It’s become a minor meme on the right that Obama keeps changing his tax plan – which is their way of suggesting that YOU(!!) could be the next person he taxes.
…now it’s $200,000. I guess last week it was $250,000. It changes with ever – whatever the polling data tells him and his advisers.
And now, over at The Corner, Mark Hemingway steams:
Wait, we’ve been hearing endlessly that Obama will never raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000!
But that Krugman is saying it is for those heads of household with:
an income, after deductions, of $182,400 a year.
Of course, Hemingway’s source on this change in the Obama plan is Paul Krugman – who doesn’t describe it as a change, and who certainly isn’t someone who speaks for Obama’s campaign.
But the easier explanation is that either Hemingway and McCain are confused or they are being deliberately misleading. Obama’s tax plan calls for those individuals making under $200,000 to be exempt, and those married couples making under $250,000 to be exempt. Hence what McCain claims is inconsistency is in fact a consistent plan. As for Hemingway, he’s just a dumbass who read what he wanted into Krugman’s description.
I’m guessing that $182,400 after deductions is about $250,000 or more before deductions – as the difference is about 26% – lower than the average tax rate.
The question becomes – are these people deliberately trying to confuse others – or have they confused themselves by attempting to look for changes without understanding the underlying plan?
Update: Missed Byron York chiming in. He has the same issue – in an ad, Obama claims that he will cut taxes for any family making less than $200,000. York cries foul – he said $250,000 before. But again – the problem is he never looked at the plan which calls for a tax cut for those making below $200,000 with no additional taxes for those making between $200,000 and $250,000. Again – the plan is consistent. The descriptions of different parts of it vary – depending on whether you are saying whose taxes will be raised versus whose taxes will be cut, and other distinctions.
[digg-reddit-me]Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. – or Lew Rockwell – has decided that this election calls for non-participation. “[T]here is no lesser of two evils,” he says. “There is socialism or fascism.” We will – by boycotting the vote – instill fear in our leaders that they are “ruling us without our consent.”
I expect little better from Lew Rockwell, a man who saw fit to promote racism in the service of a libertarian ideology. (I do not blame libertarianism for it’s promoters, but I can fault the individuals who used explicit race-baiting as Rockwell did.) What disturbs me about this opinion piece is in part it’s resonance – as demonstrated by it’s support on reddit. But what bothers me more is that it seems rooted in the same tendency to demonize opponents, the same desire to re-make the world in the service of ideology, the same rejection of pragmatism, the same denigration of “the masses,” as other ideologies from Communism to neoconservatism.
For the sake of clarity, Rockwell, rejects any truths too subtle to fit into a propagandist slogan – and so – Obama becomes a socialist, and McCain a fascist.
There are real problems with voting and our financial system and the centralization of power that Rockwell touches on – and for a libertarian citizen, neither candidate offers a clear libertarian policy vision. Each seems to offer government encroachment in different areas of life. But a libertarian philosophy does not necessarily lead to this theology of dueling evils that Rockwell invokes – in which we presume only our own innocence and purity while we attack anyone with power or who might gain power as inherently corrupt. There is a healthy skepticism needed about power and the powerful – but Rockwell goes beyond this.
He is one of those who is certain, full of passionate intensity. Which is why he can see Obama and McCain as two competing evils – and why he must simplify their pragmatic politics into two ideologies of certainty: fascism and socialism. But his appeal here is insidious – it is not just to those who share his certainties but to the uncertain. He calls on us to reject all alternatives in favor of … nothing – justifying this with the flimsy excuse that by shunning the political process we may have a psychological effect on the politicians.
My duty as a citizen, my duty as a political being, is to inform myself and to vote and then to participate in governance. It is an abdication of this duty to throw up my hands, moved by an old man’s bitterness at repeated defeat and disappointment, and to despair.
To be a grown-up in this world, to be a citizen, means to act even when the alternatives are only dimly understood – for we can only dimly understand our world.
We live in a complex environment where every action has unintended consequences – and the right path is rarely clear. By failing to act, we enable those whose secular or religious theology leads them to certainty to monopolize power and drag us from one extreme to another, as we have often seen in the past thirty years in America.
[digg-reddit-me]”I just don’t know him,” people say.
It has become a constant refrain, by now even a cliche – as political pundits declare that Obama has not “closed the deal.” At first, it was decided this was the flip side to Obama’s new-ness. But, after nearly two years on the national radar, countless debates, and a constant media presence, this reason seems less convincing. And contrast this uncertainty about Obama with the certainty about Sarah Palin – who has been a national presence for just two months. Yet many of the same people who still don’t “know” Obama claim to “know” Sarah Palin very well.
Many commentators attribute this to racism – and I’m sure that plays a part for some. But I think the essential uncertainty about Obama has its root in something else – the perceived difference between the promise of Obama and his prosaic proposals.
Few would dispute that Obama’s campaign has been imbued from the start with a sense of promise, a sense of restoration, a sense of hope, of change (you can believe in), of possibility. He invokes with prophetic resonance the essence of the American dream – “not what is seen, but is unseen, that better place around the bend.” In the midst of the financial crisis, he gives a speech in the midst of a powerful storm and calls on us to stop despairing that “the rains will never pass” but to remember that “these too shall pass, and a brighter day will come.” There is a sense that this moment is a turning point in American history, if we will seize it. And there is a hunger for change that is palpable in America.
And yet Obama’s policies seem small, undramatic, safe. They certainly are change – but not enough change to reverse the tides of history. Obama’s policies would not re-order our society; they would not transform America – either our foreign policy or domestic policy. Obama is not some libertarian or liberal or progressive or socialist or neoconservative or fascist or communist ideologue. Rather, he proposes moderate and pragmatic steps to address long-simmering issues – the squeezing of the middle class, climate change, terrorism, a broken politics, an expansive executive branch, our dependence on oil, and now, the financial crisis.
He does not propose a new ideology that will offer us all the answers. He proposes instead to tinker – to preserve the system as it is – while tinkering with the processes where we can; to create positive incentives for behavior we need; to stop policies that exacerbate the problems; to try different things, regardless of what ideology promotes them, and stick with what works.
There is great promise in this approach. Tinkering is – as the prophet of this financial crisis, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, has said – the best we can do in a world we only imperfectly understand. But it seems less dramatic than the promise of Obama that we sense.
It is on this perception that John McCain’s entire campaign is based – as they describe Obama as someone with something to hide, as inauthentic and dishonest; as they claim he is a socialist, a Marxist, a radical. Those who don’t “know” Obama fear him because they sense this contrast between promise and policy. Some fill in this gap with stories of a “secret Muslim” sleeper agent or “terrorist bloodlines”. Others claim he is a secret radical – a Communist or Socialist – who hates America and secretly will raise taxes on everyone once he gets into the White House. Yet others just remain uncertain.
Many commentators warn that Obama supporters will inevitably be disappointed in him once they realize he will not re-make the world.
Yet – this precisely is the promise of Obama. He is not a revolutionary. He is a pragmatist, offering to put the culture war of the past decades on hold in order to focus on those serious issues that we have been hearing about for just as long, yet doing nothing about. They aren’t fixable overnight – we know that. But the promise of Obama is that he will begin to address them – and that we can start making progress.
The promise of Obama is not that we will create some utopia – but that we will set our country on the right path again. The middle class will not be stabilized by Obama’s economic policies by the end of the first term; terrorism will still be a festering issue; we will still be contributing to global warming – but the hope is, the promise is, we will have started going in the right direction.
There was a political party in this country called the Know-Nothings. And we’re getting on the fringe of that, with these one-issue voters—pro-choice or pro-life. Important issue, I know that. But, my goodness. The world is blowing up everywhere, and I just don’t think that is a responsible way to see the world, on that one issue. And, interestingly enough, that is one issue that stopped John McCain from picking one of the people he really wanted, Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge. [my emphasis]
General David Petraeus deployed overwhelming force when he briefed Barack Obama and two other Senators in Baghdad last July. He knew Obama favored a 16-month timetable for the withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Iraq, and he wanted to make the strongest possible case against it. And so, after he had presented an array of maps and charts and PowerPoint slides describing the current situation on the ground in great detail, Petraeus closed with a vigorous plea for “maximum flexibility” going forward.
Obama had a choice at that moment. He could thank Petraeus for the briefing and promise to take his views “under advisement.” Or he could tell Petraeus what he really thought, a potentially contentious course of action — especially with a general not used to being confronted. Obama chose to speak his mind….
You should read the rest of the piece – it’s fascinating take on Obama and his decision-making process.
a lot of this genre of punditry seems based on the idea that journalists can discern when politicians are and aren’t misleading with their presentation of self. But I have no reason to believe I’m especially good at this, and plenty of reason to believe that big-time politicians are unusually good at misleading about this sort of thing..
I know exactly what he means about how this can be frustrating. David Brooks seems to have had wildly diverging opions about Obama – which would tend to make one somewhat skeptical of his deep insight into Obama’s character.
Matt suggests ignoring character and focusing instead on policy positions – where you can more easily figure out if a politician is lying. He doesn’t seem quite comfortable with that – and leaves himself an out – despite the fact that his piece builds to this point, he concludes only by saying that “There’s something to be said for” looking only at policies.
But I think there is something valuable in what David Brooks, Joe Klein, Maureen Dowd, Peggy Noonan, Frank Rich, George Will, and many of these other columnists do as they attempt to determine a candidate’s character. They’re often wrong. And they are rarely consistent. But I believe a person’s essential character is important – and is generally revealed when a person holds power – and it affects what politics and policies actually happen.
What we need to realize when reading these columnists is that their trade is an art – not a science. It’s not necessary that these men or women be better at seeing through to the essential character of a politician – but that their job is to try to figure it out.
[digg-reddit-me]I’m not sure I agree with Scott Horton’s claim that Powell’s endorsement as brilliant as he thinks it was. But I certainly agree that it’s resonance and it’s place in history comes from this:
Powell made clear that he was opposing a friend of 25 years at some personal cost but for principled reasons. He believed that McCain would make a fine President but he was concerned by McCain’s uneven response to crisis, by his selection of Sarah Palin, and by the tone and tenor of his campaign–framed on an appeal to the baser instincts of the population. Indeed, if one passage of the Powell endorsement is preserved by posterity, it will be the remarkable image he presented of the young mother of a Muslim soldier killed in service to country…
As a college student in a Muslim nation allied with ours told Horton:
Okay, perhaps McCain is not an anti-Muslim bigot, but he seems to think that the best way to be elected president is to whip his fellow citizens into an anti-Muslim frenzy. Our nation is America’s ally, but I can’t avoid thinking, watching the McCain campaign—is this man going to make war on us too?
This is why Osama Bin Laden has a clear preference in this election. It’s not that McCain is a racist or a bad man – it’s that he represents – both in America and in the rest of the world – because of his campaign and who he is facing in his campaign – an intolerant America, an insular America, an America that hates Muslims and foreigners – instead of the America that fights for freedom, that is new and young and refreshing and tolerant – the America Barack Obama represents.
Drudge has outdone himself today with two unusually misleading headlines.
First, the blaring red super-sized font that announced that a McCain volunteer has been ATTACKED AND MUTILATED IN PITTSBURGH – which quickly became a small side story when the actual facts came out – that a woman with a McCain sticker on her car had been mugged outside an ATM. Awful – but not the political violence initially suggested.
Now, he’s put up a link to what he calls the “Most Accurate Pollster in 2004 Election” which puts the race within 1.1 points. Of course, a perusal of the breakdown shows that the poll has McCain beating Obama in the 18-24 year old age group by 74% to 22%. To repeat, McCain is – according to this poll – winning 74% of 18-24 year old; Obama is winning only 22%.
C’mon Drudge, old boy – you can do better than that.
To think – it was just a few months ago that Drudge had seemed to have shifted his support to Obama. It was subtle but there – just like his animus towards McCain. But then – roughly as the Paris ads went up, Drudge began his not-so-subtle attempts to throw the election to McCain.
I don’t know what happened – but it does make Drudge seem like he’s losing his touch.
All in all – there’s a lot of talk about socialism these days – driven by a fear, especially among the financial elite, that a blowback is coming. At the same time, after the better part of four decades of Republican rule, the Republicans need to scare people out of voting for the charismatic candidate who’s offering to help them in this time of crisis. And certainly this ongoing financial crisis has demonstrated to many the insufficiency of the Republican approach to regulation and governance and the limitations of the market. (Though not to Republicans and free-market ideologues who continue to insist that the problems that have spiraled out of control in the shadow banking system were the result of too much government in the more stable, regulated banking system.) I could easily see a populist candidate gain power today by railing against the big money elites. But Obama is not this candidate, let alone an advocate for socialism, class warfare, or any similar ideology. (In fact, McCain’s rhetoric comes closer to populist demagoguery of Wall Street.)
Obama’s economic plan is not about socialism or revolution or any such radicalism. He’s not that type of politician. The goal of his Obamanomics (if you will) is not a socialist paradise or a European-style market socialism but a restoration of the economic justice that made 1950s and 1960s America so stable. Unless you think Leave It To Beaver took place in a socialist nation, then Obama’s economic plans shouldn’t strike you as far left. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out while thoroughly debunking the right-wing spin that Obama is “far left,” Obama is to Richard Nixon’s right on taxes, which you would never guess from the ads Senator McCain has been running. Even the “code words” that the Investors Business Daily finds to be so fraught with meaning – “economic justice” – which they insist is just code for socialism – are from1950s era American thinkers Kelso and Adler. They were the authors of the 1958 Capitalist Manifesto, a book which sought to figure out how to make American capitalism more just – while acknowledging that “capitalism [is] the only just form of economic life.”
Barack Obama’s economic plan falls well within the mainstream of American economic history.
Alexander Hamilton – that first budding capitalist of a new nation – believed that government must create and maintain infrastructure, encourage industry, and maintain financial stability through central banks and financial regulation. Henry Clay promoted (and Abraham Lincoln supported) what he called “the American system” – which included various government interventions to build up American industry. After the Civil War, industry gained more and more power – and by the time the Panic of 1873 gave way to the Gilded Age, extreme capitalism had taken over America – with extreme concentrations of wealth and vast amounts of power concentrated in the hands of a few magnates.
McCain’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt, believed that we needed to protect essential institutions and elements of society from extreme capitalism – and focused on environmental conservation, on breaking up monopolies and other concentrations of power, on increasing regulations and beginning government’s role as a protector of consumer rights. This conservatism of Teddy Roosevelt’s resembled that of William F. Buckley – who defined conservatism as a man standing athwart history, yelling, “Stop!” ((Of course, Buckley came to distance himself from contemporary conservatism – which dropped this moderate approach with preemption and prevention.))
As a result of Teddy Roosevelt’s reforms, and then the turmoil of the Great Depression, World War II, Hoover, FDR, and Truman – America had reached a point of social and economic stability. This stability of the 1950s and 1960s came at the expense of tamping down certain social and economic forces. The social stability was torn apart by the Civil Rights movement, feminism, free love, and the later radicalisms of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This culture war has been dominating politics since then.
The economic stability of this period was destroyed by the forces of extreme capitalism, greed, deregulation, and other economic radicalisms of the 1970s and early 1980s – as labor unions were undermined, executive compensation grew exponentially, social mobility was impeded, and economic power concentrated in a handful of large corporations.
The excesses of the social radicalism of the 1960s have been cataloged by the conservative movement – and many of the worst excesses have been reversed – while other elements have become accepted by the vast majority of Americans. There has been no similar concentrated political effort to moderate the other radicalism that destroyed the status quo of the 1950s and 1960s America, extreme capitalism. Just as the social radicalism of the 1960s produced great good – from the Civil Rights Movement to women’s rights – and the mainstream opposition today accepts these progressive strides forward, so the economic radicalism introduced market forces, encouraged competition, and has elevated many people in Third World nations from abject poverty as it’s mainstream opposition today accepts these positive effects of the market.
Obama belongs in this camp of mainstream opponents of extreme capitalism. His agenda stems from an understanding of the middle class best encapsulated in this clip from West Wing, which though it aired ten years ago, seems eerily relevant today:
Obama’s economic plan is a response to this wish to make things “just a little bit easier.” It is an attempt to temper the forces of globalization and extreme capitalism that have wreaked havoc in our society and position us to compete in a globalized marketplace. Like Teddy Roosevelt, he’s attempting to protect the core values of our society from economic radicalism; like Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, and Americans throughout history – he is proposing investments in our infrastructure and incentives for industry. Obama’s plan isn’t perfect – it’s just a start. It’s just tinkering – which is how that sage Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes “the best we can do” to improve our condition. It’s an attempt to make things “just a little bit easier.”
When Obama talks about “economic justice” he is not referring to some obscure Communist codeword – he is calling us to remember the world of Leave It To Beaver – a world where firemen and bankers, lawyers and plumbers, could all live in the same neighborhood. Obama doesn’t pretend he can bring back this past – but he believes we must stop the forces of extreme capitalism from destroying this American ideal and that we must take pro-active steps to reduce the destabilizing effects of globalization and capitalism while protecting our core values as a society.
This isn’t socialism – this is common sense – and it has been the American system since our founding. The radicals are those who propose we do nothing in the face of attacks on our way of life and in the face of economic calamity – the nihilists among the House Republicans and the Hooverites and those who continue to favor deregulation and oppose sensible government intervention in the markets. The radicals are those who believe the free market will cure all ills and will heal itself.
Those who claim that Barack Obama would be the most liberal president in history must have skipped the American history classes covering the period before 1980. Those who claim he is a socialist are just plain wrong.
[digg-reddit-me]I’ve reluctantly come around to the view of Sarah Palin, John McCain, and other luminaries that we must judge our fellow citizens by their associations – and we must assume that you at least partially endorse the views of anyone you pal around with. Hence – Barack Obama pals around with a terrorist – by which I mean he served on the board of a charitable foundation with this guy, along with a bunch of conservative Republicans. Therefore, Barack Obama does not see America as you see America and as I see America.
Clear. Logical.
So, I decided to see who else I could disregard because of their poor judgment and unsavory associations. Now – I first thought about Sarah Palin herself, whose husband is a member of a political party whose founder recently declared: “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government” among other nice tidbits; worse, Palin herself has spoken at this party’s convention and was at one point thought to be a member by their spokesperson – before the McCain campaign corrected her. I mean, in this case, Palin isn’t just palling around with this group – she’s associating herself with their politics by speaking at their convention – and her husband believed in the party enough to join! But then I realized that I know Sarah Palin – and Sarah Palin wouldn’t endorse those views. Obama on the other hand – he’s got bloodlines I don’t trust.
Then of course, I came across this other guy – a peacenik, with long hippie-like hair, preaching namby-pamby, weak-kneed, anti-American values like forgiving enemies and avoiding violence and caring for the poor and telling people they should pay their taxes – basically a filthy liberal. He seems to have influenced a lot of people – so I wanted to point out that not only was this guy born in what was called in his day, “Palestine” – making him likely an Arab.
Clearly, the guy is a dangerous liberal with worrying bloodlines who’s going to wage class war on the rich. That’s not what this Christian nation needs. Enough of this WWJD. It’s time for WWSPD!
We need a Straight Talkin’ Maverick to save this country! And it’s about time Sarah Palin and John McCain took the gloves off and denounced that guy with long hippie hair, class warfare rhetoric, and questionable associations with radical and prostitutes.
