Do Nothing, Know Nothing

Park­sie, Paul Ryan was instru­men­tal in killing Simpson-​​Bowles. Did you know that?

Pres­i­dent Obama did not “reject” Simpson-​​Bowles. For one thing, the Com­mis­sion failed to reach the 14 vote thresh­hold they needed to even have a for­mal pro­posal, so there was noth­ing for the Pres­i­dent to “accept” or “reject”. (Part of why it didn’t reach the needed 14 votes was that Paul Ryan voted against it).

Sec­ondly, the Simpson-​​Bowles Com­mis­sion was sup­posed to make a rec­om­men­da­tion to Con­gress. No bill based on Simpson-​​Bowles was ever enacted — or even con­sid­ered — by Con­gress. The Pres­i­dent couldn’t do much until it was.

I under­stand there is this absurd right-​​wing talk­ing about that some­how the Pres­i­dent “rejected” Simpson-​​Bowles. But it was not within his Con­sti­tu­tional pow­ers to do any­thing with it at all. Do you respect the Con­sti­tu­tion? If so, then the Pres­i­dent did pre­cisely what he was sup­posed to do — wait until Con­gress weighed in on the mat­ter, which it didn’t bother to do.

Repub­li­cans in Con­gress would rather block all efforts to improve the econ­omy, because they imag­ine that makes the Pres­i­dent look bad. They clearly place more impor­tance on their elec­toral for­tunes than on the well-​​​​being of the coun­try as a whole.

Its just too polit­i­cal for them to be competent.

Then stop elect­ing incom­pe­tent peo­ple to Con­gress, and peo­ple who don’t want Con­gress to function.

Hon­estly, elected Repub­li­cans are a lot like the guy who goes around break­ing win­dows so you’ll be forced to pay his brother to fix them. Repub­li­can vot­ers are like the kids who keep sup­ply­ing the rocks to break the win­dows with — and then then com­plain that peo­ple who live in houses aren’t com­pe­tent to keep their win­dows unbroken.

If you didn’t keep elect­ing window-​​breakers to Con­gress, maybe we’d have a respon­si­ble and eth­i­cal and com­pe­tent Con­gress. Pull the beam from thine own eye.

This com­plaint that Repub­li­cans have, that — “Con­gress deosn’t work, so we don’t want it to do any­thing” — is one of the most absurd bits of false argu­ment I’ve ever heard.

Con­gress is made up of the peo­ple that we put there. It’s not some dis­tant, untouch­able thing like a force of nature. It is what it is because We the Peo­ple decide who is there.

Repub­li­cans keep elect­ing peo­ple to Con­gress who are very vocal about not want­ing Con­gress to work. If they then com­plain that Con­gress doesn’t work, whose fault is that?

Per­haps if they were hon­est about it — “We don’t want Con­gress to work. That’s why we elect the peo­ple we do to Con­gress. We want them to break it because we are anar­chists and we don’t want Amer­ica to work” – per­haps then the strat­egy wouldn’t be so con­temptible. It’s still bla­tantly anti-​​American, but at least it’s honest.

Own up to your dis­like of democ­racy, for cripes sake. Be hon­est about it.

Ryan wants to reduce spend­ing to avoid this tax increase,

Actu­ally, that’s false. Ryan’s 2011 pro­posal doesn’t bal­ance te bud­get for 60 years. It adds over 40 tril­lion dol­lars to the fed­eral debt. His 2012 pro­posal is a lit­tle bet­ter — it doesn’t bal­ance the bud­get for 20 years and “only” adds $15 tril­lion to the debt. He doesn’t want to reduce spend­ing, and he does want to increase taxes. It’s just a mat­ter of which ones.

In both his 2011 and 2012 pro­pos­als, he decreases taxes on the wealthy (elim­i­nat­ing the cap gains tax would pretty much cut Romney’s taxes, for instance, to zero) but elim­i­nates most deduc­tions — which would increase taxes for the poor and mid­dle class. Gut­ting assis­tence pro­grams would rep­re­sent another, hid­den tax increase.

Con­vert­ing Medicare to a coupon sys­tem rep­re­sents a $6500 tax increase on America’s seniors. Con­vert­ing Social Secu­rity to IRA’s pretty much elim­i­nates it, and puts Amer­i­cans at the mercy of the same banks who caused the eco­nomic crash of 2008 (oh, and Ryan wants to elim­i­nate reg­u­la­tion on those banks to make cer­tain they can do it again).

Is Ryan fis­cally respon­si­ble? He voted for the un-​​paid-​​for Bush tax cuts (that’s a $300 bil­lion /​ year increase in the deficit) and wants to make them per­ma­nent and expand them. He voted for two unfunded wars. He voted for the un-​​paid-​​for Bush Medicare Part D. His 2011 and 2012 tax pro­pos­als increase the deficit by over $4 tril­lion. He voted for Bush’s requests to increase the debt limit. Baed on these votes, he never gave a damn about the deficit until a Demo­c­rat was elected to the White House.

He also wants to increase mil­i­tary spending.

The man is a spend­thrift zealot. He’s one of the most eco­nom­i­cally irre­spon­si­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Con­gress. He uses the deficit as a tool to lever­age right-​​wing social engi­neer­ing, an excuse to kill pro­grams he dis­likes for ide­o­log­i­cal rea­son that have noth­ing to do with the budget.

I can’t decide if peo­ple who sup­port him are dis­hon­estly play­ing the same game he is, or if they are hon­estly suck­ered in by his lies.

“Con­sider: 100% of the nations with the most lim­ited gov­ern­ment and the low­est taxes are third-​​​​​​world nations. This is not a coincidence.”

Mis­lead­ing argu­ment, at best. And you should take a gan­der at North Korea some­time.  They’re yet to find some­thing the gov­ern­ment can’t inter­fere with, and it’s the most dys­func­tional coun­try on the planet. 

Yes, it is pos­si­ble to be both dys­func­tional and over-​​controlled. I never said oth­er­wise. My state­ment which you quoted said noth­ing about the extreme on that end. I addressed only the lack of reg­u­la­tion and the absence of needed gov­ern­men­tal revenue.

It still remains that the nations with the least gov­ern­men­tal reg­u­la­tion and the low­est taxes are all extremely poor third world coun­tries. As I said, that’s not coincidental.

Where did you get this weird “coupon” metaphor? There are no coupons or gift cer­tifi­cates involved.

Under Ryan, you’d get a voucher to help you buy pri­vate insur­ance with. Remem­ber, you’re over 65 years old, which is the age group that is hard­est and most expen­sive to insure. You’d be expected to go to the open (mostly unreg­u­lated) mar­ket and buy what­ever you can afford, using the dis­count coupon from Paul Ryan. Com­par­ing Ryan­care to coupon-​​clipping is the most char­i­ta­ble anal­ogy I can think of. It would be bet­ter to com­pare it to death panels.

The point is, though, if you can’t iden­tify a causal link, there’s not much use in bring­ing it up.

Sure there is. Acknowl­edg­ing the exis­tence of such a strong cor­re­la­tion might spur effort into find­ing why that cor­re­la­tion exists. Fur­ther, The fact of the cor­re­la­tion leads to some obvi­ous and ratio­nal con­clu­sions., since it under­lines that there is no evi­dence to show small government/​low taxes invari­ably leads to increased pros­per­ity (if it did, the cor­re­la­tion could not exist).

I for­got to add — too often, “size” of gov­ern­ment is con­fused with “effect” of gov­ern­ment — and, too often, both are inap­pro­pri­ately used as sub­sti­tutes for “cost” of gov­ern­ment. And “cost” is too often equated with “waste”. These are all very dif­fer­ent con­cepts, and they need to be separated.

Excel­lent point, Rose. Too often, there are objec­tions to the “heavy hand of gov­ern­ment” which “gets in the way of busi­ness” and then “costs money.” This leads to the insis­tence that “reg­u­la­tion is bad” and we need “less government.”

Non­sense. Yes indeed gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion some­times costs money. “Money” is not the only valid con­sid­er­a­tion, and is often of only minor impor­tance. The health of the cit­i­zenry, of the peo­ple, of chil­dren, of the envi­ron­ment, this is all of extreme impor­tance, and needs to be weighed against incon­ve­nience or profit. So must beauty and esthet­ics, which help to fur­nish and nur­ture the health of the mind and the soul.

If one is engaged in a tooth-​​and-​​nail strug­gle for sur­vival, then per­haps one can be for­given for being short­sighted and hav­ing no con­cern for the health or well-​​being of oth­ers. But if we con­tinue to be uncon­cerned with such things, that will nearly ensure a future filled with tooth-​​and-​​nail strug­gles for sur­vival, after we have destroyed the health and beauty of our neigh­bors, our descen­dents, and our planet.

Mule,

There’s gen­er­ally no good argu­ment against those being essen­tial
ser­vices that can be pro­vided by a gov­ern­ment entity, even though
scale/​​scope/​​efficiency should always be monitored.

Well put. I think this is a valu­able start­ing point, and too often the dis­cus­sion gets derailed right here at the beginning.

On the ques­tion of “unnec­es­sary” or “bur­den­some” reg­u­la­tions — you’re prob­a­bly right, that there are reg­u­la­tions we can do with­out, and prob­a­bly many which have out­lived their use­ful­ness. Prob­a­bly also some that never did really have soci­etal ben­e­fit. Most, how­ever, were put in place because there was a per­ceived need. It is one thing to make a gen­eral state­ment that “things can be improved.” It is another to get down to details and dis­cuss which reg­u­la­tions, pre­cisely, should be done without.

This is not as easy as it sounds, even tak­ing one sin­gle area such as the tax code. The last time there was an attempt to do this on a com­pre­hen­sive level was in the early 1980’s. Ronald Rea­gan pushed very hard for a revamp of the income tax sys­tem, advo­cat­ing “tax sim­pli­fi­ca­tion.” He pushed the idea through Con­gress. Even­tu­ally, Con­gress did per­form a major over­haul — but wound up renam­ing it “tax reduc­tion” because, in point of fact, they made it more com­pli­cated. (Rea­gan thor­oughly endorsed the result, by the way.)

As I said, most reg­u­la­tions — the vast major­ity — are there because there is a need they are ful­fill­ing. If we’re going to attempt a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, that requires look­ing at each can­di­date for dele­tion, and exam­in­ing why it’s there, deter­min­ing of some­thing like it is still needed, and find­ing a bet­ter way to do it. I’m not mean­ing to argue against this process. I’m sim­ply say­ing it’s not a sim­ple mat­ter of throw­ing every­thing out and start­ing over, because that’s a path for dis­as­ter. (I’m not mean­ing to imply that you are advo­cat­ing that course, either.)

I under­stand and gen­er­ally approve of the prin­ci­ple of  not reg­u­lat­ing behav­ior any more than is nec­es­sary. The ques­tion always comes down to, “How do you define nec­es­sary?” We need, as I said, to look at each indi­vid­ual reg­u­la­tion to hon­estly con­sider that.

Mule,

I agree that any dis­cus­sion of “reg­u­la­tions” needs to deal with specifics. Pretty cool that we’re on the same page there.

Actu­ally, I think Ryan was against it due to Oba­macare. With­out Oba­macare in the mix, he would’ve voted for Simp-​​​​Bowles.

As short­chain pointed out, this isn’t true.

And if it was true, it would show that Ryan is not seri­ous about reduc­ing the deficit, since ACA will reduce the deficit by hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars in the next decade, and per­haps a tril­lion in the decade after that.

Yes, Max. The lower limit for when you start get­ting taxed would cer­tainly be reduced. Some Repub­li­can rec­om­men­da­tions include hav­ing no floor at all, but tax­ing even the first dol­lar earned at a min­i­mum of 10%. Should Ryan-​​Romney get elected, and if Repub­li­cans hold the House and gain the Sen­ate, I would cer­tainly expect such changes to take place.

Any­one who thinks putting a 5%-10% tax rate on everyone’s first
$5,000-$10,000 of income should be a higher pri­or­ity than the
lit­er­ally hun­dreds of other things that should be done to the
fed­eral tax code does not deserve to hold higher (or even lower)
office.

Again, we’re in agree­ment. Once more, and it’ll be a habit.