Green Lime Ice Water wallpaper
Palin writes tax cut crib notes on hand for Fox interview…but still gets it wrong
The former Alaska governor returned to the use of crib notes during an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace Sunday. Palin explained that the expiring Bush tax cuts would mean the largest tax increase in American history.
“Democrats are poised now to cause this largest tax increase in US history,” Palin told Wallace. “It’s tax increase of $3.8 trillion over the next ten years and it will have an effect on every single American who pays income tax.
“My palm isn’t large enough to have written all my notes down on,” she admitted.
“What do you have written on your hand?” asked Wallace.
“$3.8 trillion in the next ten years so I didn’t say $3.7 trillion and get dinged by the liberals saying I didn’t know what I was talking about,” Palin answered.
It’s regrettable Palin thought it was more important to act like a smug smart-ass in combination with claiming as fact, a pants on fire lie. The only tax cuts that will expire are the wealthiest Americans, Three Good Reasons to Let the High-End Bush Tax Cuts Disappear This Year
Maintaining the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans will directly reduce revenues by about $690 billion over the next 10 years.
[ ]…The cost of those tax cuts is going to go straight onto our national credit card unless we raise taxes from everyone else to pay for the $690 billion in tax breaks for the rich or we find $690 billion in spending cuts. And that means increased interest payments on the debt. When we add in the costs of additional debt service, the true price of maintaining the tax cuts for the wealthy jumps by almost $140 billion.** In total, keeping those cuts for the rich will cost almost $830 billion over the next 10 years.
Since joining the right-wing welfare brigade in which she makes millions for writing books that reinforce the bizarre stuff right-wingers already believe anyway, Palin might be one of those affected by letting tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent expire. I’ll reserve my sympathies for women getting their ears and noses cut off in Afghanistan or the millions of Americans who are out of work because Republicans acted like less than serious adults while in charge of the economy. If Palin wants to be taken seriously she might at least be accurate and honest with her hand notes. She complained that a lot of people do not like her and blamed it on the media – judging by her performance (video at link) she has only herself to blame. Even most Main St conservatives don’t like a phony.As the graph illustrates letting the Republican tax cuts expire will not hurt 98% of businesses in America. So we can toss that excuse along with the other faux outrage by Palin and other conservatives. Not that facts and graphs matter to them anyway, Boehner Spouts Anti-Intellectualism Screed: ‘I Don’t Need To See GDP Numbers Or Listen To Economists’
This morning on Fox News Sunday, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), who has waffled on the impact of the stimulus, argued against the need for more stimulus funding. He claimed that he doesn’t need to listen to economists when putting together his policy agenda:
WALLACE: Congressman — a number of top economists say what we need is more economic stimulus.
BOEHNER: Well, I don’t need to see GDP numbers or to listen to economists. All I need to do is listen to the American people, because they’ve been asking the question now for 18 months, “where are the jobs?”
Later, the interview grew a bit more hostile as Wallace tried to press Boehner on the deficit-impact of his call for extending the Bush tax cuts. “Chris, you’ve been in Washington too long because that’s all a bunch of Washington talk,” Boehner said dismissively. “I’m just asking a question, sir,” Wallace persisted, noting the exorbitant cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. “This is the whole Washington mindset, all these CBO numbers,” Boehner responded.
The same old song and dance with CBO scores. Boehner say they don’t mean a thing and Republican wunderkind Paul Ryan swears by them. Maybe Boehner has decided to quit the church of conservative guru Alan Greenspan – Alan Greenspan: Extending Bush Tax Cuts Without Paying For Them Could Be ‘Disastrous’
In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Greenspan expressed his disagreement with the conservative argument that tax cuts essentially pay for themselves by generating revenue and productivity among recipients.
“They do not,” said Greenspan.
“I’m very much in favor of tax cuts but not with borrowed money and the problem that we have gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money,” he said. “And at the end of the day that proves disastrous. My view is I don’t think we can play subtle policy here.”
Greenspan let’s the next stage of Republican talking points out of the bag. Conservatives are being hammered pretty hard with the facts. Some conservatives like David Stockman are not completely oblivious to reality – Reagan’s Budget Director: GOP Policies “Have Crippled Our Economy”.
“Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes,” Stockman writes in a lengthy analysis of the current economic condition published Sunday in The New York Times. “This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.”
Where are Republicans really wrong right at the moment? In proposing to maintain the Bush-Cheney administration’s massive tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
“If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase,” writes the former conservative congressman and OMB director, who shaped the “Reagan Budgets” of the early 1980s. “More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy.”
This brings us to round two of tax cut sound bites. Well….grave tones all around….we could cut spending. Obama has spending cuts on the table – I disagree with the rumored specifics, but they’re on the table. Talks about spending cuts are going nowhere in the punditsphere or right-wing noise machine because when it’s time to ante up and propose real cuts, they either do not want to cut specific programs or cannot decide what to cut, Poll shows Tea Party would run big budget deficits and increase the national debt
While Tea Party supporters clamor for limited government and less debt, a recent poll appears to reveal a strong, internal contradiction. Based on the data, Tea Party adherents give high marks to Sarah Palin and George W. Bush, and are reluctant to cut spending in the federal budget’s biggest components: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense.
In a CBS/NY Times poll, 91% of Tea Partiers supported a smaller government with fewer services. However, 62% stated that they believed Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are worth the cost. But, a pie chart for FY 2009 reveals that these three entitlement programs accounted for a whopping 42% of the federal budget.
Defense spending (DoD and the War on Terror) accounted for a substantial 22% of the federal budget, and anecdotal evidence seems to strongly suggest that the Tea Party (non-Ron Paul faction) has no interest in cutting military spending.
Far Right senatorial candidates Randy Paul of Kentucky and Sharron Angle continue to avoid even the village idiots at Meet the Press, opting instead for Fox propaganda network where they can field lame questions and use the appearance as an opportunity to appeal for money, Angle, Paul find refuge at Fox
Even though Democrats have a large contingent of very conservative elected officials it would be more accurate of current political divisions and history if we went by the liberal versus Right labels. This post by a diarist at Kos is a reminder why the Republican designation in particular in no way describes the modern movement that calls itself Republican A design feature
Some may not remember, but the Republican Party was founded to oppose slavery. Some may not remember, but for generations Southern conservatives remained Democrats because they wanted nothing to do with the Party of Lincoln. Some may not remember, but those grand Democratic majorities supposedly enjoyed by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson included many racist conservatives who remained Democrats precisely because they remained racist, and still couldn’t forgive even the increasingly conservative Republican Party for what they deemed to have been the sins of its past, such as the Civil War. Some may not remember, but the moderate Republican of the recent past was met and perhaps surpassed by the truly conservative Democrat of that recent past.
[ ]…Nixon’s Southern Strategy was designed to capitalize on the evolving loyalties of racists, and segregationist George Wallace ran for the American Independent Party and won five southern states in the 1968 presidential election; still, changes in party affiliation continued to lag. Reagan cynically and despicably launched his 1980 campaign by invoking “states’ rights” in racist fire zone Philadelphia, Mississippi. That helped his party quite a bit, as more and more conservative Southerners finally made the switch. In the 1988 presidential election, the kinder, gentler Poppy Bush nakedly race baited his way to victory. The last major wave came early in the Clinton administration. After that, the transformation was largely complete. Some may not remember, but modern Republican stalwarts Phil Gramm and Richard Shelby first went to Washington as Democrats. They always belonged in the Republican Party, but it had been very hard for some Southern conservatives to make that leap. No longer.
The increasing polarization of the political parties has been a long time developing. In some ways, it has been a natural realignment along ideological grounds that was forestalled only by the bitter vindictiveness of Southern racists, including those who like to pretend that their bitter vindictiveness isn’t about racism. But it is. And the now obviously racist undercurrent of so much modern Republican politics and right wing media should not be a surprise. Racism is not incidental to the modern conservative movement. It has been one of its defining characteristics.
In a nation with shifting racial demographics, the Republican strategy wasn’t the smartest, and the moral vacuity is now revealing itself in the ever more desperate Republican drive to the extremes, but the process wasn’t accidental. This is the political grave the Republicans have dug themselves. They and their enablers in the traditional media can and will do all they can to distract from the truth, but the history is there. The facts are there. The rabid anger of a disintegrating demographic is proof of its desperation. And it is every bit as desperate as it is rabidly angry. Certainly not all Republicans are racists, but the Republican Party deliberately exploited and exacerbated racial tensions for political gain for decades.
I am a southerner and am very aware of the history of Dixiecrats. It is not difficult to find right-wing pundits going on about the racists who voted Democrat during the FDR years, the inane claim that modern conservatives are the party of Lincoln and thus Democrats are the real racists. Which makes a shame of the truth, worthy of the old Soviet Pravda, if the writer hides behind the traditional labels. It used to be that, at least for its time, Republicans were a largely a liberal movement. Democrats meanwhile were a grab-bag of mutts from every corner of the political spectrum. Currently factions have aligned about the way they should be ( Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Phil Gramm certainly don’t belong in the Democratic party even in the best traditions of a big tent). We have conservatives ranging from Andrew Breitbart to Glenn Beck making taking racism and race-baiting to new heights, but they puff up like blimps when you point out they feed off of and inflame racism..
The Long Goodbye 