Another slogan for a class-warfare Democratic campaign ad: “George Bush wants to raise your taxes so that he can give away one trillion dollars [flash $1,000,000,000,000 on screen] to millionaires.”
Half of the $2.2 trillion cost of extending the Bush tax changes by 10 years will go to the nation’s wealthiest 5%. Meanwhile, as others have documented, state and local taxes are rising, and payroll tax increases are definitely in the offing to pay down future deficits.
Gene Sperling at the Center for American Progress calls the Bush tax-cut sunsets “Cinderella tax cut accounting”: since the tax cuts, like Cinderella’s lovely gown, will supposedly disappear with a poof. (Disappearing gowns — now that’s a real “wardrobe malfunction.”)
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities lays out much larger accounting gimmicks hidden in the 2005 budget:
Hey, Enron Economics worked for the Texas Republicans before. No reason why it can’t work now, I suppose. (Speaking of which, why isn’t Kenneth Lay in jail yet?) And, at least for now, it looks like the investors are still buying, putting off a dollar collapse for another day. Hopefully, of course, after the election — just like the findings of the “Why No WMDs?” Commission and the 9/11 Commission and, well, anything else that might cause the slightest bit of embarrassment to the administration. (All this shifting of deadlines really makes me worry about what they’ve got planned for Term Two.)
“Well, what do you do for this guy?… You got a pretty face. You’re a good-looking guy. Better looking than my Scott anyway.”
This, apparently, is the best come-on line that George W. Bush could muster. (This was two weeks ago, but not very widely reported.)
Update: The tall fellow standing to the left of “206B” at PM Martin’s nominating convention appears to be Reid. (Photo: Liberal Party of Canada.)
Well, as a campaign strategy for Democrats at least. It’s hard to be the sunny candidate when Karl, er, George is on the other side acting deliriously, lunching-on-‘shrooms happy. And who would blame them? After carelessly (or is that carefree-ly?) throwing all caution — fiscal discipline, the “very serious” words of the Security Council, etc. — to the wind, they had better be happy. The rest of us, on the other hand, had better not be.
Polls consistently show solid support for cutting taxes, increasing spending, and balancing the budget. The only problem is that it can’t be done.
But, even taken purely as a campaign strategy, there is a problem here: It’s hard to see how any Democrat could possibly outflank the incumbent as the candidate of wishful thinking. The president, after all, is the one proposing to make his current tax cuts permanent; increase domestic discretionary spending by 4 percent; and increase military, homeland-security, and entitlement spending by more than that — all while adding new tax cuts and balancing the budget. In the meantime, he thinks we can fly to Mars, take on $1 trillion in transition costs as Social Security is partially privatized, solve the health-care crisis with tax cuts, help people pay for college with more tax cuts, and further strengthen the retirement system with even more tax cuts. It’s utter nonsense, of course, but it’s certainly optimistic.
Faced with Bush’s “candy for everyone!” politics, pessimism may be the Democrats’ only hope. If things look bad in Iraq and job growth remains weak through November, all the president’s promises will do him little good. But hoping for short-term failure isn’t very optimistic. It’s not a safe bet, either: Bush’s policies are calculated to maximize his short-term electoral prospects while pushing problems into 2005, 2009, or 2013 — when he won’t need to pay a price at the polls.
[Matthew Yglesias in The American Prospect]
And people wonder why I’m so dour.
Apparently, the G.W.Bush-in-a-flight-suit action figure is more flexible than most: he can pose easily as a yoga instructor.
While looking up references for the above entry, I stumbled across a blogger who had confused the R’s “ownership society” with the D’s “opportunity society.” Whoops.
The Bush “ownership society,” of course, is just another way to sell Social Security privatization as a good thing, rather than something that will either (a) sink Social Security just as demand for payments rises to record levels, (b) cost an extra few trillion to launch just as deficits rise to record levels, (c) force payroll taxation into the sky just as I enter my peak earning years, or (d) all of the above. “Medical savings accounts” so far have been a boon to LASIK eye surgeons; if properly expanded, we could see a boom in all sorts of cosmetic surgery! Hooray for economic progress! Hooray for the profits to be made by starving the public and enriching the private!
And oh, I shan’t forget to mention how the Rs plan to increase the exemption of investment income from taxation, thus shifting the tax burden from the privileged coupon clippers onto the lowly working classes. But no, that’s because income from capital is income from Ownership, which is Good. The proletariat, oops, no, lucky duckies, no, Regular God-Fearing Americans should pay more taxes, anyhow. That will inspire them to become part of the Ownership Society, which they can do by, well, you know.
Geesh.
I doubt it. However, we did nix the “hi, we came all the way from [___]” from our little speeches while canvassing suburban Bettendorf — plus, I was feeling awfully self-conscious about having dressed in various shades of black. (We were both wearing square-toed boots, natch.) From Salon War Room:
…put yourself in the boots of an average Iowa Democrat a few days before the caucus. The campaign is so intense that it has become a form of political harassment. Your phone rings every 10 minutes with an automated robo-call on behalf of one candidate or another. Your mailbox is jammed with political junk mail. Then comes a knock on your door and there you find a couple of committed campaigners from Park Slope or Noe Valley or Wicker Park telling you that Howard Dean is your man. And they’re wearing these really loud orange caps.
How would you react if a bunch of Iowans invaded your neighborhood like that? Now you’re beginning to understand what might’ve happened to Dean on Monday.
Actually, we didn’t meet anyone else there from an identifiably hipster hood (save one Logan Square). There were college kids galore, and a few even younger kids (including one who was excitedly telling anyone who’d listen that John Edwards “flipped me off!”), but the overall “I’m a purple-haired wacko and I like this guy and so should you” culture-shock factor was quite minimal.
In any case, Dean has pretty well jinxed his own campaign with The Scream. I’m really not feeling so confident about him after that.
It would seem, though, that John Edwards’ stump speech is perfectly positioned to catch the “opportunity society” meme that Tom Daschle introduced in the SOTU rebuttal. This phrase is, according to Stan Greenberg’s politics-as-psychographic-clustering text The Two Americas), how the Democrats can cohesively explain their vision for government’s role in American society — and to win both left and center.
Voting for Bush in 30 Seconds, the political ad contest sponsored by MoveOn Voter Fund, ends in two days. The particular voting algorithm used is playing the more popular (and hopefully more effective) ads more often as the voting deadline nears, so last-minute voters are likely to get a taste of some of the best ads.
The fallacy of Republican “small government” exposed, in The New Republic:
Last year, the Associated Press conducted a remarkable study showing how federal spending patterns had changed since the GOP took over Congress in 1995. Republicans did not shrink federal spending, it found, they merely transferred it, from poorer Democratic districts to wealthier Republican ones. This, the A.P. reported, “translates into more business loans and farm subsidies, and fewer public housing grants and food stamps.” In 1995, Democratic districts received an average of $35 million more in federal largesse than Republican districts, which seems roughly fair given that Democratic districts have more people in need of government aid. By 2001, the gap had not only reversed, it had increased nearly twentyfold, with GOP districts receiving an average of $612 million more than Democratic ones. Justifying this shift, then- Majority Leader Dick Armey said, “To the victor goes the spoils.” It would be a worthy slogan for Bush’s reelection campaign.
Perhaps the Republicans’ latest attempt at building a Reagan hagiography will show a few New Deal Democrats the blatantly and stupidly partisan depths the GOP is stooping to these days.
Oh boy! The ostensibly Republican-led House has gotten back into big government mode with a transportation spending bill (yes, everyone’s favorite flavor of pork) that proposes to spend 50% more money than the administration’s bill, with vague assurances that “we’ll find the money.” Says Don Young (R-AK), “the Lord will take care of us one way or another” when it comes to finding $375 billion lying around.
“Now we have an actual Chinese spy–charged, though not convicted–who by all indications was funneling money into U.S. campaigns… vital secrets were given to China, which Republicans were saying two years ago posed the greatest threat to the United States. And yet we’ve not had one hearing. Not one commission. There’s been very little coverage in the press, nor is anyone yakking about it on talk radio.” Josh Marshall
west north 
