On A Related Note

What do you suppose the odds are of this bill hopelessly failing?

The Senate will hold a key vote Monday afternoon on a bill to provide $26 billion in Medicaid and education money to states.

Previous domestic aid bills have gone down in flames because Republicans and Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson have insisted that the cost of helping the poor, old, and jobless not be added to the deficit. This bill is fully offset with spending cuts and tax increases on U.S.-based multinational corporations, but Republicans have not signaled whether they will support it.

Can't add to the deficit to help the poor or jobless, but let's make damn sure we keep our checkbook perpetually open for two failed wars. You've also got to love that the preening Republicans have had their concerns met (the bill is deficit neutral), but they still can't commit to supporting it. Because they don't want the Democrats to succeed on anything, ever, even at the expense of holding our ailing country hostage.

Priorities Revisited

We can't get a single fucking legislative act through Congress without getting the vapors about how it will be paid for, but endless war funding never faces the same scrutiny or debate:

Washington (CNN) -- The House of Representatives on Tuesday gave final approval to a nearly $59 billion emergency spending bill, the bulk of which would go toward the U.S. troop buildup in Afghanistan.

Specifically, the bill includes almost $33 billion for Afghanistan, along with over $5 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, almost $3 billion for Haiti relief programs and $68 million for the oil disaster response in the Gulf of Mexico.

It now goes to the president for his signature.

This comes as July marks the highest number of casualties on record, and thousands of leaked documents show what a hopeless waste the war has become. Not only do we continue to piss away billions in a nearly decade old, ever deteriorating conflict, but pedantic things like funds to prevent teacher layoffs were viewed as wasteful spending:

Top Democrats struggled to maintain support for the bill among more liberal House members, who have increasingly turned against the Afghan war effort and are upset about the loss of funding for programs designed to prevent teacher layoffs, among other things.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wisconsin, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, slammed the Senate for stripping domestic funding from the bill, including funding for teachers and other forms of education funding.

So apparently the moral of the story is that we have to invade our own country and go to war with ourselves before it becomes politically palatable to spend money on any domestic priorities. Perhaps if keeping our country from slipping into the third-world was considered a priority of national security, we could justify taking care of our own needs.

But since that won't be happening anytime soon, there's always this:

So, asked for an exit strategy, the administration instead offered up guidelines for an endless occupation.

And then last week, in a nearly unnoticed development at an international conference in Kabul, world leaders including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed their "support for the President of Afghanistan's objective that the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) should lead and conduct military operations in all provinces by the end of 2014."

That's right: The end of 2014.

"I was kind of struck that the 2014 didn't get more critical attention than it did," said Paul R. Pillar, formerly the CIA's top Middle East analysis and now a Georgetown University professor. "The war will have gone on 13 years at that point."

I'm sure a 13-year old war will go over real well with the public in the 2016 elections, but then again, we are too goddamned stupid and complacent to do anything (or elect anyone) that will take a position to the contrary.

So Much Stupid

The last month has been a little crazy, and I really haven't felt like writing at all. The urge is slowly coming back, aided in part by the fact that some truly stupid shit has been said over the past three or four weeks.

Tax policy has been in the news lately, given the impending expiration of the Bush tax cuts and our pathetic fiscal state. Expiration, assuming our stalwart, fiscally responsible Congress doesn't outdo themselves and extend them beyond the termination date.

It starts with the usual suspects: deficit peacocks in the Republican party who have suddenly become acquainted with the size of the deficit now that they're in the minority and have to act like they didn't just spend the last eight years bombing brown people and giving money away to rich people because government surpluses are evil things that cause bad things like social spending or preparedness for economic downturns. The primary difference this time is that now they showing their true colors: openly admitting that they do not believe that tax cuts should ever have to be paid for or that they have any adverse impact on the budget.

Here's Sen. Tom Coburn:

Continuing the [Bush] tax cuts isn’t a cost, if you added new taxes, new tax cuts, I would agree that’s a cost. It’s not a cost. That’s where we are today. That’s the baseline. It doesn’t score anything to continue them. It costs money if we increase, which I would be willing to do. I think we ought to cut corporate taxes.

And Sen. John "Unemployed People Are Lazy" Kyl:

You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. Surely congress has the authority and it would be right, if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

And Rep. Michele Bachmann:

"I think we need to be paying for all the spending that’s going on," [...] "But when people can keep more of their own money that shouldn’t be considered a cost."

And their own minority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell:

"There's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue," he told Brian Beutler of TPMDC. "They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject."

And I am sure there are more, but those are just the quotes that I flagged during my weeks off. The fact that errant bullshit like this is allowed to go completely unchallenged in the news media is an entirely different issue. For now, let's just look at the facts for those of us that actually exist in a reality-based world. The following figure is from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan organization:

Even the Congressional Budget Office draws similar conclusions, as Ezra Klein notes here:

But how about the Congressional Budget Office's estimations? "The new CBO data show that changes in law enacted since January 2001 increased the deficit by $539 billion in 2005. In the absence of such legislation, the nation would have a surplus this year. Tax cuts account for almost half — 48 percent — of this $539 billion in increased costs." How about the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget? Their budget calculator shows that the tax cuts will cost $3.28 trillion between 2011 and 2018.

All empirical evidence notwithstanding, the crux of the mandatory Republican fetish with tax cuts is that by lowering taxes, you widen the base of people paying taxes, as if doing so makes taxes a bargain buy or a sale item at Walmart. This makes sense, to a very limited extent, in a private sector application with goods and services (a major difference being that paying taxes is compulsory, whereas consumers may pick and choose what goods they wish to purchase).

When businesses lower their prices, a higher number of consumers are generally more inclined to purchase their goods. It's basic supply and demand. The primary difference between the public and private sector, however, is that you generally don't have a bunch of demagoguing idiots running private sector companies that enact markedly stupid policies out of a mindless, irrational, and patently false conviction. The private sector is concerned with profit, success, and the continuity of their business. When they lower prices on their goods, they do so in a targeted manner to drive up sales, attract new customers, or punish their competitors. They do not do so reflexively regardless of any market or economic setting or as their sole idea for running their operations. If a corporation were to perpetually lower prices, as the Republicans wish to do with taxes, many of them would go out of business. Why? Because at some point, their costs would exceed their revenue, and they wouldn't remain solvent.

Somehow that logic escapes Republicans, or they simply refuse to acknowledge what is a very obvious and time-tested principle. A principle that is the foundation of our economy and our private sector. A principle that is not backed by ideology, but fact and hard data. Data that is self-evident in our prolonged budget crisis, whereby their pet tax cuts have failed miserably as costs/spending increased while revenues fell.

So we're left with a nation in which almost half of our elected officials believe in a false, irresponsible, and dangerous fiscal policy and where they are never challenged on the fallacies of their policies by those in a position to do so. Basically, people believe this bullshit because it gets spread widely and uncritically as truth, or even a position with a modicum of validity that should be considered despite the enormity of the evidence to the contrary. Bill Maher sums this up best in an episode of Real Time before the summer break:

That's the problem with our obsession with always seeing two sides of every issue equally -- especially when one side has a lot of money. It means we have to pretend there are always two truths, and the side that doesn't know anything has something to say. [...]

We shouldn't decide everything by polling the masses. Just because most people believe something doesn't make it true. This is the fallacy called argumentum ad numeram: the idea that something is true because great numbers believe it. As in: Eat shit, 20 trillion flies can't be wrong.

Indeed.

Note to HBO

Make your shit available on Netflix On Demand already.

Showtime and Starz are on board, and your absence makes you look stupid.

DIdn't See This One Coming

Senate Republicans announce their opposition to Kagan:

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan drew opposition Friday from Republican leader Mitch McConnell and two other GOP senators, raising the prospect of a confirmation largely along party lines.

"The American people expect a justice who will impartially apply the law, not one who will be a rubberstamp for the Obama administration or any other administration," McConnell said in a written statement one day after Kagan, 50, wrapped up three days of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I don't even know why they bother to release statements or hold press conferences at this point, as if they possess the capacity for any position, opinion, or philosophy at odds with their automatic, reflexive opposition to Obama.