In a Shyamalanian twist no one – by which I mean everyone – could have predicted, the CBO estimated Wednesday that House Republicans taking an ax to the IRS would both add to the deficit and decrease revenue.
Nothing typifies the House Republicans better than this. Their concern for fiscal responsibility is a complete sham, and they hope that the money they save wealthy donors by gutting the IRS will wind up in their campaign accounts. Truly, the party of grift.
Matthew 25:40 And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’
I think the Repubs have it backwards!
Only a republican could look you in the eye and tell you that losing money is actually saving money.
This mild-manner nutjob is not going to last.
“It’s dead almost before it’s born,” he added.
We know how Republicans feel about the pre-born. They’ll stick with this trhough thick an thin.
Well, to the party of fiscal responsibility, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”
A glance at the long bond markets suggests that this era is ending.
Take from the poor and middle class to give to the super wealthy.
When our Government goes bust we will, for the good of our Country, be taxed to death while the wealthy inform us how lucky we are to live in their country with no benefits.
Nothing will beat the soundest economic plan ever made by a president - cutting taxes while we were running a war on two fronts. This genius move brought to you by W and the Republican party.
Mild-mannered fascists are the most diabolical and dangerous.
This is the truth of it for sure but it is also a religious belief among many Republicans and I suspect the new House Speaker gives it more than lip service; that kind of messianic bullshit is right up his alley.
Is anybody surprised by this?
Today’s GOP House isn’t a serious good faith governing entity. With the exception of helping tax cheats, they don’t care about anything other than triggering da libz. If Biden wants it, they don’t. The deficit doesn’t matter; the border is a campaign prop, and they couldn’t care less about our allies.
They are truly the worst of the worst.
What needs to be stated is that many Republicans including the current Speaker and Donald Trump when it to foreign policy are entirely pro-Putin. In fact in my view, the best part of Trump not being president is that Vladimir Putin is no longer the most powerful man in America.
With the above in mind, the real goal by the new Speaker is to cut off aid to Ukraine and give Putin a victory in his war against freedom and democracy.
To the actual intellectual dishonesty used to try and justify cutting off aid to Ukraine, Paul Krugman in his newsletter to subscribers has this to say:
Then there’s the war in Ukraine, where many on both the far left and the far right want to cut off aid, effectively giving Vladimir Putin victory. There are multiple reasons for that convergence, most of which I’ll leave to other analysts. But one common theme on the left and the right is the claim that we can’t afford the expense of that aid.
I’ve written before about right-wing claims to that effect, and why they’re disingenuous. But I’ve been seeing a somewhat different set of arguments from the left — not so much a complaint about the sums being sent to Ukraine as the claim that we have a huge, bloated military budget, and perhaps that “merchants of death” are driving our support both for Ukraine and for Israel.
What people making such claims should know is that their views about how much we spend on the military are generations out of date.
Krugman’s entire newsletter is below.
Like most people who opine about politics and policy, I routinely talk in terms of left versus right. But when I do, I sometimes encounter people who decry this approach as simplistic. Surely, they argue, people are more complicated than that, and don’t have views that can be neatly summarized by a single dimension.
Well, while people may be complicated, politicians aren’t. Careful statistical analysis of congressional voting shows that politicians are very clearly arrayed along a left-right spectrum (yes, Joe Manchin is the rightmost Democrat, and Susan Collins is the leftmost Republican):
And if you know where a politician lies on that spectrum, you can do a very good job of predicting his positions on seemingly unrelated issues. There could, in principle, be strong environmentalists who want to cut taxes on the rich and vice versa. In practice, such people are vanishingly rare.
By the way, these days, nobody quite knows what that second, “other votes” dimension means. It used to correspond to race relations, but at this point: ¯_(ツ)_/¯?
Anyway, voters aren’t as easily characterized as politicians, but they, too, seem to be growing more one-dimensional. To take one widely discussed example, views of the economy — not what policies we should be pursuing, but simply how it’s doing — have become wildly partisan. Right now, self-identified Republicans mostly believe that unemployment, which is near a 50-year low, is actually near a 50-year high, and assess current economic conditions as being worse than they were in 1980, when both inflation and unemployment were much worse than they are now.
But while normal politics may be remarkably linear, abnormal politics may be less so. There’s a widespread notion about political extremes known as the “horseshoe theory,” which says that in some ways the extreme left and the extreme right may be more alike than either is to the center. Schematically, it looks like this:
As far as I can tell, political scientists are generally skeptical or worse about this theory. Activists on the far left generally advocate quite different policies from those on the far right; also, the far right has real political power while the left mostly yells from the sidelines.
Yet horseshoe thinking persists because there are still some ways in which it seems to match experience. There really are personality types who veer between extremes, denouncing Goldman Sachs as a vampire squid one year, then resurfacing as a political propagandist for Elon Musk later.
And the horseshoe theory has been given a big boost by recent events. As many have noted, the far left and the far right seem increasingly united in antisemitism. Funny how that always happens.
Then there’s the war in Ukraine, where many on both the far left and the far right want to cut off aid, effectively giving Vladimir Putin victory. There are multiple reasons for that convergence, most of which I’ll leave to other analysts. But one common theme on the left and the right is the claim that we can’t afford the expense of that aid.
I’ve written before about right-wing claims to that effect, and why they’re disingenuous. But I’ve been seeing a somewhat different set of arguments from the left — not so much a complaint about the sums being sent to Ukraine as the claim that we have a huge, bloated military budget, and perhaps that “merchants of death” are driving our support both for Ukraine and for Israel.
What people making such claims should know is that their views about how much we spend on the military are generations out of date.
It’s true that Dwight Eisenhower gave a speech warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.” But he gave that speech in 1961 — that is, his warning was as far in our past as, say, the Spanish-American War was in his. Military spending today is much smaller as a share of the economy than it was then:
The Pentagon’s role in the budget has declined even more dramatically than its role in the overall economy. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson introduced Medicare and Medicaid while expanding Social Security, and these programs have expanded further over time. Some of us like to say that the federal government is an insurance company with an army; well, the insurance side of the business really dominates these days:
By the way, for the record, I strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq and stuck my neck out by asserting in real time that we were being misled into war. But I never believed, unlike some leftists, either that defense contractors drove the push for war or that the monetary costs of the war were insupportable and had something to do with the 2008 financial crisis.
So, do we have a hugely bloated military budget? No doubt the Pentagon, like any large organization, wastes a lot of money. But recent events have made the case for spending at least as much as we currently do, and perhaps more.
First, one of the revelations from the war in Ukraine has been that those expensive NATO weapons systems, from Javelin anti-tank missiles to HIMARS, actually do work.
More important, it turns out that the era of large-scale conventional warfare isn’t over after all, and there are real concerns about whether our weapons production capacity is large enough to deal with the potential threats.
By all means, let’s have good-faith arguments about how much America should spend on its military. But repeating 60-year-old clichés about the military-industrial complex doesn’t help the discussion.
I guess I will go to my grave wondering why a majority of the American populace just blindly falls for this gimmick every time and never catches on to what is happening. I totally understand why many great thinkers have found true democracy to be a rather terrifying concept. The work of educating people about what is actually happening while a firehose of bullshit is being sprayed in your face is a Sisyphean task and I have nothing but admiration for those who have the stamina to fight this fight every day. Democracy seems so fatally flawed in what can happen when the people marking the ballots are purposefully misinformed and riled up to hatred every day by propaganda.
I cannot believe I am living in a world where people who understand nothing about economics, justice or common decency are influencing and/or making these decisions for our country every single day. No complexity for them - all things government bad, anything that robs the national treasury and puts money in their donors’ pockets is an automatic yes.
This legislation is an abortion, one might say. In terms of strategies and priorities, one wonders whether the House Republicans care more about “helping” Israel or more about hurting the IRS. But those who subscribe to end-times theories perhaps think that there is no harm in defunding the IRS because everything will be blown away forthwith.
You mean cutting revenue does not raise revenue?
I’m shocked!
It gets harder and harder to tell whether the Republicans comprise the stupidest, most brain-dead organization in America or if they are the single most vicious anti-American organization in America.
When you think of how many people have been brainwashed and fed a steady diet of lies and propaganda, it’s not shocking. What is (or was) shocking is how much it’s taken firm hold in this country, passing for real news. No shades of gray on anything - except in their own lives of course.
Por que no los dos?
“Superfundie, who, disguised as Mike Johnson, fights a never ending battle against woke, teh Gays and the Libtards!”