Republicans exist, in other words, to (a) cut taxes; and (b) prevent tax increases. It’s a shallow, destructive charade, but that probably won’t matter on Tuesday.
No, it probably won’t matter. People are going to vote for the exact opposite of what they want. They want balanced budgets, so they’re going to vote for a party that is promising to do away with the Paygo rules in favor of Cutgo rules. What does that mean? It means that the Republicans will be able to make tax cuts without paying for them. And that’s literally all it means. With Paygo, a tax cut is considered an expenditure no different from providing health care to a child. It has a cost, and that cost has to be paid for without borrowing more money. You can pay for it by shifting money from somewhere in the budget or through some kind of tax or fee. Sometimes, a new policy can pay for itself by creating savings to the government. But tax cuts do not create savings for the government. We learned that during both the Reagan and Bush the Younger administrations. If you want a balanced budget, the very last thing you should do is put the Republicans in charge. Their decision to gut the Paygo rules is just proof of this.
The theory the Republicans pretend to operate on is that tax cuts put more money in people’s pockets and allow business owners to make investments that create jobs. When enough new jobs are created, the government makes its money back with interest. It hasn’t turned out to be true, and no honest economist disputes this. But it does help the government balance the books when the economy is humming. The last time the budget was balanced was during the boom years of the late 1990’s. To get back to that type of economy, we need to create jobs, and the only way the government can directly create jobs is to spend hundreds of billions of dollars. The $700 billion stimulus plan created about three million jobs, or about five million less than we lost during the economic crisis. But, because the American people are about to elect a bunch of Tea Baggers, we’ll have no shot at the government creating any new jobs. Again, the people are voting for the opposite of what they want.
And if they want less partisan fighting and more results, lord are the ever voting for the opposite of what they want.
They are, near as I can tell, voting for what they want: to wit, that every knee will bend at Jesus’ name, that they’ll get to keep their guns, and that they’re pissing off the liberals.
Everything else is apparently negotiable.
When you’ve got people who’d rather sit hungry in the stands so long as their team wins, rather than watch at worst a draw with a full stomach, there’s not much you can do.
African-Americans seem to be turning out in numbers for early voting in NC.
I just voted, and about 2/3 of folks voting at the early voting location were African-American.
And yes, there are banked 2 more votes for Elaine Marshall and a pledge of a third vote from a friend. Still working the personal network.
I saw Ed Rendell on MSNBC today. He said the Repugs blew us away on the spin game. Thats what has happened. While we focused on policy and governing they just continued their endless campaign of deceit. Self serving bunch of ass clowns.
I still think its a bit more complicated than that Booman. Sure, they aren’t voting for politicians that offer them the policies they want, but perhaps they are voting for the results/outcomes they want? Dems will control the executive through January 2013, that’s a given. What they are voting for is divided government, and more specifically, a Republican Congress that will be extremely shrewd negotiators with Obama about the big issues of the day, such as taxes, immigration and climate change. For those voters that aren’t tea baggers (and candidates don’t get to 51% with just tea baggers), I think this is the calculation. They never really wanted the executive and legislative branch controlled by the dems- and now they think they are sort of fixing that glitch that resulted from the disdain for Bush and McCain that propelled dems to victory in 2008.
Unfortunately, I think this idea that divided government is going to work out is incorrect, but then again, I’m not sure too many people know how this is all going to play out. So to reiterate, people aren’t voting for the opposite of what they want, they are voting for what they THINK will be the outcome once we have divided government. Maybe a distinction without a difference given your assessment of how divided government will play out, but still, its not quite the same thing.
Then they’re morons. You give them far too much credit for their ability to think at all.
Perhaps, but the idea that basically every middle class white person who doesn’t live in the northeast, west coast or a college town is an idiot, is too terrifying for me to acknowledge.
Huh? Every middle class white person who doesn’t live in the northeast, west coast or a college town is voting to bring back the days of Dick & Rove now?
How about this then? People are going to get the opposite of what they want. A worse economy, more debt, and more shrieking.
Yep- that’s it exactly.
If these numbers from the DNC (pdf) are correct, things aren’t too bad, except in Wisconsin.
I always wonder if you bloggers are stupid, or just lying.
“People are going to vote for the exact opposite of what they want.”
Yes they ARE voting for precisely what they want. White Americans want nice, clean white republicans in office. Everything else is a distant 2nd place to that. They just say “cut taxes” as 40 year old dogwhistling. As long as a black guy is President, American white folks will vote in RECORD numbers – for republicans.
You blogger folks may wish to consider tuning into reality one of these days, rather than providing cover for the bigots, and pretending that they really are interested in things like their own economic well-being.
So, how’d he get elected in the first place?
I’m going to give a generous interpretation of the sensible Republican viewpoint (warning: may be an oxymoron). People who have businesses live on their sales. They see any increase in government activity as an encroachment on their business. Varies from sector to sector of course. If you are in the spy and military contracting business, it is win-win. But your ordinary pharmacist, let us say, thinks that a dollar that goes to government is a couple of cents his clients can’t spend on what he has to sell.
It is a fallacy of composition. You need to have some training in old-fashioned economics (no longer available in our elite, not to mention our less-than-elite instutions) to understand why.
The point is, that there is a real problem out there with people who are not fascist, but who think they are being rational because they can’t reason through to the end of the chain. They are going to suffer as much as anyone else when the the thugs come in. And they won’t know why.
“Fallacy of composition” in this case translates to the “fixed size of the pie fallacy” or the “the economy is a zero-sum game fallacy”.