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It wasn’t so much a vote as a proclamation of ideology last Thursday when Republicans filibustered Obama’s nominee to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The rebuff had nothing to do with the person, Richard Cordary, who even Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said appeared well qualified.  Rather, it was part of the GOP campaign to hobble the agency created to safeguard borrowers from dodgy payday lenders and predatory mortgage salesmen.

The GOP thwarts regulatory agencies in order to enforce its “you’re on your own” philosophy. That is, each citizen, like an island, fends for himself in a world where the invisible hand of the market serves as regulator. Democrats believe something very different. They espouse the principles set out by President Teddy Roosevelt in his 1910 speech in Osawatomie, Kan., and echoed by President Obama in his address there last week. That is America and Americans are better when citizens work together and watch out for each other, that cooperating invigorates the individual, the economy and the nation, and that primacy is in people and profit is subordinate.

The late Senator Paul Wellstone expressed the essential sentiment most succinctly:

 “We all do better when we all do better.”

Republicans don’t ascribe to that. They want to set up a country where every person is responsible for every aspect of daily life, from ensuring drinking water is safe to reducing workplace hazards. The GOP wants to shred regulations that protect citizens, even eliminate the federal agencies that enforce them. Congressional Republicans have worked to defund the Environmental Protection Agency, a move that would “empower” each citizen to persuade big industrial polluters to limit the particulates, mercury, arsenic, cadmium and lead belching from smokestacks. (more…)

Mea culpa, I misspoke, my bad – I stand corrected.

In past commentaries, I have called Newt Gingrich a lobbyist. Apparently, he hates that tag, even though he has indeed gotten very wealthy by taking big bucks from such special interest outfits as IBM, Astra Zeneca, Microsoft, and Seimens in exchange for helping them get favors from federal and state governments. But Gingrich, his lawyers, and staff adamantly insist that it’s rude and crude to call him a lobbyist. No-no, they bark, The Newt is “a visionary.”

Major corporations, they explain, pay up to $200,000 a year to the corrupt former-House speaker’s policy center for the sheer privilege of bathing in the soothing enlightenment of Newt’s transformative vision. Also, as the man himself constantly reminds everyone, he has a Ph-By God-D. So he’s “Dr. Newt,” the certified visionary.

Yet, the center’s own sales pitch to lure potential corporate clients makes crystal cleat that the visionary services he offers entail doing what (excuse the term) lobbyists do. For example, the center brags that Newt has “contacts at the highest levels” of government, and that being a paying customer “increases your channels of input to decision makers.” One corporate chieftain who hired the well-connected Washington insider for $7,500 a month plus stock options, says that Gingrich “made it very clear to us that he does not lobby, but that he could direct us to the right places in Washington.” (more…)

Don’t watch unless you have a sense of humor.

Check Mitt v. Mitt at MittvMitt.com

Sam Cooke (January 22, 1931-December 11, 1964), who co-wrote and recorded the original song “Wonderful World,” is considered one the pioneers and founders of soul music. He is often called the King of Soul. He stood up for equal rights and took an active part in the Civil Rights Movement.

I debated Herman Cain’s economic advisor, Rich Lowrie, last night on the Larry Kudlow Show. A key point here is that the plan, which Bruce Barlett calls a “distributional nightmare,” radically shifts the tax burden from high-income households to everyone else. I focused on the median household, and Lowrie either doesn’t understand the implications of the plan or he’s deliberately misrepresenting it.

For a $50K household, married couple, two kids, all income from earnings and standard deductions, the current tax burden is $8.3K. Under 9-9-9, that would grow to $13.5K, an increase of over $5,000 (hat tip: CCH, BS). The Washington Post fact checker came to a similar conclusion. Ezra Klein too.

(I expect that any minute now the Tax Policy Center will release a slew of data supporting these points with their much more detailed tax model.)

But Lowrie wouldn’t accept that conclusion. In fact, he asserted that their federal tax would be lower because they’d move from a 15% payroll tax to a 9% income tax. This, as I said on air, is “patently wrong.”

First of all, assuming they plan to exist, they’ll need to consume stuff, and thus they’ll also face the 9% sales tax. That already makes their tax rate 18%, higher than the 15%.

But as Michael Linden points out, and this is widely agreed upon by tax economists, the incidence of the 9% tax on business income (which denies businesses a deduction for wages paid) also hits them, which is why former Joint Tax Committee chief of staff Ed Kleinbard described the tax as a 27% payroll tax for families whose incomes derive from earnings (note that Lowrie is perfectly comfortable with the standard assumption assigning the incidence of the employers side of the payroll tax to the family — this one re the business tax is equally standard).

For a family with $500K, same assumptions as above, their tax bill would fall by $44K. (more…)

The candidates for the Republican and Tea Party nomination for president stood silent at a debate when the questioner asked if society should allow an uninsured coma victim to die. The Tea Party audience, however, made clear its answer: let him die!

This is not your father’s (or mother’s) GOP. During a time of national crisis, the President has submitted an urgently-needed jobs bill that is well within the mainstream for Republicans as well as Democrats. But today’s Republicans are a new breed, dedicated not to their country or even an ideology.

Who could best express the absurd lengths these politicians will go to destroy anything that’s stands in their way? Nobody I can think of – except Groucho Marx. But before Groucho has his say, let’s have ours.

Their refusal to pass the strongest provisions in this reasonable bill, if that’s what they choose to do, will be conclusive proof that their only allegiances are to their own re-elections and the massive corporations that they serve. This bill is far from perfect, but it’s a start.

Rejecting this bill wouldn’t just be a vote against jobs, although it would certainly be that. It wouldn’t just be a vote against children, although it would condemn them to oversized classrooms in crumbling buildings. It wouldn’t just be a vote against bridges and highways and a safer, more prosperous country. (more…)

“Newt Gingrich: Obama’s ‘Bureaucratic Socialism’ Kills Jobs” is one of many similar headlines appearing on dozens of web-based news portals in this 2012 election season. This one keeps popping up, and I’m getting sick of seeing it.

The reason? It manages to pack several major lies, each of which you could write a book about, into just five words—and hardly an editor anywhere takes a blue pencil to it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no problem with ‘socialism.’ My shoot-from-the hip response when someone spits the ‘S’ word out in a political argument is, “Socialism? I’ve been a socialist all my life, and proud of it. We should be so lucky as to have some socialism around here. Unfortunately, we’re not even close.”

First of all, Barack Obama is not a socialist. Even back in his more youthful years in Illinois, at best on a good day, he was simply a neo-Keynesian liberal with a few high tech green ideas. Keynesians believe, among other things, that when markets fail, government has the task of being the consumer of last resort, even hiring people directly to build infrastructure and put people to work. (more…)

Saturday Night Live has no difficulty lampooning the field of Republican candidates seeking the GOP nomination for President.