tell anybody who will listen why I did, and who I blame for making it necessary.

And if Obama had a wartime consiglieri, maybe it might have been a bit different, but I doubt that it would have been substantially different. Because it was Barzini, all along.

208

I left it out because it was you apparently can’t distinguish between ‘evidence’ and ‘assertion.’

Speaking of evidence, how about this one:

You might be surprised to learn this, but most of your tax dollars aren’t given to the poor.

One-third of the Federal budget goes to Social Security and Medicare, i.e. to the elderly as a whole, who have a lower poverty rate than pretty much any other age group.

Another 20% goes to defense and security, another 6% goes to interest on the national debt. 7% for Federal retirees and veterans’ benefits, 3% for transportation infrastructure, 3% for education, 2% for scientific research, 1% for non-security-related foreign aid…OK, we’re up to 75%, without any handouts to the poor.

We do have 14% for various safety-net programs, and about 8% for Medicaid and SCHIP.

What most liberals would like to do is simply put people back to work, rather than giving them handouts to keep them going in the absence of jobs. But our economy has lost 7.3 million jobs since this point in 2007, total household net worth is down about 17% since mid-2007, and businesses aren’t expanding simply because they don’t have enough customers: a lot of people don’t have jobs, a lot more people are working part-time or for way less than they used to earn, and even people who are still making what they made three years ago are trying to catch up with the reality that their assets aren’t as worth as much as they used to, so they’re saving rather than spending to get their own balance sheets into a better position.

You might like all these people to get to work, but just to reiterate, there aren’t enough fucking jobs. We’ve lost seven million jobs since 2007.

So what us libruls would like to do is to invest in infrastructure. Rebuild every water and sewer system in America that’s gone well beyond its reasonable life expectancy. Make sure no highway bridge anywhere in this country is in danger of collapsing for a decade or two to come. Fix the more significant gaps and bottlenecks in our freight rail network, because rail is far more energy-efficient than trucks for transporting stuff, and steel rails bear the load with lower maintenance than asphalt does. Modernize our power grid. Bring our broadband networks up to par with the rest of the world. Since there’s no way we’re going to quit coal as a power source for a few decades, figure out how to maximize the efficiency of our coal plants so that we at least get the most usable energy possible for each ton of CO2 our coal plants dump into the atmosphere. Build or improve, as the case may be, our intracity rail systems so that when our economy recovers and gas goes to $10 a gallon, we’ve got choices besides driving. (And get rid of regulations that limit development around transit stations.) And where cities are close enough to each other for it to make sense, develop high-speed intercity rail systems, so that there’s a faster, better way than car or plane to get from, say, D.C. to Pittsburgh.

All these things, and more, are things we’re going to eventually have to do. So we might as well do them now. We’ve got several problems - aging infrastructure, underutilized capacity, and millions of unemployed people - that are in effect each other’s solutions. And to beat it all, right now Uncle Sam can borrow the money to put people to work on all this stuff at practically 0%. You can’t beat that with a stick.

That would be the responsible, sensible, and prudent thing to do, if we were running government like a business, as we’re often told we should. But we keep on being told that’s stimulus, and stimulus is bad. So we fall back on Plan B, which is to at least give the unemployed some money to put food on the table and not wind up on the street. It’s not ideal - far from it. But you conservatives won’t even give Plan A the time of day. So handouts it is.

[/Rant]

ETA: I should make clear that those were 7.3 million private-sector jobs. (It’s about the same overall.)

209

Amen to all that.

210

I know. You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.

But dammit, we simply HAVE to let our representatives know that we are DONE putting up with this kind of lackadaisical, half-assed, twisting-their-toe-in-the-ground, shy little girl bullshit from them. I think we have to tell them now, how wrong they are and how wrong they’ve been and exactly why.

I’ve been calling and writing not only my OWN Congresswoman and Senators, but Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi AND Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. I think we tell them to keep the bulk of the deal but deep six the tax cuts for the wealthy in exchange for tax cuts/incentives for small businesses a la Mark Warner’s proposal. I actually think Snowe and Collins could potentially be swayed.

And I’ve not only been calling on my Representatives to vote a certain way, I’ve been straight out telling them that I EXPECT them to be working their colleagues and persuading them. I know how my Representatives feel about the tax cuts for the wealthy. I know I can rely on them to vote appropriately. But I damn well expect them to corner their colleagues in the halls, take them out to coffee, do whatever in the hell has to be done to find the few who can be reasoned with. I may be naive, but I refuse to believe that they are all sick freaks who care about the wealthy more than the old and the unemployed. They just can’t be, or all humanity is lost.

BEG them to “work the room”!

I know of none who have indicated such publicly. But we both know this shit is all about “back room deals”. Our Representatives need to get their asses in those back rooms and work the deals.

G-d, this is heartbreaking. I don’t want to hate Republicans. I want to respect them as caring individuals who have honest differences from Democrats that can be worked out into a reasonable compromise for both parties.

But I was listening to Randi Rhodes yesterday, and a man called into her show that literally (and I do mean literally, not figuratively – literally) brought me to tears in my car. He is a military veteran with an outstanding background and resume. He worked in various industries until one by one they were all outsourced. So he went into construction, figuring they can’t outsource building a building. It has to be built here, not overseas. But he can’t find steady work in that field, not because things aren’t being built, but because builders won’t hire him. When he goes to the job sites all he sees are out-of-state license plates and low-wage workers.

And after he got all that off his chest, he proceeded to apologize to President Obama, that he was the reason the President had to take such a bad deal. That he put the President in a position where he (the caller) could be used as a pawn. And then he started bawling like a baby. “I just want to work. I just want a job. I just want to work. I can’t find work. I really do want to work,” through sobs of despondent crying.

But Republicans have painted him as the villain in all this. The lazy slob who would rather get a “free handout” than actually get a job. And maybe if we cut off his lifeline, he’ll be forced to do something.

Yeah, the guy’s about to do something all right. He said he’s about to end up living on the street. There’s “something.”

This deal and the way Republicans have treated the unemployed and middle class in this country have made me hate them. I hate them on behalf of everyone who is going to go hungry, lose their home or even actually die because of their base pandering to the massively wealthy who keep them in power. I hate them.

I don’t know whether I love you more or must begin hating you for making me see this through a different lens. I am not yet convinced. I do not fully believe that a man as smart and politically savvy as Barack Obama couldn’t have used John Boehner’s own words and threaten to publicly humiliate him (in his Barack Obama way, not the Shayna way, which would clearly just alienate them further ;)) with those words if he didn’t live up to them.
"On Sunday John Boehner, Republican leader in the House of Representatives, suggested he might vote for only the tax cuts on middle-income Americans. He told CBS television that while he favoured extending all the tax cuts that dated from the era of George W. Bush, he would vote for a partial extension if necessary.

“If the only option I have is to vote for some of those tax reductions, I’ll vote for it,” he said. “If the only option I have is to vote for those at 250 and below, of course I’m going to do that”."

Well, sir, that’s your only option because that’s what I’m going to tell my House and Senate Leaders to put up for a vote (and then make damn sure he’s gotten every single Democrat on board in exactly the same way Mitch McConnell got every single Republican on board. If McConnell can do it, surely Obama can. Right?).

Game. Set. Match.

And yet he caved. He fucking caved.

I’m SO disappointed I cannot even begin to tell you.

211

No. The Republicans are a oneness, the Dems are a threeness, maybe a fourness. The “D” after the name only indicates a rough sort of affiliation. True, there probably are no “R”'s who are more liberal than the most rightarded “D”, but that’s about it.

And even if, even then, the Pubbies have the forty votes in the Senate to kill anything they truly hate. Its kinda like “majority rules” but more like “majority rules if the minority is OK with that.” Which they are not.

212

Who is our President again? I could have sworn it was Barack Obama, but lately it feels like John Boehner. And now, if you turn on the tv, it’s like we’ve time-warped back to 1983! President Obama actually had to have former President Clinton take a press conference on this. :eek:

213

1993, of course. ::sigh::

214

Hey, you guys better take heed when the Mama Grizzly of the left is talking! :smiley:

215

Clinton! * Clinton*? Menshevik, third legged, centrist, business friendly, blue dead dog Clinton? Slowly I turned…

He ain’t no mamma grizzly. He’d fuck a mamma grizzly.

216

I wasn’t talking about Clinton.

217

Yeah, I know, and it wasn’t funny.

218

http://notaxdeal.com/

219

When Obama retreated from this, he might as well went to the WH and started packing - he’s done

220

Possibly. Or maybe Boehner will self-destruct on hubris like Gingrich did. Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to these people is too much success.