G.W. Bush's Stench Still Lingers Today

G.W. Bush's Tax Cuts at Work

The Congressional Budget Office released its new economic forecast today. It predicts painfully slow growth, unemployment at 8.5 percent at the end of 2012. The CBO also says we're in for big deficits, and provides this handy chart for why. Note the persistent and large chunk of light blue -- that's lost revenue. The footnote explains:

“Extend Tax Policies” reflects the following policy assumptions: Most of the provisions in the 2010 tax act that were originally enacted in 2001, 2003, 2009, and 2010 are extended (instead of being allowed to expire on December 31, 2012, as scheduled), and the alternative minimum tax is indexed for inflation.

Some of those provisions were part of the economic stimulus, like the payroll tax break that was part of the stimulus and gave workers more money in their weekly paychecks. That's the tax Republicans now say workers should start paying again. It's worth about $120 billion a year.

For the rest, look toward the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which Republicans insist we should keep. They've added something like $3.2 trillion to the deficit.

The problem is still clearly the Bush tax cuts. And the hits just keep on coming!


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I Love Me Some U.S. Constitution…. That Is Until It Doesn’t Fit My Radical Ideology

Study shows: Tea partiers are deeply in love with a constitution they want to gut.

U.S. Constitution

A study led by a team of UNC-Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt professors examining what “cultural dispositions” unite the Tea Party reaching some interesting conclusions about the political movement’s relationship with the Constitution. They simultaneously revere the idea of the Constitution and hate much of what it actually says:

In our follow-up poll, 84% of those positive towards the TPM [Tea Party members] said the Constitution should be interpreted “as the Founders intended,” compared to only 34% of other respondents. Other respondents were also three times more likely not to have an opinion on the issue, highlighting the salience of the question for TPM supporters. Support for Constitutional principles is not absolute. TPM supporters were twice as likely than others to favor a constitutional amendment banning flag burning; many also support efforts to overturn citizenship as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Constitution – and Tea Party more generally – take on heightened symbolic value and come to represent a ‘way of life’ or a “world view” rather than a specific set of laws or policy positions.

Sadly, the study actually paints a much more reasonable picture of the Tea Party than the reality suggests. Amending the Constitution to literally write your own policy preferences into the document is very rarely a good idea, but it is also an entirely legitimate way of bringing about constitutional change. The Tea Party, however, seems more interested in simply asserting repeatedly and loudly that the Constitution already imposes their preferred policy outcomes on the country — and in ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

In the past two years, we’ve seen Tea Party elected officials claim that everything from Social Security, to Medicare, to Pell Grants and federal student loans, to federal disaster relief, to the minimum wage, to child labor laws, to the ban on whites-only lunch counters all violate the Constitution. In other words, it’s clear that the Tea Party has little interest in following the actual Constitution — they just think the rest of the nation is gullible enough to believe that it says whatever the Tea Party wants it to say.



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