The Left is still a no-show in American politics

The time for sitting it out is over

Harold Meyerson has a nice piece in the Washington Post today, "A loser of a tax deal" about the declining share of GDP that goes to wages and salaries. "The earned income share of GDP peaked in 1969 at 53.5 percent," Meyerson writes. "In 2012, it was 43.5 percent."

"Where did those 10 percentage points of GDP--currently about $1.5 trillion every year--go instead of to U.S. workers?" he asks. Simply put: corporate profits, a huge transfer of wealth to the owning class.

When those profits are distributed to shareholders, the lion's share goes to the very wealthy, whose income from dividends and capital gains, Meyerson points out, are taxed at a much lower rate than income from wages and salaries. Into the bargain, retained profits are frequently invested by corporations in overseas production rather than domestically. This, of course, reinforces foreign low-wage competition with American workers.

All of this, Meyerson tells us, is redistributionist--a charge frequently lobbed at liberals, but which more accurately describes the right-wing agenda. "Far from mitigating the consequences of this shift [in income from working people to the wealthy], the U.S. tax code reinforces the redistribution from wages to profits," Meyerson writes.

"None of this upsets Republicans, but it would be nice if Democrats realized these tax breaks undermine everything they stand for," he concludes.

Meyerson's column is a helpful, fact-based assessment of the recent fiscal-cliff deal. It is only a minor quibble to observe that Democrats likely do realize that the current tax code, with its favorable treatment of unearned income and overall generosity toward corporations and the wealthy, does undermine what they stand for.

And it's certainly worth pointing out that President Obama might have gotten more in negotiations, if he had been rougher on Republicans. But the deal, unpalatable as it might have been for the Left, nevertheless represented a significant reversal of Bush-era tax cuts in the face of powerful irrational resistance from the Right. The tax on dividend income, for instance, went up 33 percent. That would have been a more meaningful step, if the payroll tax hadn't gone up even more.

In the long run, the fight for economic justice is going to take something more than an aggrieved awareness of how far we are from that happy state. It will take a level of Democratic electoral vigor that isn't possible with a Left that is eternally divided about the wisdom of participating in "bourgeois" politics.

Right now unions and minorities, organizationally and individually, are the only participants in the electoral process who organize and vote based on the interests of working people. A scattering of environmental and feminist organizations and other nonprofits are involved, as well. But there may very well be as many as ten million or more leftists, with organizing, communication and policy experience, who could be running, working and voting in local, state and federal elections; and doing so in a way that would reestablish a liberal agenda as a thing to be reckoned with here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

What if Barack Obama planned all this?

Wouldn't that be something?

What if Barack Obama has played the country like a drum?

For a certainty nobody thinks Obama won as much as he could have during the recent stumble over the fiscal molehill. Hell, he didn't even seem to be asking for enough to begin with. Doesn't the guy know how to negotiate?

But what if Barack deliberately decided not to ask for as much as he could have, deliberately decided that he wasn't going to try to win all that was possible to win? What if that was a purposeful strategy?

To be sure, there's hardly anyone outside of the Republican caucus willing to say that Obama asked for too much and forced the caucus to give more than they should have given. Nope, people don't think that Obama asked for too much and they don't think he bludgeoned the Republicans. They think he governed.

If that's true, imagine the possibilities.

And it might be true. I mean, look at how much ground Obama has recaptured since the 2010 election:

No one is asking to see his birth certificate anymore. And if they are, the media is not reporting it--well, Fox, maybe, but I mean the other media. And the Obama's-a-Muslim thing, is gone, too.

More important, the Tea Party is contracting. That passion looks spent. And Democrats actually gained seats in the House this election. And the Republican caucus in the House is in disarray.

This may be a man, this president, who always had his mind set on the long game. Maybe he saw a branch of the future that looks like a path to a president who doesn't lose on the debt ceiling.

Just saying.

The Climatological Cliff Looms Largest

The fiscal cliff looks like a molehill from here

While President Obama appears to be meeting the lowest possible expectations in the assault on the fiscal cliff, I find myself more preoccupied by the climatological, environmental and ecological cliff we are stumbling towards. And out of my reverie has materialized the number one quadrillion.

That's 1,000 trillion.

In dollars, that's almost 700 times the U.S. GNP. That's more than 10 times the total assets--dollars, property and equipment--held by U.S. businesses, corporations and households. In other words, it has taken all of us, for however long we've been here in the United States, to work for however long it took (at a tremendous cost to many of us and to many of those who came before us) to create together about $100 trillion worth of wealth (however unequally it might be distributed).

These numbers are not my invention, I borrowed them (and perhaps fudged them a bit) from a website that goes by the name of "U.S. National Debt Clock-Real Time." The question is not whether or not the statistics I am parading by here are damn lies or otherwise, the question is from what swamp bubbled the one quadrillion that so mesmerizes me. And, yes, I am calling that one quadrillion "dollars."

The starting point of my fugue: How much damage done by Hurricane Sandy?

About $50 billion, or so, the number plucked from a Forbes magazine article. Okay. The U.S. economy can cover that loss easily. And, as the Forbes story makes clear, the labor and materials invested in the recovery should boost the economy; never mind that the cost of the emotional damage suffered by Americans who lost somebody or something isn't reckoned with in the article.

The Forbes story also reviews the cost of other damaging hurricanes. The total from a  daycare school's worth of hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Andrew, Irene and others between 1992 and now is probably north of a half-trillion dollars. But if these hurricanes came more powerfully or more often than they might have without all the environmental damage that preceded them, what is the true cost of all the damage that created and had to precede those stronger and more frequent storms?

What is that cost when it is added to all the other damage from droughts and forest fires and oil spills and air pollution and oceanic dead zones that we have caused, created or amplified? What is the cost in suffering and illness and death and contaminated and compromised food supply and poisoned water and air? How does the damage from every little storm and every wounded life add to that total?

Because whatever that total is, that's probably about what it is going to cost to fix the damage. So if the number one quadrillion dollars is the total (and it is very likely an order of magnitude or two higher) than that means it will cost us everything we own and all the work that we do for the next 40 or so years to fix the damage we have done. That's if the number is one quadrillion and not two or eight or higher. And while we are trying to fix the damage, the situation will be getting worse.

The only bright spot here is that if we start the work now some of us will one day contemplate a brighter future. But a perspective to add as we plunge into the swamp at the base of the fiscal cliff is this: The notion of the national debt, which appears to be the root cause of Republican angst, is such a tiny part of our portion of the true global (environmental) debt (damage), such a small hill, that President Obama and both his allies and his adversaries ought to be able to clear it in a single bound.

And so ends my reverie, on a day when the cliff that concerns me is climatological.

Barack Obama's Christmas Wish

Or John Boehner's gift to Barack

Or the fiscal cliff is coming and you better be nice. Or we're all getting coal for Christmas. Or the Senate wants in on what may end up a Christmas with no gifts, at all. Or the Senate doesn't really want any part of Christmas. Or something.

To recap. Obama told Boehner that he is willing to settle for tax increases on households earning $400,000 or more, and might be willing to adjust cost-of-living increases for Social Security, maybe.

Boehner, thinking that he couldn't sell such an agreement to House Republicans, decided to test his own leadership by proposing legislation that would maintain most of the Bush tax cuts and increase taxes only for households making one million dollars or more. Feedback from his caucus persuaded Boehner that he would suffer legislative defeat on the proposal, a definite embarrassment for the speaker. So, he decided to humiliate himself by pulling his proposal without a vote and go home to Ohio. His last words were something like "let Harry (Senate Majority Leader Reid) do it."

Maybe that is Reid's Christmas wish, but it didn't sound like it when his Democratic colleague, Sen. Charles Schumer, said, "we're not going to want to come to a deal if we know Boehner isn't going to move it in the House."

Anyway, Senate Republicans have the filibuster to use against any deal. And, in comments reported by the Washington Post on Saturday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sounded like he agreed with Schumer's statement. No enthusiasm for leadership there.

Still, though it seems improbable, there might be enough Republican votes in the Senate to shut down a filibuster. It would take seven Republicans to do so and, probably, a fiscal cliff deal that doesn't protect the wealthy as much as Boehner has sought to do, reduces some scheduled cuts to the Pentagon budget, and cuts Social Security COLA increases a bit (maybe including protection for low-income recipients). To complete the deal would then take support from all House Democrats and 17 House Republicans, or some mix of the two caucuses that adds up to 218 votes in the House.

Not only does such a deal seem improbable, it would leave larger budget cuts, stimulus spending, further revenue increases, and an increase in the authorized national debt to be negotiated by the same parties in January. Failure to address everything on the table in a satisfactory way means reduced unemployment benefits for long-term unemployed, tax increases for low- and middle-income earners and steep cuts for social programs. The Obama administration can take certain steps to put off the impact of some tax increases and spending cuts, but those steps likely will not do much to keep the stock market from tanking, or to prevent business investment and hiring from dropping significantly, or to avoid dropping back into recession.

So what seems likely to be the outcome of all of this? One of the following, I think:

Either,

1. Obama turns out to have been more clever than most people thought. Polls show that a significant majority of Americans will blame Republicans more than Democrats for failure on the fiscal cliff. This may well be a large part of Obama's willingness to hold out for a deal that protects low- and middle-income households, extends unemployment benefits and includes new stimulus spending. He gets some of this stuff in a proposal that passes the House and Senate between Christmas and New Year's and enters 2013 looking like a leader with an ability to get more of what he wants from demoralized Republicans.

or

2. Obama turns out to have been more of a compromiser than Democrats want and gets Republican votes in the House and Senate for a deal that gives up too much on entitlements and leaves extreme right-wingers in Congress feeling like they can still wag the dog. He enters 2013 with little chance of protecting social spending from further cuts and having to give in further to get congressional Republicans to raise the debt ceiling.

or

3. Obama holds the line and we dive over the cliff, causing a certain amount of economic panic as we enter 2013. Republicans will get the lion's share of the blame for the damage, but will be consoled by the ability to vote for tax cuts as part of any eventual agreement. It will be too late to prevent the collateral damage that will fall primarily on working folks and communities of color in the first quarter of the year.

or

4. Right-wing Republicans continue their zealous campaign to cripple the federal government throughout 2013 and turn the legislative session into trench warfare, insuring deeper recession and, likely, the longest mid-term election campaign in history. Even a shockingly large Democratic victory in the 2014 elections will do little to immediately relieve the longest and deepest economic downturn in American history. European and Asian economies will suffer even worse.

or

5. Mutated combinations of some or all of the above are possible. The actual outcome could be an either more or less disastrous hybrid and almost certainly a sterile one.

Merry Christmas, or something.

Medicare reform

What it should look like

Ezra Klein's column in the print edition of today's Washington Post is headlined "Republicans missing central issue on Medicare." On the Post's website, the column is headed "A smarter Republican agenda on Medicare." I like the head on the print version better, though near as I can tell, the content in print and on the web is nearly identical.

I like the print head better because Klein's column makes the point that "raising the Medicare age [of eligibility] is a particularly dumb cut, and his elaboration of that point is simple and clear. The move wouldn't save anything. "It merely shifts costs to employers, consumers and other public entities, including Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the states." The move would not reduce the deficit or preserve the program.

Some Republicans and conservatives are pushing "beneficiary engagement," Klein writes, but nothing in his column makes the case that there is "a smarter Republican agenda" out there. It's just that some Republicans are not interested in pursuing the "trophy" win (as Nancy Pelosi calls it) that John Boehner and the House Republican caucus appear to be seeking.

In the meantime, a smarter agenda for Medicare reform, "A Systemic Approach to Containing Health Care Spending" is posted on the website of the New England Journal of Medicine. And in "The Senior
Protection Program," the Center for American Progress (CAP) proposes a series of reforms that should save hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 10 years. Despite all the fiscal cliff hoopla, the CAP proposal hasn't gotten much media attention. Other than a Republican interest in preserving profits for insurers, pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers, it's hard to say why.

Cliff diving

Fiscally speaking, Obama's position only gets stronger

Why shouldn't President Obama demand Republican support for ending Bush-era tax cuts for the rich? Because if he doesn't find a way to compromise with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, we will all go over the fiscal cliff?

The truth is Republicans have stronger reasons to avoid the cliff than Obama does and, surprisingly, many more reasons to go over it, as well. Either way, they face political damnation.

If we do take a dive, Boehner and McConnell know that Republicans will get the major portion of the blame. Their refusal to compromise will be portrayed as protecting lower tax rates for the rich. No amount of explaining will change that perception.

Obama will be criticized, too, but not as harshly, and he doesn't have 2014 election worries, either. Republican incumbents (House or Senate) planning on running for reelection will begin their campaigns fearing that intransigence on the fiscal cliff (and the debt ceiling, if it comes to that) will cost them politically.

Theoretically, going over the cliff will position Republicans to reach a "grand bargain" in January that includes tax cuts. The new year will create incentives for both sides to reach a compromise that restores some of the Bush-era tax cuts (except for high-income earners) and maintains the payroll tax exemption that will disappear at year's end.

A January compromise will allow Republicans to claim that they remain the party of tax cuts. Unfortunately for them, to get the cuts that will help maintain their brand (even though Democrats will want them, too), Republicans will likely have to agree with healthcare reforms that they have always opposed, like allowing the government to require competitive bidding for medical equipment and other items purchased by federal health-care programs.

Medicare and Medicaid reforms outlined by the Center for American Progress and generally supported by Democrats are projected to save $385 billion over 10 years, without affecting eligibility or benefit levels. Republicans have their own proposals for saving billions more in healthcare spending, but most of them come from delaying eligibility and raising costs for recipients. The credit for such reforms will go to Obama, not to Boehner, Ryan, Cantor, McConnell, et al.

That same Republican leadership will want to restore some of the cuts to the military budget that will result from going over the fiscal cliff and Democrats will want to do some of that, also. But they won't want it worse than the Republicans will and will be able to bargain for other things they want more, like a little bit more stimulus spending and reduced cuts in education and human service spending.

All of that compromising is going to make Republicans look weak to their core constituencies. It's a painful prospect; agree to tax increases to avoid going over the fiscal cliff and tarnish their anti-tax, anti-government brand, or strengthen the perception that they are defending tax cuts for the rich and agree to a compromise afterward that makes them look like a junior partner in supporting handouts to Democratic constituencies.

The only possible basis for Democrats to oppose going over the cliff is the possibility that doing so will result in instant and significant damage to the economy. (Just three weeks ago in Compromise or Betrayal, I did advocate compromising with Republicans before going over the fiscal cliff. What can I say? Like Obama on gay marriage, my thinking has evolved.)But there are all sorts of ways the government can blunt the immediate effects of tax increases and sequestration, delaying the pain for long enough to pass a fix in January. Obama has lots of cards to play now. After the cliff dive is done, his hand will be even stronger.

Compromise or Betrayal

The Politics of Gridlock

So, I wrote the Washington Post, again. Something like Letter to the Editor number lebenty-leben, I’m guessing. They didn’t get around to publishing it (quelle surprise!), but here it is:

Editor,

“Obama did not lead a U.S. retreat from the world,” Jackson Diehl writes in “Foreign policy red flags “(Post, Nov. 12). “Instead he sought to pursue the same interests without the same means.”

Obama has withdrawn ground troops from war zones, cut the defense budget, and backed away from nation-building projects and from U.S.-led interventions, Diehl tells us. That sounds to me like a decision to pursue distinctly different interests around the world and, more specifically, to make it clear that the U.S. will no longer police the world to secure all the advantages that once accrued under Pax America.

If my understanding is correct it might mean that U.S. corporations can no longer invest and operate globally backed by the threat of force. If my understanding is correct it might also mean that groups with historic grievances against the U.S. (real or imagined) will unfortunately have more space and freedom to plot anti-American violence. Indeed, that might make Americans a bit more vulnerable, a risk that we will have to figure out how to manage and reduce by other means. But if we can do this through a “lighter footprint” globally, we might become one of the principal architects of a more peaceful world.

Or is Diehl suggesting that a heavier footprint might get better results? Are we talking, say, the Bush footprint, which resulted in upwards of one million Iraqis and Afghanis dead or displaced, thousands of American fatalities, and a military budget that roughly doubled from the first Bush-year to the last? Is that the footprint Diehl is recommending?

Jeff Epton

That’s the letter, but there’s more to say, of course. Obama’s “lighter footprint” still includes drone attacks, Guantanamo and anything but a get-tough-with-Israel element, but at this time in history, and after almost 50 years of disappointment with American foreign policy, I’m more than willing to settle for half a loaf.

And, speaking of compromise, disgruntled leftist though I may be, I’m ready for more of it. If Barack Obama wants to trim a little around the edges of programs I support, including Medicare, in exchange for Republican votes for higher taxes on the wealthy, other revenue increases of various kinds, closing tax code loopholes or ending subsidies that supplement the profits of oil companies and hedge funds and other corporate actors, and continuing reductions in the military budget, I’m ready to sign on.

Some of those cuts likely will harm individuals and communities that need more, not less, government assistance or protection. But without Republican support for revenue increases the country will continue to be pummeled by the effects of political gridlock.

Of course, there are lots of possible compromises that will provide no long-term benefit. Any worthwhile deal with Republicans in Congress must be part of a strategic assessment that suggests that the Republicans who do compromise will be willing to do so more than once.

I don’t know what criteria to apply in reaching such a conclusion, but I’m fairly certain that there are Republican senators and representatives who believe that a deal of some sort would be better for the country than falling off the fiscal cliff and also believe that Republicans who continue on their present reactionary path might well be overwhelmed by an approaching demographic tsunami.

There will be plenty of folks who wish to argue with this approach. People who believe that compromise can easily convert to betrayal. Robert Borosage lays out that perspective in persuasive detail in “A ‘grand bargain’ on the fiscal cliff could be a grand betrayal.”

Borosage’s main argument is that going over the fiscal cliff will not immediately do the kind of damage that so many observers are predicting. Further, he says, the nation does not have a debt or deficit problem, but a jobs problem that needs to be addressed first. And, finally, that there is plenty of time next year, after going over the cliff that is not a cliff, to address the problems created by lapsed tax cuts and automatic budget cuts.

But I’m not persuaded. I agree with the proposition that getting more people back to work is more important than addressing the deficit. But what Borosage and I believe is not going to compel action. The end of the payroll tax cut is going to reduce household income for even the poorest working families by a meaningful amount. That’s not going to get anybody back to work. There are more layoffs coming, as well, as the fiscal cliff approaches.

Sorry I am that compromise is necessary, but January will not create a more flexible Congress or present new opportunities to pass another sorely needed stimulus bill. Stimulus items like spending for infrastructure, extending unemployment benefits, and preserving the payroll tax cut are going to take compromise, now or later. Election victories notwithstanding, coaxing the right number of Republicans to vote with Democrats is going to take giving up something.

Though Jackson Diehl’s Nov. 12 piece left something to be desired, two Post columnists wrote rather more interesting columns that ran on Nov. 14. Dana Milbank’s “The Confederacyof Takers” points out in substantial detail how well most red states do feeding at the public trough. “Red states receive, on average, far more from the federal government in expenditures than they pay in taxes. It is the opposite in blue states,” Milbank wrote.

Also, check out Harold Meyerson’s “The GOP’s gerrymandered advantages,” which points out that in Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania congressional races, Republicans won 30 more seats in the House of Representatives than Democrats, despite the fact that Obama won the popular vote in those states by margins that should have led to a 30-seat Democratic advantage. That did not happen, Meyerson wrote, because Republican gubernatorial and legislative control of those states after the 2010 census permitted significant gerrymandering of House districts. “…by suppressing competition, and crafting uncompetitive districts, [Republicans] maintained their hold on the House last week.”

 Obviously, it will take a while before the full effects of the coming demographic change will swamp intransigent Republicans. In some cases, it will take Democratic victories in tight elections in state legislative districts over the next six years before redistricting will permit Democrats to once more exercise all the prerogatives of the majority party in Congress. But legislative victories for working people and minorities should come a little easier in the future than they have over the last four years.

In the meantime, we should all keep in mind that working people in the red states are suffering, too. After all, capital and organized commercial interests in the south, like weapons manufacturers, oil companies and agribusiness, are siphoning off a huge share of the federal largess that heads that way.

Ordinary folks in the red states are pretty much getting the same shaft as working people elsewhere. They may even have been getting it longer. The fact that they don’t seem to vote their own interests is a measure of how long they’ve been exploited and of the absence of unions to organize and message an alternative. While we are compromising, and strategizing our way to future victories, we ought to figure out a way to talk plainly and supportively to folks in the red states. They are Americans and they are our sisters and brothers.