[Vision2020] Poison Pill Politics

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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March 1, 2013
Poison Pill Politics By CHARLES M. BLOW

The deadline has passed. The sequester is in effect. And Congress is not in
session.

We now know that our political system is broken beyond anything even
remotely resembling a functional government.

The ridiculous bill was designed as a poison pill, but Republicans popped
it like a Pez. Now the body politic — weak with battle fatigue, jerked from
crisis to crisis and struggling to recover from a recession — has to wait
to see how severe the damage will be.

(The director of the Congressional Budget Office
estimates<http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/310969-1>that the
sequester could cost 750,000 jobs in 2013 alone.)

This is all because Republicans have refused to even consider new revenue
as part of a deal. That includes revenue from closing tax loopholes, a move
they supposedly support.

As Speaker John Boehner said after his Congressional leaders met with
President Obama on Friday:

“Let’s make it clear that the president got his tax hikes on Jan. 1. This
discussion about revenue, in my view, is over.”

Boehner’s intransigence during the talks drew “cheers,” according to a report
in The New York
Times<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/us/politics/house-republicans-cheer-boehners-refusal-to-negotiate-on-cuts.html?ref=politics>,
from his chronically intransigent colleagues. But their position is a twist
of the truth that is coming dangerously close to becoming accepted wisdom
by sheer volume of repetition. It must be battled back every time it is
uttered.

Let’s make this clear: it is wrong to characterize the American Taxpayer
Relief Act as a “tax hike.” In reality, much of what it did was allow 18
percent of the Bush tax cuts — mostly those affecting the wealthiest
Americans — to expire while permanently locking in a whopping 82 percent of
them.

But of course, that misrepresentation fit with the tired trope of Democrats
as tax-and-spend liberals. It also completely ignores that it was Bush-era
spending that dug the ditch we’re in.

Republicans have defined their position, regardless of how reckless:
austerity or bust. However, as economists have warned, austerity generally
precedes — and, in fact, can cause — bust. Just look at Europe.

But Republicans are so dizzy over the deficits and delighted to lick the
boots of billionaires that they cannot — or will not — see it. They are
still trying to sell cut-to-grow snake oil: cut spending and cut taxes, and
the economy will grow because rich people will be happy, and when rich
people are happy they hire poor people, and then everyone’s happy.

This is the vacuous talk of politicians trying to placate people with
vacation homes, not a sensible solution for people trying to purchase, or
simply retain, their first homes.

Now the president is trying to make the best of a bad situation and bring
expectations in line with what is likely to happen.

When Gallup this week
asked<http://www.gallup.com/poll/160760/americans-reactions-sequester-include-bad-disaster.aspx>Americans
to use one word to describe the sequester, negative words
outnumbered good words four to one. The top three negative words or phrases
were “bad,” “disaster” and “God help us.”

At a news conference after Friday’s meeting with Congressional leaders, the
president tried to tamp down some of the most dire predictions about the
sequester’s impact. He said:

“What’s important to understand is that not everyone will feel the pain of
these cuts right away. The pain, though, will be real.”

The president knows well that if the sequester’s effects are so diffused
that the public — whose attention span is as narrow as a cat’s hair —
doesn’t connect them to their source, people might think the administration
cried wolf.

That’s why he said, and will most likely continue to say for months, “So
every time that we get a piece of economic news over the next month, next
two months, next six months, as long as the sequester’s in place we’ll know
that that economic news could have been better if Congress had not failed
to act.”

He must yoke this pain to the people who invited it. It’s not as though
most Americans don’t already think poorly of Republicans anyway.

A Pew Research Center
report<http://www.people-press.org/2013/02/26/gop-seen-as-principled-but-out-of-touch-and-too-extreme/>released
this week found that most Americans think the Republican Party,
unlike the Democratic Party, is out of touch with the American people and
too extreme. And most Americans did not see Republicans as open to change
or looking out for the country’s future as much as Democrats.

The president said Friday that “there is a caucus of common sense up on
Capitol Hill” that includes Congressional Republicans who “privately at
least” were willing to close loopholes to prevent the sequester.

Those privately reasonable Republicans might want to be more public before
their party goes over another cliff and takes the country with them.

•

I invite you to join me on Facebook
<http://www.facebook.com/CharlesMBlow>and follow me on
Twitter <http://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow>, or e-mail me at
chblow at nytimes.com.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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