Political Blogs, News and Views

A World Without Sound-bites Or Talking-Points

Obama spoke from the Rose Garden this morning, putting forward his ideas on how to both pay for his proposed American Jobs Act, and further tackle our national debt.

Three hours before he began speaking, I had already heard the “thought out” responses to his speech (which he was 3 hours away from even making), by more than a half dozen Republicans who have been taking their preemptive replies to the media since last week.

When we answer questions before they’re asked, and reply to proposals before they’re even made, aren’t we just setting ourselves up to fail as a nation?

I’ve heard a lot recently from the large group of Republicans who all hope to be President someday, that we “need to have a national discussion” on this and that. It usually sounds to me like they’re taking a pass over giving any real answers or ideas of their own when they say it, but they say it often so I thought maybe they just need someone to get the “discussion” started.

I’d gladly be that person, and I’d only have one rule going in, leave your talking points and sound-bite memos at the door. We’ve all heard them over and over, and frankly, some of it is getting pretty boring.

Higher Taxes Means Less Jobs
Really? Because Ronald Reagan raised “some” taxes, eleven times by my count, and we had significant job growth during those 8 years. Though, there is an argument to be made about the low quality of jobs created during his two terms, but right now I think most Americans (at-least millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans) would welcome even low quality job creation.

Bush (41) threatened to raise taxes and his party bailed on him, so no significant or relevant data from that term to add to this discussion.

Clinton raised “some” taxes, and we had significant job growth during his 8 years.

Bush (43) cut “some” taxes, and the significant job growth stalled.

Obama has allowed himself to be strong-armed over the last 2.5 years into keeping the Bush tax cuts and–still no job growth…

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time we look at the reality that when “some” taxes are more fairly proportionate, it lifts the screws from the middle class and allows the majority of small business owners to feel a bit more certain and confident about the future, which leads to job growth by the largest group of employers in the country.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to stop making false claims just because they fit our agendas and ideologies, and we start talking in hard facts.

For instance, like the hard fact that tax cuts over the last 10 years haven’t led to any measurable job growth what-so-ever.

An entire decade of evidence shows us that lower taxes for the highest earners does not translate into job creation in America at all.

Obama’s Proposals Will Hurt Millions Of Small Businesses
Actually, looking at the numbers that have been talked about and shared, it seems like somewhere around or under 5% of “small businesses” would see any sort of tax increases by what Obama is proposing, the rest would see their taxes remain the same, and even see new tax credits if/when they hire additional employees.

The truth is, most small businesses are already paying the higher tax rates that Obama is proposing all corporations and wealthy individuals pay, because most small business owners are in the middle class and don’t have the lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists at their disposal to game the system.

It’s only a small percentage of companies which actually fall under the status of “small business” and have the resources for getting the advantages of tax breaks and loopholes that would end under Obama’s plans.

Raising Taxes On Just Wealthy People Is Class Warfare
Well then, doesn’t that also mean that lowering taxes on just wealthy people is also class warfare? Only in the other direction?

You can’t have it both ways, we have to stop playing with two-headed coins.

If raising taxes on a specific group is class warfare, then lowering taxes for a specific group is too…and Republicans have been doing that to the benefit of the wealthiest 2% (adding to the burden on the middle class) for years. A lot of years, in-fact, since the 1950′s. It’s about time someone calls them out on it, and hopefully puts an end to their half-century-plus of attacks on hard working, middle class America.

I agree that forcing wealthy people to pay higher proportional taxes would be unfair, unjust and could even be accurately described as class warfare.

However, asking all Americans to pay even proportionate rates just seems fair. If you make $90,000 per year and roughly 28% of 100% of all your yearly earnings goes towards taxes, then anyone making more should be paying roughly 28% of 100% of their yearly earnings in taxes too. No loopholes, no caps, no shelters, no exceptions.

And since I know somebody will read this and say “what about those who work but earn so little that they don’t pay income taxes?”, let me just say first, ask your doctor if a heart transplant is right for you, and second, billionaires already get the same lower end deductions that low income people are getting which void their income taxes, so those deductions are already proportionately fair. Everybody gets them. What’s unfair, is that as your earnings increase, you begin to receive benefits and special treatment that those of lower income can’t. That’s where the unbalance is at.

The American government shouldn’t punish nor reward individual success, it should only work in a neutral manner to create the environment where individual success is possible for all. Not be a tool for those with large pools of money and access to gain preferential treatments.

Obama’s Plan Will Hurt Charities
Heard this sentiment from Gov. Perry today, loved it, laughed hysterically. Then I thought, someone should educate him on the strength of charities in years past, like when the wealthiest Americans were paying a 94% top-rate^[1].

For instance, at those incredibly high upper-end tax rates in the early 1940′s, during World War II, the American Red Cross was able to get over 100,000 nurses into service, prepared over 25 million relief packages for Allied prisoners of war, shipped hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies overseas to Allied troops, and launched a national blood donation program that collected more than 13 million pints of blood for use by our wounded soldiers^[2].

All of that had to cost a pretty penny, and if it were true–as Perry’s claim appears to imply–that wealthy Americans and American businesses are only donating to charity as a result of being rewarded with lower tax rates and credits for doing so, then I can’t imagine the Red Cross or any charitable organization being able to accomplish the amazing feats that they did at that time.

Do people and companies take advantage of tax breaks for their charitable donations, absolutely. But, is that the only reason they support the organizations and causes that they do? Absolutely not.

It seems I have a more optimistic view of the kindness and compassion that we Americans are capable of showing for one another than Gov. Perry, which is rare since I’m fairly pessimistic by nature, but I also have evidence to support my optimism in this case.

I didn’t start this piece with the idea of finger-pointing, I really just wanted to ponder if wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, if we all started talking in full and un-slanted truths about the mess we’re in?

Wouldn’t it ultimately be more productive if we stopped debating over the spin and ideological rhetoric, and actually just focused on finding real solutions to our very real problems?

Sure, politicians from both sides do it. And maybe I’ve unfairly called out only one side here, but that’s the side I see the worst behavior coming from right now. They have an agenda, they’ve stated it openly, to make Obama a one-term President, and it looks to me like they’re willing to put that agenda before the needs of the nation during a time of crisis.

I get that playing politics is what they do, but when it comes at the expense of suffering to those they’ve sworn to serve, it’s gone too far.

^[1] Tax Policy Center

^[2] American Red Cross

Technorati Tags: american jobs act, division, rhetoric

Posted in Political Divide | Comments Off

Has America Lost Its Way, Or Its Soul?

Posted by Scott Bannon

It’s obvious that there are some deep political divides between the left and right in this country. There have always been ideological canyons separating people in America, going all the way back to our founding fathers. But, one unifying thread weaving through our chaotic and sometimes violent history, that to my knowledge had never been broken–not even during the Civil War when brother fought brother on the battlefields–was our shared respect for life and ability to show compassion towards one another during times of need.

However, it seems that thread may be broken now.

I watched and listened in shocked horror last week as the audience applauded the statement that Governor Perry had presided over 234 executions during the Republican presidential debate.

It isn’t about people being for or against the death penalty. In fact, I support it being used in cases where all possible doubts have been removed, and even believe its use should be expanded to include many sexual offenders given my belief (based on statistics of repeat offenders) that there is no chance for rehabilitation for some minds.

But, when did we lose our compassion and empathy? When did death, even the death of a criminal, stop being a tragic and sad waste for some of us?

I’ve always been able to respect political and ideological differences, but to see proof that what many around the world believe–that Americans are heartless and blood-thirsty–brought my outlook for this nation’s future down to a new low.

Yet, I believe the audience at this week’s debate was sadly able to trump the earlier cheers for death, when shouts of “Yeah, Yeah, Society should just let him die” nearly became an audience chant after moderator Wolf Blitzer asked “who pays?” if a man who doesn’t have insurance (perhaps because he lost his job?) suddenly becomes gravely ill.

Really? We not only cheer for death but we also have zero compassion for our neighbors who may have fallen on hard times, possibly through no fault of their own? That’s the society we’ve become in America?

Suddenly, the party that spoke for years about creating a ‘culture of life’ in this country, has become the culture of death and misery? A party that celebrates–with cheers and applause–killing and suffering?

It makes me feel a lot of things, sad mostly, but it also makes me wonder what happened to the religious right? Where’s the Christian majority? Because there is absolutely nothing Christ-like in applauding pain and death visited upon one another.

Technorati Tags: death applause, debates

Posted in Election Coverage | Comments Off

So, How Do You Write-In A Vote On Those Electronic Machines?

Posted by Scott Bannon

I’ve tried. For 3 years now I’ve tried to see what my fellow democrats fell in love with in President Obama back in ’08, but still it escapes me. As full disclosure, I was for Clinton last time around in the primaries, and in the general election only voted for Obama as a vote against the McCain/Palin ticket.

Now sure, President Obama is smart and pragmatic, and that has been refreshing, but is that really all it takes? Aren’t there times when a leader should make bold and gutsy moves? How about being able to negotiate? That seems like a desired skill in a political leader.

Sadly, there’s been neither bold moves nor effective negotiations from this administration to date, so what is it people fell in love with?

Sure, we got a national healthcare reform bill, but in an attempt to pull support from the right democrats allowed the heart to be cut out of it, and the whole bill to be effectively rewritten into a windfall for the Insurance companies. And that support from the right that democrats caved in to get?–Well, at crunch time when the vote came down they backed out anyway, smiled and said “Gotcha!”

Was a lesson learned from that? Did democrats and the administration finally see that starting negotiations in the center and moving right while their opponents were starting on the right and moving further right through the dealings was a bad strategy? Nope.

How about with the debt ceiling negotiations of late, how did the administration do there? In my opinion, they dropped the ball by not tying a raise in the debt ceiling to the continued tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% last winter. Everybody knew then that the debt ceiling was getting close and going to need raising soon, and after seeing how republicans had acted time and again in negotiations up to that point they should have leveraged the republican’s desire to protect those tax breaks for the rich at all costs by getting a debt ceiling increase then.

That appears to have been a serious missed opportunity now, and President Obama compounded that missed opportunity during the recent negotiations by again starting with a reasonable, centrist offer that allowed republicans to force the deal further right as time went on, and then completely blew it by chopping his own legs out from beneath himself during the negotiations in stating that he would not consider a 14th amendment solution if a deal couldn’t ultimately be reached.

As a negotiator, you don’t necessarily have to be willing to go over some arbitrary line, but keeping your opponents in the dark over whether or not you would cross that line is a fundamental tactic. Showing your cards before the bets are placed is just bad poker.

So, I’m done trying to find what my fellow democrats fell in love with in Obama. Even if I found it somehow, the fact is I’ve learned that he’s in ineffectual negotiator, and that alone disqualifies someone from holding any political office in my mind.

It’s sad to me that no serious democratic challenger has stepped forward so far to offer our party–and the country–another option. I know there’s still lingering fears born out of the debacle that tore the party in two when Kennedy challenged President Carter’s re-election bid, and we all watched as Pat Buchanan’s challenge weakened Bush enough in ’92 to create hope for a hillbilly democrat from Arkansas (if only there were another like him with resolve and fundraising capabilities, hmmm), but this is a different time in America, and with the 24/7 news cycles voters like me have seen enough to know President Obama just can’t get the deals done, and are ready to gather behind someone with a little backbone and skills.

And lacking someone like that to rally behind, I need to know how to cast a write-in vote on these electronic voting machines, so that I can show my support for Elmer Fudd, the serious cartoon candidate.

Technorati Tags: elections, negotiating, negotiation

Posted in Campaign Trail | Comments Off

Is It Time For A Real Change In American Politics?

Posted by Scott Bannon

In the past I have always believed that two (or more) strong political parties was a good thing for our country, because with strong opposing forces it prevented us from straying too far in either idealogical direction. Sure we’ve gone off course now and then over our history, but we have always been able to adapt and recover because we were never too far off center.

However, I’m about to reach the tipping point on that belief, and swing over to a “let’s destroy them” partisan position after watching the Republicans spend the last 2 years investing all of their energy into obstructionism for the sake of being obstructionists, even at the expense of the nation and citizens who are suffering.

From unprecedented misuse of the Filibuster to prevent meaningful assistance legislation from even getting an up or down vote, to their new definition of negotiating.

While it’s vogue to place blaim at the top first, the fact is on every major battle since the Obama administration took the reins, the administration has started from a left-of-center position and moved towards the center, while Republicans have consistantly began right-of-center and then moved further right throughout the negotiations.

They’re playing Lucy to The President’s Charlie Brown. Promising negotiations, pomising support in exchange for compromises, only to pull away at the last second time and again; gaining all of the compromises they wanted, without having to make any significant consessions of their own.

That is not how governing is supposed to be done. It is not leadership. It is not even politics. It more resembles stubborn schoolyard behavior and it has stunted our nation and economy as a result.

Yes, I blaim these Republicans, not President Bush, for our painfully slow economic recovery of the past two years, because they’re clearly playing politics with the economy rather than working to improve it.

As proof I offer that Speaker Boehner attempted to steal some thunder (and Press) from the President recently during the President’s Twitter Town Hall meeting, by tweeting a question that was, I’m sure, intended to embarrass the President. Boehner asked in his tweets, where are the jobs?

Well, that is the question to ask, but he was asking the wrong person. Republicans have argued for years that we couldn’t eliminate tax breaks to the wealthiest 2% or large corporations, because they are the job creators and eliminating their tax breaks would prevent them from creating jobs.

And after a decade of the Bush tax breaks they’ve been given, Speaker Boehner and other leading Republicans need to answer the question, where are all the jobs? With a decade of those tax breaks under their belts (and in their pockets) we should be overflowing with employment opportunities by now…so, where are they?

And while they’re at it, maybe those Republicans can explain why this congress, under their leadership, hasn’t allowed a single jobs bill to reach the floor for broad discussion or an up or down vote this year?

Or why the Republicans on The House Committee on Education and the Workforce voted “No” to a legislative amendment to maintain funding for job creation and training programs under the Workforce Investment Act that actually creates jobs and improves job opportunities? That seems like something we should be keeping stable (or even increasing) at a time when around 20 million Americans can use it.

They’re [Republicans] playing a sneaky game right now, of crying for cameras about the President’s lack of jobs creation, while in the near anonimity (some watch C-SPAN, few pay attention) of daily legislative process they themselves are obstructing any and all meaningful measures that would or could produce jobs for Americans, because they know most reporters won’t bother to dig deep enough to see through the hyped-spin, and so it makes them look like the job crusaders in the public eye.

But the truth is out there (almost an X-Files moment), despite Democrats being so terrible at pointing it out and making their case. The facts about what legislation and legislative amendments are being allowed or denied to reach the House floor is available. If anybody cares to inform themselves beyond the partisan leanings (left or right) and shallow coverage of major news media, it’s easily found.

And while in theory I still feel that multiple strong political parties offers the best opportunity for a centrist and strong nation, in the real world the facts are getting ever clearer to me that when one party decides to embrace a Scorched Earth policy for political gain rather than engaging in any honest diplomacy for the good of the country, then the bottom completely drops out of the multiple strong parties theory and We The People would be far better served going forward without one side’s input.

Technorati Tags: economy, jobs, partisanship

Posted in economy, Political Divide | Comments Off

Wisconsin Governor’s Battle With Labor Gives Cause For Reflection

Posted by Scott Bannon

Our great nation was founded because of a single and universally agreed upon concept by our founding fathers; that groups of people have the right to collectively demand fair treatment in their lives and work. An idea that they were each willing to fight and die for.

What was it–if not a colonial attempt at collective bargaining–that our founding fathers did? They came together and presented the King of England with an offer to fairly negotiate, or lose his control over the peoples and revenues of America.

And when King George declined to negotiate, our founding fathers, with the idea and intention “to form a more perfect union“, revolted.

From that point to today, unionization among Americans has taken us to having our own country, to practical labor laws which protect us from working conditions we openly scoff at that exist in other nations, to a narrowing of the gap between pay levels among women and minorities as opposed to white males.

Our founding fathers recognized and practiced the fundamental necessity of standing united against tyranny, be it from a monarchical tyrant, a state Governor, or a greedy CEO, it is a founding principal of our nation and we all, every one of us living in the greatest nation on Earth, benefit from that idea and the struggles of united Americans–from our founding fathers to today’s Teamsters–in our lives each and every single day.

What’s happening now with states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and others is a complex problem. There are financial budget issues at stake that are very real, and they will require some creative and thrifty solutions to solve.

However, attacking unions and the ability to collectively bargain is not the answer. A state needing more revenue gains not a penny by stripping the right to collectively bargain away from its public workers. The loss of bargaining rights simply doesn’t have a direct dollars and cents value attached to it.

The right to unionize for collective bargaining is a concept, an accepted Universal Human Right, it isn’t a tangible good that states could take from workers and sell on eBay to raise revenues with.

In real terms, attacking collective bargaining is actually avoiding the true financial issues of the state. It’s political smoke and mirrors, but lacks any possibility for solving, or even slightly decreasing, the state’s financial problems.

A more productive approach for any state, city, or other small government that actually wants to address their financial pitfalls would be to sit down at a table with union leaders and negotiate ideas that actually have potential to offer financial relief to the taxpayers in the short and long terms.

Anything beyond that, such as attempting to prevent any Americans from freely participating in a collective bargaining process if they wish to, is completely un-American and violates the very principals our founding fathers are so revered for today.

Technorati Tags: America, union, wisconsin

Posted in On The Home Front | Comments Off