Casual Observation

9 Comments

1. 

   Phil Perspective on March 6, 2015 at 12:29 pm

   I’m sure people here knew it was a scam all along.  Just like the rich never lost control of the GOP to the Teahadists.  The Teahadists were just the useful idiots to move the GOP farther to the right.  Just like any “liberal” that whines about Communism/Socialism is an idiot.

2. 

   seabe on March 6, 2015 at 12:44 pm

   I like this comment over at LGM:

   Democrats and other progressives, of course, will portray the plan as warmed-over Reaganomics. The obligatory Paul Krugman column or blog post trashing it will surely be written. After all, Lee and Rubio wouldn’t just cut investment taxes for middle-class families; the rich would also pay less.

   ~ James Pethokoukis

   I earned a shiny penny each and every month, because mini-Mal has a bank account with me as a trustee. I’m very excited to hear how much I will save with this investment tax cut!

3. 

   Marie2 on March 6, 2015 at 12:48 pm

   A question I have is why didn’t the “reformicon” platform gain any traction?  

   Was the language too soft sounding for today’s strident and militant GOP base?

   As their budget plan meant more money in the hands of the “haves” than what Romney proposed, why weren’t these funders on board with Rubio?  

   Did the reformicons run the numbers for the plutocrats to show them that their ideas would sell more easily to the rubes and also deliver as good or better dollars to the wealthy as any of the other GOP hopefuls?  Or did they skip the number crunching and assume that they were splitting the difference between conservative elites and the rightwingers.

   Or was Rubio seen as too much of a lightweight to succeed nationally with a sufficient number of rubes to carry off this stealth plan?

   • 

     seabe on March 6, 2015 at 1:54 pm

     The old plan — prior to this one — actually attacked a lot of tax expenditures and such. It wasn’t progressive in any sense, but it was what you would cite as a conservative vision of how to reform the tax code (Repealing itemized deductions and significantly denting the home mortgage interest deduction). That’s not saying much, because conservative tax code reform still amounts to shitting on the poor and lower to mid middle classes, but it wasn’t a full blown bonanza for the rich above the current tax code.

     I suspect now it might gain some traction after they applied the new “fixes”.

   • 

     yastreblyansky on March 6, 2015 at 9:03 pm

     It wasn’t meant to get any actual support (except from poor Rubio)–it was a branding exercise to get favorable press coverage like this and this.

4. 

   Frank Wilhoit on March 6, 2015 at 2:09 pm

   We’ve reached a point where there can be no capitalism without coercion.

   Some of us used to wonder what would happen if it ever came to a straight fight between Business and the Church.  Well, no, I didn’t actually wonder; I knew that Business would lose, hard and with a quickness; but the point is that most of the visible effort was going into making sure that those two forces never collided head-on, but at worst only obliquely.  So it was that certain elements of the Christian programme were tacitly understood to be dead letters, because they would have been Bad For Business.

   Now it only matters what is Bad For Business as long as Business is (to some degree) consensual.  When Business becomes coercive, it ceases to care about its image.  Different calculations come into play.  The real story of the “Tea Party” is that the alliance between Business and the Church is taking on a new shape and a new purpose.  (It is still an alliance; the two actors are still distinct and their interests are capable of diverging.)

   This is what Chait’s piece should have been about, but instead, it was more of the same old lazy.

5. 

   nicteis on March 6, 2015 at 3:27 pm

   It’s things like this that threaten to shake my belief in the Easter Bunny.

6. 

   boran2 on March 6, 2015 at 4:51 pm

   Decepticon is more appropriate given the reality.  

7. 

   Errol on March 6, 2015 at 7:26 pm

   well it was touch and go there for a while