Has to be William Galston.
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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.
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Jerk, yes, but probably not stupid. He’s just setting up the GOP defense heading into November, and pushing the debate that will follow an Obama victory and possible GOP bloodbath in the House.
In other words, the coming debate over the Ryan Budget is not only a loser for the GOP electorally speaking, but it opens the door to a wholesale repudiation of entitlement cuts and other austerity measures going into the future.
They want to make sure that at the very least, they’ll get another crack at Bowles-Simpson. What Galston and others are afraid of is that a big win for Dems in the Ryan debate will translate into much more progressive-friendly reforms. This is just another iteration of the “we need to make the tough decisions” rhetoric that they’ve been flooding the airwaves with.
It’s the standard GOP line of defense: go on the offensive, and be as offensive as possible while you’re at it (summoning John Sununu). We need to be prepared and organized and on message to beat back this assault, because there’s only going to be more of it.
Notwithstanding that Galston is nominally a Dem, this article is still an attack from the right. I thought I was reading the National Review there for a few minutes.
Let’s not forget there are many Dems to the right of Obama and who will try to sabotage any real move to the left. For instance if Obama wins big and also wins Congress, watch the “moderates” in congress and the Senate stymie any radical redistribution of wealth from rich to poor or any policies that might enable that. There will even be many moderates who will switch to voting Republican in the election if it looks like Obama might get too big a majority…
Yeah, it’s more accurate to note that there’s a sizable wing of the Democratic party that’s just as eager to embrace entitlement cuts as the GOP. Call it the Erskine Bowles wing of the party, maybe. I’m not sure how many it adds up to, but we’re about to find out.
What is wrong with The New Republic? They have always been the worst. I thought that Facebook guy buying in was supposed to change things, but I guess not.
Well, at least they don’t matter now nearly as much as they used to.
The facebook guy is a billionaire. He belongs to the Dark Side.
TNR = concern trolls
I’ll put it simply. Long Reform(tm) requires the parties working together. The Republican party can’t do that. Hence talking about Long Reform(tm) is a waste of time. The only way is to destroy the republicans, to beat them until they abandon insanity.
Besides, you can’t ever really “close the door” on something.
Beat them until they have no power. They will never abandon the insanity. They still think and have always thought, that the New Deal was a failure and abandoning all regulation and intervention would result in the Depression “burning itself out”. I believe my father and uncles who told me that it would have resulted in a Communist revolution out of sheer desperation.
Forgot to say that my father and uncles actually lived through the Depression and WWII and as young men, not kids. They KNEW what the Depression was.
My grandmother was 11 in 1929, she would save everything right up until the day she passed.
When it comes to “doing what we all know must be done,” consider me where digby is:
“Once again, there are many miles of reform to go before this kind of “tax reform” can possibly benefit average citizens. Let’s just raise the rates on the wealthy for now and try to get money out of politics. Once we do something about those problems, maybe then we can have a serious debate about reforming the labyrinthine tax code so that the entire burden doesn’t fall on middle and working class Americans. Right now, it’s the Kochheads’ world and we just live in it.”
The truth is, I want the mortgage deduction and employer deduction gone. I want pretty much every tax expenditure gone. But I can’t support getting rid of the them in good faith until rates are jacked back up as well, as a fail-safe for when other expenditures are added. I also want a VAT (or carbon tax). Liberals need to support that if they want to get “real” revenue for actual ponies and rainbows.
And a long-fix to Medicare? Medicare needs no fixing. Taiwan copied it straight out of our books, and they aren’t having many problems (doctor shortages, but that’s easily fixable if you fix our education system). Extend Medicare to everyone. Then fix the cost of med school and college in general. “Simple”. But cutting benefits? Yeah, no.
You’d have better luck eliminating Medicare than eliminating the mortgage deduction…
I knew it was going to go off the rails as soon as Galston decided to conflate immediate concerns about the economy with long-term concerns about the deficit.
If the economy recovers and taxes are raised (i.e. return to Clinton level) then the deficit is fixed, without gutting social programs.
Those are both big ifs. Both parties seem addicted to tax cuts and CPI-U has been falling since April. With today’s announcement for July, that makes three months straight of deflation (not withstanding Subway cookies going from 3 for a $1.00 to 3 for $1.50 and gasoline going from $3.869 to $4.059). Three months of deflation (what went down? house prices?) is not a good sign.
The Democrats have to drill into the electorate’s brains that the Republicans have been stalling spending measures designed to lift the economy and the rich need to pay more taxes (so do the middle class but you don’t mention that during campaigns). The Ryan budget cuts spending SLOWING the economy and raising taxes on the Middle and Working classes. OBAMA CAN’T FIX THE ECONOMY WITHOUT A DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS. Can’t shout that loud enough. Real Democrats not Kent Conrad’s and Ben Nelson’s, but the time for that was the primaries.
That’s quite a playpen of stupid jerks that he has to compete with. He won’t hold the honor long.
This reads more like standard Beltway pablum to me. To be the “stupidest jerk in the universe” don’t you need to distinguish yourself in some way? God knows the competition is ferocious, almost all of it from this planet.
Thank God for the Vogons.