If you read the right wing blogosphere or listen to some in Congress you would think that President Obama invented deficit spending and that Republicans have always been the party of fiscal responsibility. Well, we know that is not true. In comparing the top 5 presidents in terms of percentage increase of public debt and percentage increase in public debt relative to gdp, Obama finishes only 4th and 34d respectively with Reagan and Bush earning the gold medial.
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Death Penalty, Occupy Wall Street and Everything Else
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January 7, 2011
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SUNDAY IS THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of the attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords that ultimately killed six and wounded 13 others in the worst act of political violence in this country since the bombing of the 1995 Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I remember that moment of shock first seeing the news but at the same time not being surprised to find out that Gabby was the target.
I knew that she regularly received death threats; that the Tea Party demonstrated outside her office carrying weapons every week and that her office had been shot at following her 2010 vote in favor of health care. After the 2010 incident, I wrote that it was “not enough for [Republican Leader] Boehner to say these actions are wrong, if he leaves unchecked the hatred his party so diligently pollinated.” Yet the Republicans only added fuel to the fire, as months later Giffords’ Republican opponent had a fundraiser to “target” victory and “remove” her from office where donors could shoot an M16 rifle.
Republicans are trying to have it both ways when it comes to its extremist fringe, expressing displeasure over their most outrageous conduct but stoking the mania that fuels it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Republican presidential sweepstakes where the candidates are willing to condemn the racist rants in Ron Paul’s newsletters, only to then engage in race-baiting themselves as Newt Gingrich did in equating African-Americans and food stamps.
The worst thing about Paul, however, is not the dated newsletters but his more recent actions such as endorsing Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin (a white supremacist with ties to the militia movement) for President in 2008 and not Republican nominee McCain; inviting neo-confederates to testify before his subcommittee or his ongoing ties with white supremacist groups.
This has not come up, however, both because the media has been shamefully lazy in reporting on Paul’s more recent activities and because you will not hear Gingrich or other Republicans criticize Paul’s embrace of the neo-confederate fringe since that has become part of the Republican base. This is especially true as we head into the critical South Carolina primary; home of prominent neo-confederate Representative Joe Wilson who gained national infamy for yelling “you lie” during President Obama’s address to Congress on health care.
The reality that no Republican will challenge Paul’s white supremacist ties does not alter the fact that they should. In 1992, Bill Clinton angered Jesse Jackson but gained credibility when he repudiated racist remarks by Sister Souljah that called for the killing of white people. John McCain attempted a similar feat before the 2000 South Carolina primary, calling the confederate battle flag a “symbol of racism and slavery,” but recanted three days later.
With Paul pursuing a strategy that focuses on the caucus states where organization is key, as long as Republican treat him with kid gloves and refuse to repudiate his David Duke-lite candidacy (Paul is endorsed by Duke), he will come to the GOP convention in Tampa with a sizeable slate of delegates. The Republican nominee would need to placate him to ensure a successful convention, which could undermine his attempt to move to the center as the fall campaign begins. Once again the tail would be wagging the dog, just as in Congress where Republicans have suffered political defeats due to the Tea Party Caucus’ insistence on extreme and politically unpopular positions.
When Barack Obama was sworn in, I naively thought that the nation was finally entering into a post-racial era. The bitter cold of that day should have served as a warning, as there has been a 553 percent increase in patriot and militia groups since that time returning to peak pre-Oklahoma City levels. Yet when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning about the rise of right wing hate groups, Republicans cried foul and demanded an apology.
I am not saying that Republicans as a whole condone the tragedy in Tucson or right wing hate groups, in fact the Republicans I know are appalled by both. Yet when Republicans say things like “reload”, encourage people to bring guns to public events or embrace white supremacist groups without condemnation by the party leadership, their “silence utters very loud”.
The upcoming anniversary and the rise of Ron Paul give the party a chance for a “Sister Souljah moment” that would allow it to break free from a fringe that is hurting it politically. More importantly, it would allow this upcoming election to be based on competing visions of our future and not the ugly scars of our past.
More Info on Ron Paul: http://ronpaultruthsquad.yolasite.com/
Southern Poverty Law Center — The Year in Hate 2010
Related Columns
Year of Living Dangerously Part II: Responding to Tucson’s Day of Terror
In 2008, Ron Paul did not endorse Republican nominee John McCain, but rather Paul endorsed Constitutional Party Candidate Chuck Baldwin. Baldwin is a neo-Confederate New World Order conspiracy theorist who praises the confederacy and its leaders, Robert E. Lee andStonewall Jackson, and calls the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.” Baldwin writes a weekly column on the white supremacist site Vdare and is a proud supporter of American militia movements.
As reported by Reason magazine, Baldwin believes that ”if America wishes to remain a free and independent republic, if this nation truly desires future peace and prosperity, and if we genuinely aspire to remain a blessed and protected land, we must quickly throw off this foolish infatuation with multiculturalism, which is nothing more than an attempt to de- Christianize our country, and humbly return to the God of our fathers!”
For months, I have heard Ron Paul supporters complain that they were being ignored by the media. only to then whine when they did and discovered Paul’s horrific record on race. The Paulistas have responded by minimizing Paul’s record to a few sentences which they claim he has repudiated. The reality is that his denials are not credible and he continues to have ties and engage white supremacist organizations as details.
Since none of them would ever believe me (if that possibility even exists), I decided to create a page where it was slapping them right in the face (or hood as the case may be) and also to provide a resource for others to respond and refute this in discussion. That means forcing them to defend his real record. How many Ron Paul supporters have told you that he endorsed a white supremacist for President in 2008? How many have told you that white power hate groups are an integral part of his fundraising operations? That is why I launched the RonPaulTruthSquad @ http://ronpaultruthsquad.yolasite.com/
Ron Paul’s ten minutes of fame should have ended in 2008, but it didn’t. He got a free ride as an gadfly, which was then passed on to his son. Neither belongs on a prominent stage in American public discourse, let alone in the House of Representatives, the Senate or the Presidency. It is tragedy that he may gain even a hint a legitimacy after tonight’s Iowa caucus. Hopefully, the political buzz saw awaits him and he will collapse quickly like past Iowa flukes and that white supremacist hate will not seem so cute to people in the future.
Excerpts from Selected Columns
While a tragedy of this nature requires no amplification, what is particularly disturbing is that the cancer of vitriol that has spread so malignantly across our body politic would consume the life of Christina Green; a child born on September 11th, 2001 amidst a brief period of national unity unmatched since World War II but which is now a distant memory. . . . Just as midnight gives way to dawn, so must we fight darkness with light. We can shine a light on hate speech and incitements to violence by promptly exposing and denouncing it wherever we see it and calling it for what it really is. This is because the offense of hate speech is not just its content but the assumption that the listener must share these views. Year of Living Dangerously Part II: Responding to Tucson’s Day of Terror
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More telling is the fact that in both the state houses and in Congress, the Republicans have made little effort to hide the fact that their party’s interest is not in governing but in ruling. For Republicans, power is not a means but an end in itself. Busting the unions has nothing to do with balancing the budget, but everything to do with strengthening the party’s power. This is part of a larger effort to maximize their power and reward their corporate supporters with tax breaks and privatized state assets while punishing their opponents — even if it is counterproductive. . . . Witness how House Speaker Boehner has gone from taunting the President over “where are the jobs,” to dismissively stating “so be it” over jobs lost from Republican budget cuts. Gov. Walker and the GOP’s Carthage Moment
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Although our per capita income has nearly doubled in real terms since the Eisenhower years and we pay less in taxes, we appear to be afflicted with a deep poverty of vision and spirit. While past generations sacrificed to fight world wars and reach the moon, the Republican plan reflects a Katrina-esque vision of America that can watch indifferently as the nation decays and its citizens suffer. The Republican’s Borat plan will create an America with a patchwork of gated emerald cities that are surrounded by vast areas that more closely resemble the decrepit remnants of the Soviet empire than the America of our parents. It may not be Kazakhstan, but I do not think our parents ever envisioned that this generation’s “defining moment” would be giving the next generation a deed to Americastan instead of the prosperous superpower we inherited. The GOP’s Borat Budget
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On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, while polls show a divide as to whether the war was about state’s rights or slavery due to years of revisionist history. Let the Confederates speak for themselves – below are the secession statements of Mississippi and Texas — and it is crystal clear that the war was about slavery. That is what the Confederacy was about and that is what symbols of the Confederacy represent. The Civil War was about Slavery Plain and Simple
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In To Kill a Mockingbird , a jury convicts an innocent Tom Robinson based on race despite an impassioned closing argument by Atticus Finch imploring the all-white jury, “in the name of God, do your duty.” A half-century later, Scott Rose is now asking the same of Flagler County school officials. Meanwhile Luke Herbert, like Tom Robinson, was forced to flee because of being one of “them” and not “us” and now attends a virtual high school. Luke Herbert And The Dark Side Of America’s Fastest Growing City
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Anyone who has traveled through this region knows there are two things that you cannot escape because they are everywhere you look — Dunkin’ Donuts and history (both of which are taken quite seriously by the locals). The tour will be risky for Palin since each stop likely will challenge her Us Magazine view of American History (and require knowledge of events prior to Ronald Reagan taking office). If she is able to weave the narrative from each stop into her message, she may counter her image as an intellectual fly-weight. If, however, she uses the tour to create pretty pictures while she delivers the same pap as before, she will cement her status as a political munchkin. Is Palin Following My Suggested Tour?
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What has changed is their size as they are now more powerful than they were in 2009 when Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin complained that banks “own” Capitol Hill. While the phrase “too big to fail” is often bandied about, the operative question is whether they are too big to govern or are somehow exempt from the rule of law itself? Or even worse, who is master of whom? You do not have to be an engineer or inventor to understand what is at stake as the House debates the America Invents Act. For ultimately this is not about business process patents, but political process beliefs. Are we still a government of the people, by the people and for the people or have the banks foreclosed on that as well. The Latest Bank Bailout: Does Too Big to Fail, Mean Too Big to Govern?
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In setting a goal to reach the moon by the end of the decade, President Kennedy explained that we seek such challenges “not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. What the GOP refuses to admit in its ideological rigidity is that from the transcontinental railroad to the internet, the government has played a major role in making the hard possible. Cutting through all the talk about spending cuts and revenue “enhancements”, ultimately this is a debate about who we are as a nation and whether we still have the courage to do what is hard and the compassion to do what is right. Debt Ceiling 101: Five Things You Should Know
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[As] the phrase “Cyber Pearl Harbor” has begun to enter into our lexicon, Kapersky Lab’s Roel Schouwenberg believes the recent DigiNotar attacks may have greater consequences than the Stuxnet virus in terms of the scope of its disruption and potential impact in putting “cybersecurity and cyberwar on the political agenda”. That may ultimately be a good thing, since greater emphasis on cybersecurity may be necessary if we hope to stop the phrase “Cyber Pearl Harbor” from entering into our history books. Cyber Attacks A Growing Threat To US Business And National Security
The Internet Law Center announced today it had achieved a significant victory for its client Hopscotch Adoptions, Inc. (www.hopscotchadoptions.org) of High Point, North Carolina in a federal defamation action against Vanessa Kachadurian of Fresno, California, with an $85,000 settlement. (See full release here Kachadurian is an infamous serial cyber defamer and the case raises questions of whether state defamation laws need to be updated to address the damage done by the worst polluters of the cyber public commons given the substantial costs suffered as a result of their conduct.
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History can be savagely poetic and may be on the verge of doing so again. As the Republican Presidential Circus reaches the doorstep of the Iowa Caucus, Newt Gingrich is inching up in the polls ready to emerge as the right wing’s flavor du jour. Who better to be at the helm of the GOP to endure what may be a backlash against Republican extremism and obstructionism, than the one candidate most responsible for both.
Elected to Congress in 1978, Gingrich believed that Republicans must fight the Democrats “with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars.” Gingrich relentlessly attacked Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright as the “least-ethical Speaker” of the century with countless charges that even his fellow Republicans dismissed as baseless. Nonetheless, the media prefers conflict over policy and Gingrich quickly became a Beltway star.
Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, who served with Gingrich, said his modus operandi is to “smear any public figure who fails to share his worldview. His insults are so overblown and outrageous that after the rhetorical dust settles, the reputation most damaged is his own.” Newt’s famous smears include calling Clinton Democrats “the enemy of normal Americans,” blaming Columbine on the Democrats and claiming that President Obama has a “colonial world view.”
Gingrich also attacked Republican Congressional leaders who viewed Congress as something more than “a forum for partisan warfare” and actually cooperated with Democrats to get something accomplished; famously calling Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole “the tax collector for the welfare state”.
Republican Mickey Edwards, who also served with Gingrich, explains that Gingrich “aggressively pushed Congressional Republicans in a direction in which the pursuit of power trumped all other considerations.” Gingrich became the leader of what conservative columnist George Will described as “ideologically intoxicated” Republicans who believe that “Democrats are not merely mistaken but sinful” or as one Republican conceded to journalist Elizabeth Drew, simply feel that “they were totally right and the other side was totally wrong.”
As Speaker, Gingrich issued his famous guide to Republican candidates that merely contained a list of approximately 70 insults to hurl at your opponent (e.g., “corrupt” or “traitor”) but which said nothing about policy or effective governing. This was Gingrich’s style, as John Feehery, a former aide to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, noted “Gingrich likes to make sweeping generalizations in ways that are needlessly polarizing and often irresponsible . . . as his white hot rhetoric is spoken to inflame rather than inform.”
As a Presidential candidate, Feehery believes Gingrich is trying to convince “the hard-right . . . that he is as crazy as they are.” Mickey Edwards dismisses Gingrich’s candidacy stating ”at some point, people will learn to stop taking Newt Gingrich seriously, (since) Newt is utterly unconcerned with the welfare of the country…He cares about (a) Newt and (b) power for Newt.”
Congress is now full of ideologically intoxicated “Newtants” who have no qualms about tanking the economy for electoral advantage or bringing the country to the brink of a financial crisis rather than yield on an ideological point. That is why disapproval of Republicans in Congress is at record levels (76 percent disapproval) and half of the country now believes that the Republicans are intentionally sabotaging the economy for political gain.
If these numbers did not concern Republicans before, the election results on Tuesday showed an emphatic rejection of Republican extremism with the recall of anti-immigrant Senator Russell Pearce in Arizona and the overwhelming defeat of Republican initiatives in Mississippi and Ohio.
Republican primary voters clearly have gotten the message and have, instead, chosen to double down on crazy as Gingrich is now in a three-way dead heat with Herman Cain and Mitt Romney.
Today’s voters are angry and want candidates they can measure by results not insults. Were he to emerge victorious from the Republican Convention in Tampa it is inconceivable that Gingrich would be able to restrain his penchant for bombast. As a result, Gingrich’s final march would only further fuel the current backlash and make him the mascot for everything Americans hate about politics today.
While Gingrich has compared himself to Napoleon and Churchill, it is fitting that his political finale may not be the Commander-in-Chief position he has long coveted but rather as Piñata-in -Chief, making Seis de Noviembre a joyous fiesta for Democrats.
Last week, the President put forward a detailed plan for jobs, controlling our deficit, and comprehensive tax reform. The President’s tax reform plan will abide by the principles of cutting rates, getting rid of inefficient and unfair tax breaks, and observing the Buffett rule – a simple rule of simple fairness that no household making over $1 million annually should pay less in federal taxes than middle-class families pay.
Yesterday in an interview with Senior Adviser David Plouffe on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace used misleading statistics to argue against the President’s efforts to level the playing field for middle class Americans by requiring that the wealthiest pay their fair share. In an effort to falsely assert that the President’s plan would place an unfair tax burden on the wealthiest Americans, Wallace said that, “1 percent of households with the highest incomes pay 38 percent of federal income taxes. The top 10 percent pay 70 percent of federal income taxes. Meanwhile, 46 percent of households pay no federal income tax at all.”
These statistics are misleading and don’t tell the whole story. They leave out payroll taxes that every worker pays to make sure they will have Social Security and Medicare when they retire, which fall disproportionately on the middle class. And they don’t mention that the share of the nation’s income going to the highest earners grew rapidly in the past two decades – at the same time tax rates fell for the highest earners.
In fact, because of growing income inequality, the top 10 percent of American earners now earns 42 percent of the nation’s income, and when correctly calculated, pay about 50 percent of the federal income and payroll tax burden – not much larger than their share of earnings.
As we continue to have a robust discussion about the President’s plans across our country, it’s important to understand exactly how they will affect Americans – from the middle class to the highest earners.
We already took on several tax myths here (see “Buffett Rule Facts and Fictions,” by NEC Director Gene Sperling) but given that more misleading information continues to make the rounds, it is important to set the record straight.
Here are facts:
Claim: The top 10 percent wealthiest Americans pay 70 percent of federal income taxes.
Fact: This statistic presents a deeply misleading picture of the actual federal tax burden because (1) it fails to include payroll taxes, which every worker pays, and which fall disproportionately on the middle class, and (2) because it doesn’t reflect that high-income Americans earn a disproportionate share of income.
Claim: The 1 percent of households with the highest incomes pay 38 percent of federal income taxes.
Fact: This statistic again ignores the payroll taxes that every working American pays, and the fact that incomes of the top 1 percent have increased rapidly in recent years.
Claim: 46 percent of households pay no federal income tax at all.
Fact: Around 82 percent of Americans pay income or payroll taxes, and those who don’t are mostly elderly people.
Claim: The average taxes paid by millionaires is high enough to make the Buffett Rule unnecessary.
Fact: This is misguided on several grounds.
Millionaires faced an average income tax rate of about 24 percent as of 2009 according to IRS data (and payroll taxes should add very little to that—in the range of 1 to 1.5 percentage points).
However, the Buffett Rule is not about all taxpayers or even the average taxpayer making over $1 million. Instead, it is about those who are able to pay lower taxes than middle-class families.
Take IRS data on the taxes paid by the 400 highest-income households in 2008, all making over $110 million per year and making an average of $271 million per year. Some of those 400 taxpayers do pay their fair share, but according to that data, one-third of this group pays less than 15 percent of their income in taxes and 85 percent pays less than 30 percent.
Indeed, a full 22,000 households making more than $1 million annually paid less than 15 percent of their income in taxes in 2009, according to analysis of the IRS 2009 Statistics of Income file by the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis. And 165,000 households making over $1 million paid less than 30 percent of their income in taxes.
Second, even looking at averages provides strong evidence of how unfair our tax code has become. That same IRS data shows that the average income tax rate for the most well off 400 earners was only 18.1 percent in 2008 and 16.6 percent in 2007. (This does not count the impact of the payroll tax, which is trivial for these taxpayers since only a tiny fraction of their income is subject to the payroll tax). These exceptionally low effective tax rates paid by the most well-off do violate the Buffett Rule because they are lower, and at times significantly so, than the amount some middle-class families may pay in income and payroll taxes. For example:
Claim: This is a new tax rate on millionaires.
Fact: This is not a new tax rate on millionaires; instead the rule should be incorporated as part of fundamental tax reform that lowers overall rates. Currently, the highest-income Americans pay far less than the top marginal tax rate. Therefore, reform that meets the Buffett Rule should focus on limiting the degree to which the most well-off can take advantage of tax expenditures and preferences.
Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director
