Washington debates tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year, while far too many struggle at the other end of the economic spectrum. Can you say skewed priorities?
Charles Rangel was found guilty by his colleagues in the House of Repesentatives of violating ethics rules — which would be huge news if it wasn’t likely to result in just a slap on the wrist.
Rangel was found guilty Tuesday “of 11 counts of ethical violations,” The New York Times said. The House committee ruled “that his failure to pay taxes, improper solicitation of fund-raising donations and failure to accurately report his personal income had brought dishonor on the House.”
House Ethics Committee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, said the investigation was “difficult and time consuming” and that a punishment was likely to be announced this week. That punishment, however, is likely not to be very satisfying. Expulsion, one of the possible punishments, is unlikely, the Times reports, and Rangel “is more likely to face a letter of reprimand or a formal censure.”
I’m not advocating for expulsion, necessarily, but the fact that it is off the table — or appears to be off the table — is an indictment of a system that protects incumbency. And while the GOP has tried to make hay out of this, it is pretty clear from their own actions while in the majority that they would act no differently (the list of Republican miscreants is pretty long).
It’s convention time for the state’s municipal officials, and they plan to focus their attention on Gov. Chris Christie’s so-called tax reform “tool kit.”
The convention — the League’s 95th — comes as Republican Gov. Chris Christie and Democratic leaders of the Legislature fight over how towns can meet the cap.
Christie has been pressuring the Legislature to pass his “tool kit” bills, the most important of which would allow towns to opt out of civil service rules and put a cap on arbitration awards. Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) said he’ll get to that before the end of the year, but that the governor has not proposed legislation that would push towns to share more services.
Elizabeth Mayor J. Christian Bollwage said he and other mayors will use the convention to tell lawmakers and members of the Christie administration to stop fighting and get to work on property tax solutions. He said more drastic steps are needed than what’s included in the “tool kit.”
“The rhetoric, the chess playing has to stop and there needs to be some bills passed that will get us to meet this two percent cap,” he said.
The problem, however, is the cap itself. The cap is nothing more than an arbitrary imposition, one that bears no relation to the reality of running local government. The cap, like so many of the other reform proposals on the table will only go so far and fail to address the real issues facing local government.
We need to stop making distinctions among different types of government spending and different taxes and start thinking about the role of government in the state in a more unified way. That will mean consolidation of some communities and school districts, elimination of fire districts (fire and first-aid spending should be a municipal or county-level responsibility) and other special taxing districts. This will allow streamlining — fewer police chiefs, fewer school superintendents, etc. — which should save money on the spending side.
Plus, we need to alter our thinking on taxes, begin to think of the tax pool as a larger single entity made up of smaller components — income, corporate, sales, property, gas, etc. We can then assess their fairness and make the most efficient use of them for collecting revenue and distributing funding according to need.
There is something strange about watching Jon Stewart, a deft political satirist, fall prey to the false god of reasonableness.
Paul Rosenberg explains the danger of Stewart’s stance, reminding us that it lets the bad guys off the hook. As Rosenberg says, Stewart’s objection to calling Bush a war criminal or pointing out the racism in the Tea Party movement (which in no way undercuts the movement’s legitimate rage at our national decay) is logically flawed. Calling Bush a war criminal makes him seem like Pol Pot, Stewart says, which seems extreme. But
If we want our presidents to not be war criminals, we need to make it sound like a bad thing. No, make that a really bad thing.
It’s a conversation-stopper, not a conversation-starter, Stewart explained. Not a problem, I say. Arrest first, then converse. You see, Jon, It really wasn’t cable news that started the Iraq War. It was George Bush & the neocons. They’re the ones we should take of first. There are laws you know?
Just as importantly, Stewart’s argument is based on the notion of motive. If Bush believed his approval of torture, rendition and a misguided and unnecessary war was in the best interest of the country, was done to protect Americans, then he was not a bad guy. Remember, Pol Pot thought he was right, too. It is not about the motivation, but about the action. Bush and his cronies shredded the Constitution in numerous ways and lied us into war — there is no doubt about that, though Stewart suddenly refuses to see that. The former president should be held accountable for this.
If this makes me seem unreasonable, then so be it.
The New York Times buys into the nonsense being peddled by the president’s Fiscal Commission, calling their proposal a dose of fiscal reality and shared pain — though sharing the pain is far from what this plan would do.
The plan, the Times says,
frankly acknowledges what most politicians are too cowardly to admit — that deficit reduction will require shared sacrifice.
It lays out sensible principles, prominent among them that deficit reduction should start gradually, beginning in 2012, to avoid disrupting the fragile economic recovery. It also affirms the need to protect the most vulnerable Americans and to invest in education, infrastructure and research and development.
Then it does what any successful deficit reduction plan must do: It puts everything on the table, including tax reform to raise revenue and cuts in spending on health care and defense. It even dares to mention the need to find significant savings in Social Security, Medicare and other mandatory programs.
But Social Security is not the problem (minor fixes will address a potential problem in the retirement program that has been blown out of proportion) and the kind of tax reform being proposed is the kind that the people who run our corporate state will appreciate, but that those of us in the middle class will be none too happy about.
The focus should be on addressing healthcare costs — which the Obama health-care plan is supposed to do, but won’t because it left the contours of the for-profit corporate system in place. A single-payer system is what is needed, with less of a focus on high-end technology and more on preventative medicine. But that is another debate.
The issue here is the plan on the table, which is a right-wing economist’s dream come true. As Jeff Madrick, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, writes on Huffington Post, the radical reduction in the federal income tax rate (the bulk of which would go to top earners) “is simply right wing ideology at work, and has nothing to do with deficit issues.”
To the contrary, the authors are using deficit alarms to present a new tax agenda. Is Obama really going to stand behind it? There is no commonly accepted evidence that current marginal tax rates, or even higher ones, suppress economic growth.
He also is critical of the arbitrary slashing of federal outlays — to 21 percent from an expected 24 percent (and the current 22 percent) and what he calls Draconian (and unnecessary) cuts in debt levels.
Why the reduction? There is no reason at all to do so, except an ideological one: less government is always better. Again, there is no absolutely commonly accepted evidence that higher levels of government suppress growth. Yet the proposal is willing to make painful cuts in programs to meet this spurious goal. And it will leave no room for more public investment.
Third, the proposal’s goal is to reduce debt levels to 60 percent of GDP and eventually 40 percent. To do so requires a deficit on average of 2.2 percent of GDP. Again, there is no evidence that debt levels of 60 percent are better than levels of 70 percent, for example. Reducing the debt levels to 40 percent is simply Draconian. One argument is to keep them low to be able to respond to emergencies, as the nation just did. It would be far better to devote attention to avoiding the extreme emergencies.
The spending cuts, as Madrick points out, will be counterproductive in this broken economy, making it more difficult to address stagnant employment or help those dislocated by the damage done by the very economic elites likely to benefit from its medicine.
