Washington Post: The Fierce Urgency of Pork
Posted by iusbvision on February 6, 2009
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 6, 2009; A17
“A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.“
– President Obama, Feb. 4.
Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared “we have chosen hope over fear.” Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn’t understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.
The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn’t what’s illegal, but what’s legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.
He’d been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he’s not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don’t get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.
Read the rest here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/05/AR2009020502766_pf.html
Marc Perkel said
The last time we had a new Democratic president, essentially the same thing happened. Republican congressmen voted against
Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax and budget proposals, uniformly predicting doom. Raising marginal income tax rates a few points on the
wealthy, they charged, would lead to economic ruin. Instead, the exact opposite happened. Over the ensuing eight years,
the nation witnessed the creation of 25 million new jobs, a balanced federal budget and steadily rising prosperity.
Today, an act of historical memory is required to recall that when Bush took office in 2001, people actually worried about
paying down the national debt too fast. No problem. The new president embraced what it’s tempting to call Limbaughnomics,
the absurd belief that tax cuts invariably lead to greater government revenues and more and better jobs.
Instead, Bush presided over a sluggish economy, the worst record of job creation since World War II, growing inequality
and the current banking crisis, a direct result of “free market” deregulatory fundamentalism combined with a speculative
real estate bubble that sustained the illusion of prosperity until it burst. Oh, and yes, runaway budget deficits, thanks
mainly to the combination of Bush’s tax cuts and the war in Iraq.
[Mark,
The problem that you are having is that your "historical memory" is a fantasy. The economy did not start to improve under Clinton until 1996 and the economy under Bush from 2003 till 2007 was booming and the record shows it. I am about to show you some of that record.
So what happened during that time, well Clinton worked with Newt Gingrich and John Kasich in the Republican dominated Congress and passed welfare reform, government spending restraint, and they cut that capitol gaines tax in half. The result was an explosion in government revenue.
This was referenced in the debates. Remember when the ABC reporter chastised Obama for saying that he wanted to raise the capitol gaines tax rate in spite of the fact that history proves that doing so slows the economy and lowers revenue? Here is the video and you can see for yourself - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpSDBu35K-8
Also your fantasy that President Bush mostly presided over a sluggish economy is just a lie and here is the proof. http://iusbvision.wordpress.com/2006/10/25/economy-booming-rich-paying-more-since-tax-cuts/
Look at that article carefully and than look in the comments section where we piled on with more articles. We posted a couple dozen articles from the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press that told about how the rich were paying more money in real dollars since the tax rate cuts, the economy was growing, unemployment was dropping and government revenue was going up.
Here are some examples:
I have dozens more of these. So much for your "historical memory". With all due respect here is an idea for you, do the homework and stop just making stuff up or repeating talking points that are easily disproven in 10 minutes of looking up the record. - Editor]