Jonathan Chait's Blog, page 24

Norquist Obfuscates On Pledge Loophole

Remember how Grover Norquist last night admitted that his anti-tax pledge has a massive loophole, in which allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire (which is the basis for the revenue component of any bipartisan deficit agreement) does not count as a tax hike? Now he's in damage control mode:

ATR opposes all tax increases on the American people.  Any failure to extend or make permanent the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, in whole or in part, would clearly increase taxes on the American people.  In addition, the failure to extend the AMT patch would increase taxes.  The outlines of the plans are deliberately hazy, but it appears that both Obama’s Simpson-Bowles commission proposal and the Gang-of-Six proposal dramatically increase taxes on the American people.

It is a violation of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge to trade temporary tax reductions for permanent tax hikes. 

The present conversations in Washington should focus totally and exclusively on reducing government overspending.  President Barack Obama has increased the annual federal budget by almost $1 trillion dollars.  ATR has not altered either its policy positions or opposition to all tax increases whatsoever in any debt negotiations.

Tax reform that reduces tax rates and broadens the tax base on a revenue neutral basis should be done separately and not in a rush under duress from parties hostile to the interests of taxpayers.

Nothing here actually contradicts Norquist's previous statement. He opposes any deal that would allow the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, but the Pledge does not forbid it. The Pledge just turns out to be very badly designed, failing to bind its signers to extend expiring tax cuts. The statement above mentions that the Pledge forbids trading tax cuts for permanent hikes, but that doesn't necessarily apply to the Gang of Six deal.

Does this matter? Well, I suppose if there are any Republicans who want to cut a Grand Bargain but worry about breaking their Pledge, they have an out.

It Seems Like National Gang Week Starts Earlier Every Year

I've now heard two anecdotal instances of people receiving this chain email:

Subject: FW: Driver beware

National Gang Week is starting: This is their new target method while driving on any roads, If you see a baby car seat sitting on the side of the road DO NOT STOP!!!! These are gangs targeting people, especially women, to stop their vehicle to help a baby. They make this baby look as if it has blood on itself or on its clothes, when you get out of your vehicle in attempt to help, the gangs jump out from cornfields or tall bushes. They have beaten women to near death, and then continue to rape them with baseball bats and other torture methods. This is not just a forward of information, it is within our area. If you do happen to see a car seat DO NOT STOP CALL THE POLICE IMMEDIATELY!! Please send this onto everyone you know.

Benjamin F. Bean


State Of Tennessee


Department Of Correction

Obviously the entire thing is made up. (Can we create some program whereby any person over the age of 65 who sets up an internet account automatically gets snopes.com as the default home page?)

My favorite part of this hoax is the assumption that gangs have their own national holiday. And they call it "National Gang Week"! I bet they have this printed up on their own gang calendars. They look forward to this week all year long.

"Can we pull the fake baby rape scam today?," ask the junior members.

"Not until National Gang Week," reply the leaders.

Anyway, everybody knows that the proper ritual to celebrate National Gang Week is not to set up fake babies by the side of the road, but to release noble, doomed bipartisan fiscal plans.

Juan Williams Appreciating Diversity Of Fox News

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Juan Williams accuses National Public Radio of being in thrall to political correctness while simultaneously playing the race card against it:

“It is a very elitist and in this case white institution that I think is struggling with the changing demographics of American society,” he said. ...

In the book, Williams argues that neither his firing nor his previous fights with NPR management were isolated incidents, but rather part of a wider resurgence of what he calls “political correctness” in culture today.

“You are not supposed to say certain things in political conversation and I think it is political correctness, like the walking dead, back from the grave,” he said.

Nice trick there.

I also empathize with Williams' frustration with the whiteness of NPR. Naturally this explains his decision to go to Fox News.

Rick Perry Takes Foreign Policy Advice From Crazy Man

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Rick Perry is obviously very conservative, but I didn't realize that he'd be soliciting policy advice from a certifiable lunatic like Andrew McCarthy. I want to be clear about this. I use synonyms for "crazy" pretty often, which I find to be necessary in a world in which one of the two major parties holds to such beliefs as global warming is a hoax and tax cuts increase revenue. But even by the prevailing standards of the contemporary Republican Party, McCarthy is truly off his rocker.

Here's McCarthy on Barack Obama's radicalism:

Obama’s radicalism, beginning with his Alinski/ACORN/community organizer period, is a bottom-up socialism.  This, I’d suggest, is why he fits comfortably with Ayers, who (especially now) is more Maoist than Stalinist.  What Obama is about is infiltrating (and training others to infiltrate) bourgeois institutions in order to change them from within — in essence, using the system to supplant the system.  A key requirement of this stealthy approach (very consistent with talking vaporously about “change” but never getting more specific than absolutely necessary) is electability.

Here he is, in an interview, on the Islamist character of health care reform:

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What do health-care reform and “the Grand Jihad” have in common?

ANDREW C. McCARTHY: They both enjoy the support of Islam and the Left.

Here he is peddling debunked claims about Obama's Kenya ties:

Barack Hussein Obama Jr. spent very little time in the United States Senate after his 2004 election. In a flash, he was eyeing the White House. All told, he spent about 140 days in attendance at congressional sessions -- at times, even seemingly confused about his committee assignments.

But he did make times to spend six days in Kenya. They were six days spent campaigning for the candidate running in opposition to Nairobi's pro-American government -- in outrageous contravention of U.S. policy and, probably, federal law. That opposition candidate was Raila Odinga, the communist Luo who was seeking the presidency, who agreed to impose sharia law in Kenya in order to win the support of Islamists, and who threw the country into murderous mayhem when his bid fell short. It was one of the most dangerous, destabilizing, disgraceful performances in the history of the U.S. Senate -- but you've probably never heard about it, because the Obamedia chose not to report it.

[...]

In the Washington Times, Mark Hyman reported that Odinga had visited Obama in the U.S. in 2004, 2005, and 2006, and that Obama had sent an adviser, Mark Lippert, to Kenya in early 2006 to plan a trip by the senator that summer, timed to coincide with Orange Democratic Party campaign activities. Obama followed through in August. For six days, he was nearly inseparable from Odinga as they barnstormed the countryside. [pages 213-214, 214-215]

Here he is dissenting from National Review's editorial denouncing Birtherism.

There’s speculation out there from the former CIA officer Larry Johnson— who is no right-winger and is convinced the president was born in Hawaii — that the full state records would probably show Obama was adopted by the Indonesian Muslim Lolo Soetoro and became formally known as “Barry Soetoro.” Obama may have wanted that suppressed for a host of reasons: issues about his citizenship, questions about his name (it’s been claimed that Obama represented in his application to the Illinois bar that he had never been known by any name other than Barack Obama), and the undermining of his (false) claim of remoteness from Islam. Is that true? I don’t know and neither do you.

Here's McCarthy suggesting that Bill Ayers may have ghostwritten "Dreams From My Father." Here he is defending Sarah Palin's "death panels" attack.

The man is a walking clearinghouse of right-wing conspiracies. Needless to say, I haven't even begun to describe his policy views, which are rather extreme. (Here's McCarthy advocating that President Bush openly ignore the courts and deal with suspected terrorists any way he pleases.) It's pretty surprising that even a Rick Perry would take his advice.

(Photo: Obviously a different Andrew McCarthy.)

 

The Gang Of Six's Strangest Bedfellows

Here's something I did not expect at all: supply-siders appear at least open to supporting the Gang of Six budget. Larry Kudlow offers a qualified endorsement as does the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

[T]he outline from the three Republicans (including Oklahoma conservative Tom Coburn) and three Democrats is different from most other such offers because it combines spending cuts with reform that would lower tax rates. Most Beltway budget deals combine immediate tax increases with the promise of future spending cuts that somehow never occur. They enhance Washington's claim on the nation's private resources. This deal has promise because it would reduce that claim.

That's especially true of the tax reform outline, which suggests moving to no more than three income tax rates, with a top rate in a range between 23% and 29%. This would be "paid for" by closing loopholes and tax preferences, but a marginal rate tax reduction of that magnitude would be worth giving up a lot. It could be by far the most pro-growth tax change since the 1980s, and the U.S. needs faster economic growth now above all else....

Certain high-profile tax breaks, such as the mortgage and charitable deduction and for health care and retirement, would also be "reformed, not eliminated." Our hope would be that the tax writers could duplicate the sweeping 1986 tax reforms that closed scores of tax deductions while slashing personal tax rates to 15% and 28%.

The weird thing is that I like the Gang of Six plan, too. If The Journal editorial page (and Kudlow) and I both like the same fiscal program, chances are one of us is confused. I suspect, unsurprisingly, that the confused party is the supply-siders. The only way to get tax rates down to the levels they're talking about while raising the kind of revenue the Gang of Six is talking about is to eliminate the capital gains tax preference. I have a hard time seeing supply-siders go for that.

The 1986 Tax Reform Act did eliminate the capital gains tax preference, though successive presidents snuck it back into the tax code and progressively enlarged it. Right-wingers tend to completely ignore this fact, which complicates their story of Ronald Reagan as a unwavering supply-side champion. The entire thrust of conservative tax policy since 1986 has been to enlarge the capital gains preference and move away from the clean, broad-based income tax vision of 1986.

On the other hand, maybe they're not confused. Maybe they just fear the alternative scenario in which President Obama wins reelection and the Bush tax cuts expire more than they fear losing the capital gains tax break. The strange alliance does provide a slight glimmer of possibility.

 

JONATHAN CHAIT >>

Norquist Tax Pledge Contains Massive Loophole

The Washington Post editorial page has an interesting scoop on Grover Norquist's tax pledge:

WITH A HANDFUL of exceptions, every Republican member of Congress has signed a pledge against increasing taxes. Would allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire as scheduled in 2012 violate this vow? We posed this question to Grover Norquist, its author and enforcer,and his answer was both surprising and encouraging: No.

In other words, according to Mr. Norquist’s interpretation of the Americans for Tax Reform pledge, lawmakers have the technical leeway to bring in as much as $4 trillion in new tax revenue — the cost of extending President George W. Bush’s tax cuts for another decade — without being accused of breaking their promise. “Not continuing a tax cut is not technically a tax increase,” Mr. Norquist told us. So it doesn’t violate the pledge? “We wouldn’t hold it that way,” he said.

It's pretty strange, isn't it? Apparently Norquist interprets his pledge in some ultra-literal way that precludes it, in the case, from fulfilling its primary purpose. On the other hand, a plan to pass a one-dollar tax hike while cutting federal spending in half would violate the pledge.

So if you can allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, can't you set future tax rates that would provide for lower revenue levels than under a scenario where they expire? And why hasn't anybody thought of this loophole before?

I Am Beginning To Question Glenn Beck's Grasp Of History

From Beck's address to the Christian Zionists:

"This old, dusty outdated document that chartered a new course for mankind should have brought us into World War I earlier and blown up the tracks to Auschwitz when we first saw them from the sky!"

I'm pretty sure that's World War II he's thinking of. Of course, never have graduated from Beck University, I may not be qualified to make this call.

(Video here. See 4:10 to 4:19.)

Jobs I'd Like To Have: Kim Kardashian's Intellectual Property Lawyer

Do you see the legal problem with this Old Navy video?

The model looks too much like Kim Kardashian, says her lawyer:

“Kim Kardashian is immediately recognizable, and is known for her look and style. Her identity and persona are valuable. When her intellectual property rights are violated, she intends to enforce them,” adds her intellectual property attorney Gary Hecker.

The part that trips me up here is the use of the term "intellectual."

Helpful Fashion Heuristics From Larry Summers

This -- from Summers' recollection of his dealings with the Winklevoss twins, is a great insight:

"One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an a**hole. This was the latter case."

This Chris Christie For President Thing Is Weird

Of all the rumored and hoped-for Republican presidential candidacies, the one that baffles me most is Chris Christie. He squeaked out an election by running in an off-year, when Republicans enjoyed a huge national turnout discrepancy, and against an unpopular incumbent. He's won legislative victories by taking advantage of the divided, corrupt, relentlessly parochial Democratic opposition in his state. But Christie is not a "political talent." He's an anti-talent, unpopular even in his own state, even setting aside questions of whether his Jersey-tough guy style would play well nationally, which I suspect it would not.

Why, then, would Republicans want to cajole him into the race? Here's where the argument gets even more bizarre. His very unpopularity has become part of the rationale for his candidacy. Maggie Haberman notes the latest bad poll for Christie, and concludes that it "underscores what those hoping he will run for president say, that his time to make a national bid could pass him by when 2016 rolls around."

So the idea is that Christie has already grown so unpopular in his home state that he's likely to lose re-election. And this means he should... run for president? Is the idea here that they can introduce him to a new, national electorate that won't have enough time to develop a full-scale loathing by November 2012?