Category: Politics

Kevin Drum has been on a roll lately with a two-part look at various long-term scenarios for Social Security privitization. Today’s post has some numbers which seem to show that SS is not in fact anywhere near broken. I’m not very well-informed on the details but it does look quite positive.

For what it’s worth, I am against the current privatization push for Social Security. I voiced my concerns on the issue a few weeks ago.

The bigger question that needs to be asked, and this is where the Democrats are, as ususal, not doing their job framing a coherent opposition, is, Why do the Republicans hate Social Security?

I have not done much political blogging since the election. That’s partly due to burnout and partly because the news in ‘political’ quarters these days seems so weird I don’t quite know whether to slap on a tinfoil hat, pack my bags for Canada, or laugh my butt off. Here’s a sample of what I mean:

Bush ’04: it’s not just about pursuing an agenda that Americans don’t think you have a mandate for anymore. It’s about punishing the people you *know* didn’t support the mandate.

Some conservative activists are urging the Bush administration to scrap the federal deduction for state and local taxes as part of a broader plan to revamp the nation’s tax system.

[…]

A proposal to eliminate the deduction for local and state taxes on federal tax returns would affect blue states more than it would red states. In 2002, two-thirds of the $184 billion claimed under the deduction was in states carried by Sen. John F. Kerry. About a third of the total was in just two states, New York and California.

We’ve stepped past the actual pursuit of a conservative (or whatever the hell they think they are today) agenda towards an agenda that’s just punitive towards “liberals”. And by “liberals”, we mean people who live in blue states, regardless of their income. Think of all those poor Orange County conservatives, those upstate New York Republicans…hell, think of us poor bastards in Ohio – the lynchpin to Bush’s reelection, and we still get reamed by his tax plans.

I definitely agree that eliminating the deductability of all state and local taxes is a bad idea. But is it really a deliberate attack at blue states and/or liberals? Have things become that politicized?

I tend to doubt it. I suspect that this is ideology driven (if you can call BushCo’s belief in “screw the 95% for the benefit of the rich” an ideology) more than some kind of attack on the liberals. But who knows? These days I don’t know what to believe.

So as I said, I’m not posting as much about politics until I can get a better sense of what the hell is going on.

Having a lovely time in cool, rainy NY. This triggered my pissed-off meter though:

Vietnam Vet, 53, Called for Duty in Iraq

A 53-year-old Vietnam veteran from western Pennsylvania has been called up for active service with the U.S. military in the Iraq war, The Tribune Review of Greensburg, Pennsylvania reported on Wednesday.

Paul Dunlap, a sergeant in the Army National Guard, will join an armored division next month as a telecommunications specialist in Kuwait, and expects to be there for at least a year.

They must be getting damn close to the bottom of the barrel. This guy has not been in combat since serving as a 19-year-old Marine in Vietnam. WTF is the DOD doing him calling him to go to Iraq?

I read things like this and it reminds me that one of the many things I am thankful for this Thnksgiving is that our friend the ex-Marine has not gotten a similar call. Yet. I fear that day.

And yet again, Digby goes and posts something that makes me wonder why I even bother blogging. This time it is a long, excellent look at the rural/urban psychosocial divide in America. He’s covering ground another of my favorite bloggers, Orcinus, covers, and it also ties in with what I taked about in my last post.

Here’s a sample:

We cannot make a populist case to rural America as long as rural America continues to believe, as it has for centuries, that the government only takes their money and gives it to people they don’t like. This belief is why people who should naturally support our programs instead vote for tax cuts. In the past, populists often shrewdly coupled their argument with nativist causes and were able to scapegoat either immigrants or blacks as part of their argument, thus partially nullifying this cultural resistence. Even FDR agreed to set aside the issue of civil rights for the duration. Needless to say, we aren’t going to go down that path.

So, Democrats are left with a difficult problem of how to deal with a region that is in economic distress but whose culture traditionally believes that government only helps people unlike themselves.

[snip]

Yes, if people were rational about these things you could sit down and have a nice discussion with spreadsheets and diagrams showing that the rural red states benefit far more from federal redistributon of wealth than the metropolitan blue states. You could explain that many of the social changes that have happened have benefitted them in their own lives while acknowledging that there has been a cost and that changes of this magnitude can be frightening and destabilizing. You could show that the massive New Deal programs and the post war expansion benefitted primarily the middle class, not the poor. You could rally the people to the side of their own class instead of the corporations who benefit from the policies currently in place.

But, as we’ve seen, people are not rational.

Go read the rest. If Digby’s not in your bookmark list yet, he should be.

DH in MI, one of the Kos bloggers, has an interesting piece on another of the many disconnects between Republicans, Democrats, and the public. Worth a read.

In short, a lot of Democrats are great at creating good policies, but too few of them are good at creating appealing atmospheres. The former is essential to being a good legislator or executive, but you need to latter to get elected.

4 more cabinet members resigned today, Colin Powell among them.

I used to respect the man; perhaps I will again some day. But I thought he had more integrity than to be a party to the tissue of lies that Iraq has turned out to be.

The Bull Moose gets an award for “most unintentionally funny” nomination for his successor. Lieberman? Not in a thousand years.