Even though I never heard a proposal from the Supercommittee that I could support, I still think it is pathetic that they couldn’t even come up with any proposal at all. The Republicans never even offered anything tempting or that would create any political pain if it was rejected. I think it is a very real possibility that by the end of this week Congress’s approval rating will be smaller than the margin of error in any poll. How could you not express disapproval at this level of dysfunction?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
I get it now!
Better the less wealthy among us sacrifice a far greater perecentage of our income to combat the “great threat” that obviously can only be defeated with the lower classes money.
I noticed this assclown only has low tax issues with the Social Security one year break. Sessions hates 99% of us make no mistake.
How about we increase social Security again and then get a Tax Increase on the people who are living like greedy pigs at our expense. People who make $500,000 then claim all their income at a 15% capital gains rate and then righting off the fucking interest on their mansions.
They always want to kick you in the teeth if don’t have the money to
lobbybribe them.Down with the Senate! Up with Caesar!
I don’t know why the dems on the supercommittee haven’t made more of the fact that the only reason we don’t have a deal is because the GOP has moved so far to the right that no deals are possible. If I’m the dems, I just put together a deal modeled on one of Reagan’s tax deals, then i call it “The Reagan Supercommittee Bill.” Then i disseminate widely in the press, prominent dems go on all the shows, and then we talk about this great compromise bill modeled after the great leadership of Reagan. Then headlines read: “GOP Rejects Reagan Bill.” Heads explode.
We’ll never get anywhere until its mainstream view that the GOP is much further to the right than the dems are to the left. Right now, speaking the obvious is high treason in DC.
The problem with trying to play the messaging this way is that their noise machine is much much louder than ours. Any message that the left attempts to put out there in Middle America is almost immediately refuted
by the Fox/Limbaugh axis of evil.
So you’d “put things on the table” for political effect, knowing that there was no chance the other side would agree, in order to make them look bad.
Hmmmm…if only some high-ranking Democrat had come up with an idea like that.
It falls apart when it comes time to “disseminate widely in the press,” and for “prominent dems [to] go on all the shows.”
I’ve been operating under the assumption that dems don’t have that kind of access to media. I suppose it’s possible they just never tried, but it seems doubtful.
Nurse – another case of penicillin to Capitol Hill – STAT!
….and bring some lithium!
If the supercommittee deadlocks, a lot of people are going to have to go back and reevaluate their opinion about the original debt ceiling deal.
If they deadlock and the triggers go into effect, the math looks like this:
Debt ceiling raised through the 2012 elections (no more hostages), 9% cut in Pentagon spending, collapse in Republican popularity – in exchange for a 2% cut in Medicare reimbursements.
If they don’t go into effect, Obama got the debt ceiling raised through the 2012 elections and caused the Republican collapse, and that’s it.
In both cases, none of the items “put on the table (wink, wink)” get implemented, and the Bush tax cuts still expire at the end of 2012.
It was only ever the “certainty” that the supercommittee – with its defense contractors tools and people who want to extend the Bush tax cuts and Medicare haters and whatnot – were going to produce a horrible set of debt-reduction proposals that ever made the debt ceiling deal look bad in the first place.