Visual source: Newseum
Remember when the news cycle was dominated by pundits repeating GOP talking points about Democrats wanting to raise taxes? The tone has changed. Republicans are now on the ropes, having to defend their desire to cut taxes for top earners and give massive tax breaks to corporations.
First, let's start with The New York Times:
By wide margins, Americans are now telling pollsters they want a tax system that raises more money and is more fair by asking the rich to pay more. They are connecting the dots between the lavish high-end tax cuts of the past decade and today’s serious problems — including widening inequality and mounting deficits — and demanding change. The Republican presidential candidates aren’t listening.
Take the flat tax plan of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. For all his talk about how it would make filing easier — that is dubious — what it would really do is give high-income Americans a big tax break, while almost everyone else could expect relatively modest tax savings or none at all.
E.J. Dionne Jr. picks up in the shift in tone:
We may be reaching an inflection point, the moment when the terms of the political argument change decisively. Three indicators: an important speech last week by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the increasingly sharp tone of President Obama’s rhetoric and the success of Occupy Wall Street in resisting attempts to marginalize the movement.
The most telling was Ryan’s address at the Heritage Foundation. House Republicans regard Ryan as their prophet, their intellectual and their resident wonk. Usually, he carefully lays out the numbers and issues visionary promises of how cutting government (and taxes on the wealthy) will lead us down a blissful path to prosperity. He’s sunny when everyone else is grumpy.
So it was jarring to see Ryan used as the principal counterattacker against the president, who has been making the injuries of class inequality clear and pointing to the costs of the Republicans’ just-say-no strategy in Congress.
The Washington Post lashes out against proposals for another corporate tax break for repatriated profits:
A DEMONSTRABLY BAD idea in pursuit of a possibly worthy goal is still a bad idea. In this instance, the demonstrably bad idea is giving corporations a federal tax break — make that another tax break — on “repatriated profits,” money they earn overseas and bring home. The goal is an infrastructure bank to help build roads and other projects. Such an entity could help rationalize the hodgepodge of politically dictated projects and leverage private capital. But arithmetic’s basic laws must prevail: You can’t pay for an infrastructure bank with a tax break that costs money. [...]
Meanwhile, the holiday is not apt to create jobs. A Goldman Sachs analysis concluded that “the short-term economic benefit of such a policy would likely be minimal.” A tax holiday would not produce “a significant change in corporate hiring nor investment plans,” Goldman found, because “most firms with large amounts of overseas profits are likely to have adequate access to financing, so the availability of cash on hand is unlikely to be a constraint on investment.” It would reward companies that maneuvered to shift profits to tax havens. Finally, a tax holiday could have the perverse effect of encouraging companies to shift operations — and jobs — overseas in the expectation of another break down the road.
This is a provably bad idea. Congress passed a repatriation tax holiday in 2004. The Congressional Research Service reported “little evidence” that new investment was spurred. A recent study by the Democratic staff of a Senate subcommittee found that the 15 companies that repatriated the most profits, more than $150 billion, ended up cutting their U.S. workforces by nearly 21,000 jobs.
Alex Pareene writes eloquently on the relationship between the 1% and our government:
It is our belief that many of the problems facing Americans today can be directly connected to the unchecked power and complete unaccountability of the 1 Percent, a group that benefits from every unequal boom of the modern era and escapes each disastrous bust unscathed. The 1 Percent is insulated from the negative effects of its disastrous policies by its paid representatives in government. The elite 1 Percent ensures the slavish loyalty of its political handmaidens by flooding their campaign coffers with money squeezed from the 99 Percent as deposits, fees and interest.
Meanwhile, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite writes about the "original violence" on Wall Street:
We definitely need to condemn police brutality against peacefully protesting demonstrators in the U.S.; there are reports of escalating force used by police in Denver, Colo. this weekend. Faith leaders are uniting to condemn violence by police in a petition from the group Faithful America. The petition says, “As people of faith, we condemn all violence and repression targeting the Occupy Wall Street movement. In communities across America, occupiers are providing a peaceful witness against corporate greed and economic injustice. We call on local authorities to respect their freedom of expression.”
We must not lose sight of the fact, as the Faithful America petition highlights, that there is an original violence that created the #occupy protests in the United States; this is the “corporate greed and economic injustice” of Wall Street. This is not the murderous regime of Hosni Mubarak, certainly. But it is violence nonetheless.
Drew Westen ponders why our candidates disappoint us:
All of us have the misfortune of having grown up in imperfect families, born with a set of designer genes that even millions of years of evolution couldn’t tailor to perfection. And from that pool of imperfect people we draw our leaders, many of whom are attracted to politics as much by their weaknesses as by their strengths.
Those weaknesses seem to be on display today, as voters face the possibility that their choice next November may be between the quintessential “corporation man” in Mitt Romney, a character straight off the set of “Mad Men” but seemingly without the character development, and the intellectualized undecider in Barack Obama, who couldn’t seem to feel, until recently, the “fierce urgency of now” for people desperate for a job or crushed by a mortgage.
In fact, attitudes toward authority and intellect are essential differences between political parties of the right and left and they help explain why most Americans believe the Republicans and Democrats could both use some time on the couch.