How Politically Naïve Are We?!

Candidates are struggling to keep up with the philosophies hurled at them by their Super-PAC puppet masters, trying to keep in step with the demand of “the 23 billionaires” who back them. The two issues that the billionaires care most about are deregulation and lower taxes… and notwithstanding their purported alignment with fundamentalist Christian virtues… the latter appears to be little more than insurance that there are issues that will draw voters to their side. They seem to forget that while Ronald Reagan did implement a massive tax reform act that did lower rates in one part of his term, that same Republican president also understood the necessity of raising taxes to pay for government spending. Reagan most certainly had more years of raising taxes than he had years of reducing that tax bite. He got the idea of fiscal responsibility, a notion that is apparently missing from every GOP candidate save Ron Paul.

The myth that cutting taxes for the rich creates jobs lives on, despite the lack of a single meaningful statistic that supports this assumption. Why a rich person would go on a hiring binge in the absence of consumer demand for the underlying product or service – no matter how deeply the tax rate were cut – simply defies logic. The world just doesn’t work that way. The net effect is to make the rich richer without having the slightest benefit for the rest of us. Why would we engage in such massive stupidity?

And these billionaire-driven Super-PACs have pushed three out of the four remaining GOP candidates to positions on tax cuts that are downright dangerous, threatening to balloon our deficit to staggeringly higher levels. “[According to a report by U.S. Budget Watch], a project of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and former House speaker Newt Gingrich would do the most damage to the nation’s finances, offering tax and spending policies likely to require trillions of dollars in fresh borrowing.

“Both men have proposed to sharply cut taxes but have not identified spending cuts sufficient to make up for the lost cash, the report said. By 2021, the debt would rise by about $4.5 trillion under Santorum’s policies and by about $7 trillion under those advocated by Gingrich, pushing the portion of the debt held by outside investors to well over 100 percent of the nation’s economy… The red ink would gush less heavily under former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the report said — at least under earlier Romney proposals that paired $1.35 trillion in tax cuts with $1.2 trillion in spending reductions and would leave the debt rising on a trajectory that closely tracks current policies…The lone exception is Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who would pair a big reduction in tax rates with even bigger cuts in government services, slicing about $2 trillion from future borrowing.” Washington Post, February 23^rd.

And no, President Obama, you aren’t getting a particularly good grade for your tax reform proposals either. While 67% of America supports your increase on the tax rate applied to billionaires, your notion of reducing the corporate tax rate and eliminating loopholes by creating another loophole defies logic. It’s true that while we have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world, we have one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates because of loopholes, most of which allow off-shore money to accrue and be used offshore without being taxed domestically. Closing those loopholes is a terrific idea, but creating a new loophole – a proposed lower rate for manufacturing (25% vs 28% for other firms) is fighting the problem with the problem. Stop!

And where’s the legislation to stop the practice of taxing folks who make their regular living in the private equity/hedge fund business at about half the rate of everyone else who happen to have jobs that don’t carry a different rate – the very reason Mitt Romney can earn over $20 million and pay only 13.9% in taxes. It’s time to reform the “carried interest” rule that only applies to these fund managers, even though that is precisely what the 23 Super-PAC billionaires most want to preserve. It’s just not fair to tax certain professions at rates that don’t apply to any other job categories. And no, these fund managers are not going to retire and deprive America of their capital resources. What a totally stupid argument! They’ll just make a few billion dollars less.

It’s also interesting to note that underlying root word for conservative is exactly the same root word for conservation. Republican Teddy Roosevelt was the poster boy for preserving our national parks and other federally natural resources. It’s not okay to make American business “more competitive” by allowing them to dump effluents into our aquifers, lakes and rivers or hurl pollutants into the air rather than pay for the cost of preserving those natural resources. It’s not okay for there to be a “fracking exemption” allowing natural gas drillers to use toxic, drinking-water pollutants to force gas to the surface. Why in the world would the government simply give those natural resources away without charge to corporate America? The air we breathe and the water we drink and enjoy in our recreation simply belong to all of us. It’s akin to letting paper companies and oil-drillers take resources from our federally owned forests and underground reserves for free. That certainly would make American businesses more competitive, but the very notion is simply stupid.

Here’s an example, involving one of the most toxic substances that is generated as an industrial pollutant: mercury. “After 20 years of delay and litigation by polluters, the Obama administration approved in December one of the most important rules in the history of the Clean Air Act. It will require power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants by more than 90 percent in the next five years and is expected to prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths annually from asthma, other respiratory diseases and heart attacks.” New York Times, February 22^nd. Immediately, Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma set about getting a majority vote in both the House and the Senate to trump the regulation (the statute allows such a vote without a presidential signature) and stop this “job killing” regulation and to thwart the Obama administration’s “job killing environmental agenda.”

Exactly why is destroying our environment good for business? Why should we subsidize corporate America with our lungs and our bodies? And what job creation? The NY Times responds further: “Yet no matter what the Republican leadership claims, the clean-energy sector is a much more likely source of future job growth than the fossil-fuel industries they are so determined to protect. And the new clean air rules Mr. Inhofe [from an oil and gas state] so abhors are likely to create far more jobs than they eliminate… It is true that the mercury rule, and other clean air regulations, will require substantial upgrades in older, coal-burning power plants and force others to close down. The power companies have had years to prepare. In addition to reducing emissions of global warming gases and ground-level pollutants, the upgrades are expected to create as many as 45,000 temporary construction jobs over the next five years and possibly 8,000 permanent jobs.” Where are Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight David Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan when you need them?!

And folks tell you we need a huge military, that we won the war in Iraq – even though that country is now squarely in the camp of our enemy Iran – or that we have crushed the Taliban for which the Afghan people are grateful. Doesn’t anybody watch the news? The Taliban are stronger than ever, knowing they will be there no matter when we leave. Anti-American riots over the Qur’an burning incident are nothing more than giving the existing anger at a conqueror that won’t leave a place to vent. Our “global policeman” efforts have created more enemies and more recruitment “posters” against us – we are the most hated country on earth. We have a military budget that is ten times the aggregate budget of the next ten big military spenders on earth… and we haven’t won a major war since WWII. The impact of this military folly on our deficit is killing us. Exactly how much more mythology will Americans swallow before they are willing to taste the truth.

I’m Peter Dekom, and never in my lifetime have I heard so many mainstream political candidates with so many absolutely absurd notions of governance.