Lying like a rug on the tax cuts

David Rosenbaum of The Newspaper of Record (when they axe Lelyveld, that is) has a great headline:

Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?

My goodness gracious, are such things possible?!

What is more important is that the tax relief most people will receive is quite meager, hardly the impression the president sought to leave when he campaigned around the country for the plan.

Mr. Bush kept emphasizing the tax benefits for people with modest incomes, not the more extensive tax relief he wanted for the well heeled. He often had onstage with him a couple with two children and an income of $40,000 or $50,000 whose taxes would be cut by more than $1,000, mostly because of the increase in the child tax credit.

But the indisputable fact is that the bulk of the tax cut will go to the wealthy. A study by Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research institute whose calculations have gone unchallenged, found that half of all taxpayers would get a cut of less than $100 a year this year and that by 2005, three-quarters would get less than $100.

On the other hand, almost two-thirds of all the tax savings will go to the wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers, and the richest 1 percent will get an average tax reduction of nearly $100,000 a year.

I don’t think these guys even know when they’re lying any more. They just say whatever it takes.

It would be nice to have a President who at least knew what the truth was.

TAXES….Taxes, taxes, taxes, how much is enough?

This post isn’t about persuading anybody about anything. I just want to present a few numbers to put the whole tax/budget debate into perspective.

The chart on the right shows total federal tax receipts. As you can see, they have been relatively steady for the past 50 years, averaging about 18% of GDP (yellow line). There’s also a pretty obvious dynamic at work: whenever taxes start to rise to around 20% of GDP, they get reduced. This happened most recently in 2001, and during the 2000 election there was a bipartisan consensus that taxes ought to be lowered. (Bush and Gore differed on the size and nature of the cuts, but both agreed that taxes should come down.)

But what about the future? It’s remarkable, really, that even with the growth of Social Security and Medicare over the past half century tax rates have stayed pretty stable. But it can’t last forever, and the best estimates of the Social Security trustees are that taxes have to increase by about 3% of GDP over the next three decades in order to fund Social Security at its present level (Figure II.D5 in this report). Medicare has similar problems, and the best estimate is that its cost will also grow by about 3% of GDP during the same period (Figure I.E2 in this report). That’s a total of 6%.

(Of course, it’s possible that Medicare as it currently exists will be gone by 2030 and America will have some kind of national health plan. I’m ignoring that possibility.)

So here’s the deal: if tax rates have averaged 18% of GDP, and we need to raise that by 6 points over the next few decades, that’s an increase of about one-third. In other words, a lot.

But — if we’re running budget deficits of 3-4% of GDP into the far future, then in order to fund Social Security and Medicare and balance the budget, tax rates may need to rise by 9 or 10 points. That’s an increase of over 50%.

This is why deficits and current tax cuts matter. If we want to keep Social Security and Medicare around in their current form — and I think a large majority of people do — then taxes will have to rise by about 1% a year over the next 30 years. If Republicans keep cutting taxes and we end up having to fix a chronic deficit as well, then taxes have to go up nearly 2% a year instead. That’s a big difference.

Social Security and Medicare are expensive programs, and we should have a national debate about their future. The current round of tax cuts is part of that debate, but their impact is being obscured by tax cut zealots who are deliberately trying to create a crisis atmosphere in which it’s “obvious” that we can’t continue to fund these programs.

But we can. Repeal the Bush tax cuts and agree to a tax increase of 1% a year for the next 30 years and we can do it. If you don’t think that’s worth it, fine. Make your argument. But in any case, let’s argue honestly and may the best argument win.

UPDATE: From comments, I see that a couple of things are unclear. First, this chart does include payroll taxes, which have gone up fairly steadily for the past few decades. Second, the final year in the series is 2003. My charting software didn’t make that clear.

From www.dailynews.com

Burbank airport almost cleared for $107 million in improvements
BY JASON KANDEL, Staff Writer

BURBANK - A Bob Hope Airport finance committee gave the preliminary OK on Monday for a proposed $107.2 million budget - 36 percent more than last year - that includes nearly $70 million for facility upgrades and runway improvements.

…

Last year, the figure hit an all-time high of 5.5 million, surpassing the 4.9 million in 1995 and 2004. The increase is fueled by new arrivals from Delta Airlines and JetBlue flights.

The jump has led to a parking crunch, a problem officials are scrambling to fix. They are proposing $13 million for improvements to the airport’s parking lot.

But no additional spaces are in the budget because the airport is bound by a development agreement signed last year with the city of Burbank that limits the number of spaces it can develop, Gill said.

…

In July, work crews are expected to start a $6.4 million project to move a parking lot to free up space for a taxiway for general aviation and cargo planes.

Am I the only one who see a future problem here for Burbank Airport Parking facilities?

So they are generating more airport traffic, but are umable to increase the number of car park spaces due to earlier decisons!

Six operators of eight car park sites near Bristol International Airport have lost appeals over using their land as unofficial car parks.

In 2003, North Somerset Council refused retrospective permission for the land to be used for parking.

…

Bridget Campbell, of the government inspectorate, said in two cases up to 350 cars parking on land was causing “a serious loss of openness”.

She said the numbers of cars at Freeman’s Farm and The Oakes made the countryside area feel urban.

…

The owners… were given until 20 January 2005 to cease the parking practice.

Councillor Peter Burden said: “The council is committed to protecting the green belt from further damage by mass off-airport parking.”

Sounds like Bristol airport has a parking problem, though looking at Bristol Airport Parking Bristol has at least 6 parking operators.

Anyway, main point foir this post is a pet hate of mine is when companies set things up (like off site airport parking) without planning permission and then expect reterospective permission! When running a business this sort of cavalier approach is bound to land a business in hot water!

Let’s watch really closely how the walk-back unfolds. And taking what was undoubtedly a hotly-debated stab at walking back the administration’s WMD claims this afternoon was Secretary of State Colin Powell.

A little more than an hour ago NPR ran an interview with the Secretary on All Things Considered. Here’s one of the key passages in which the interviewer asks Powell about why no toxins were found on the alleged chemical/biological weapons trailers found in northern Iraq

MS. BLOCK: There were no toxins found in those trailers.

SECRETARY POWELL: Which could mean one of several things: one, they hadn’t been used yet to develop toxins; or, secondly, they had been sterilized so thoroughly that there is no residual left. It may well be that they hadn’t been used yet.

Our concern was that Iraq was keeping in place this capability, waiting for the day when they were free of sanctions and could go about putting all of their programs back in place. This particularly applies to the nuclear program. What I said in February when I spoke to the UN, was that they had the brainpower, they had the plans, and they were working on acquiring the capability, and whenever they were free of UN constraints or other constraints — nobody was breathing down their neck — there was no doubt in my mind Saddam Hussein still had the intention of developing such a capability.

And as we have seen from material that’s come forward in the last couple of days, and we’ve seen on television and in papers, we now have seen the plans, we have seen the scientists who said this is what he was supposed to be working on, and he was told to hide this material until times were better to get the program up and running again. That was the concern we had with Saddam Hussein. Not only did he have weapons — and we’ll uncover not only his weapons but all of his weapons programs — he never lost the intent to have these kinds of weapons.

So now the argument is that Iraq hadn’t reconstituted anything, but rather that they were holding on to the plans and waiting for the day when they were out of the sanctions box and could go back into the WMD business.

Frankly, I believe that’s true. I also thought they must have had some chemical and possibly biological weapons left over from the glory days before the inspectors came in. I still think they may have. And this is one of the reasons I strongly backed the need to threaten force to get inspectors back into the country and quite possibly war to remove Saddam’s regime once and for all. As I discussed a year ago, I think that circa 2001 the sanctions were hurting us more than they were hurting Saddam and that time was on his side, not ours.

But this isn’t the argument the administration made — not even close.

If this is what the White House thought, then there was no reason whatsoever to turn the world upside down in order to pull the trigger this spring.

Dick Cheney knew that, of course. Thus the recourse to bogus Niger uranium documents.

“When I’m president, we’ll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day,” said Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri. (while referring to the then upcoming Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in university admissions)

The Supreme Court is the highest court of the land. I don’t always agree with their decisions, but their decisions are supposed to be respected. If you don’t like their decisions, then change the law or the Constitution, but I don’t see anywhere in the Constitution where the President can unilaterally overrule the Supreme Court!

And in true dumbass fashion-

The Chicago Bears are no longer the Chicago Bears, they are now “Bears football presented by Bank One.” This is really stupid!

- 40 % goes to the website
- 30% goes to the label
- 8% goes to the publisher
- 10% goes to middlemen
- 12% goes to the artist
Source: Business 2.0

The tangled web starts to unravel

Jake Tapper writes about the lies that took us into war over at Salon (it’s Salon Premium). Here is an interesting taste:

Korb also suggests that this affair could seriously affect the ability of the U.S. government to function efficiently. “What this administration has done to military and intelligence professionals in government is disgraceful,” he says, citing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was publicly rebuffed by Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after predicting — correctly, it now seems — that it would take “several hundred thousand troops to keep the peace in postwar Iraq.” Korb also cites the formation earlier this year of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of a few dozen former intelligence officials from Army Intelligence, CIA, FBI, Defense and State Departments, to protest what they saw as a misuse of intelligence for the purposes of building a case for war. “This will also have long-term ramifications,” Korb says.

On the VIPS steering committee sits 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern, one of President Ronald Reagan’s intelligence briefers from 1981-85, who still has many contacts within several intelligence agencies. McGovern tells Salon that he believes the Bush administration’s pressure on and manipulation of intelligence agencies was “worse than the Gulf of Tonkin,” when President Lyndon Johnson falsified information in order to secure authorization to escalate the Vietnam War. At least back then it was done “in his quick, manipulative way,” McGovern says. “This was so premeditated.”

McGovern, who opposes the war in Iraq, says “the intelligence just wasn’t there, so in such a case the president who wants to pursue this war and his advisors will either manufacture it or cook whatever is there to the recipe they want to pursue.”

Korb and McGovern are just two such voices in a chorus of seemingly credible, if mostly anonymous, critics. On Thursday, a senior CIA official told the Washington Post that Cheney and his staff “sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here.” There was the story about Powell, first reported by U.S. News & World Report, preparing for his testimony before the United Nations in February and so exasperated with dubious information provided to him that he threw the documents in the air and declared, “I’m not reading this. This is bullshit.” There’s the Time magazine story reporting that an Army intelligence officer said Defense Secretary Donald “Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence.” On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal quoted a State Department intelligence official who said of the pre-war WMD information that “much of it wasn’t very solid, and the fragmentary information sometimes produced fierce internal disagreements about its meaning.” Then there was the individual from the Defense Intelligence Agency who told the New York Times that “the American people were manipulated.”

With the Administration line now looking to blame the “intelligence” that they received for misleading lying to the public, it looks like the intelligence community is going to bite back.

What’s Going On?

It should be fairly obvious by now that, my promises of the last two days notwithstanding, I’m not in a position to return to normal posting at the moment. One reason is that I’m very busy at the moment–in fact, I just now finished a three-and-a-half hour lecture. I know professors aren’t supposed to have much to do in the summer, but there you are.

The second reason is that I’m once again feeling worn down. Over the weekend, I spent several hours working on a post (hinted at on Monday). The subject, triggered by the near-simultaneous passage of the tax cut and the massive increase in the federal debt ceiling, was going to be a catalog of reasons why Republicans of various stripes had reason to be displeased with President Bush and the Republican Congress, drawing on the words of self-identified conservatives as support (my future student Joshua Claybourn was going to receive a link; go visit him anyway). And I was going to conclude by suggesting that the only conservatives who could be truly satisfied with the present administration–at least among those paying attention–were those who lived by the philosophy of “I got mine,” and those for whom partisan triumph is the most important goal.

And then I see stories like this one from the Denver Post, in which evil Republican strategist Grover Norquist revels in his plans to wage scorched-earth campaigns against Democrats across the country:

We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals–and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship.

Bipartisanship is another name for date rape.

It is exaactly the [Charlie] Stenholms of the world who will disappear, … the moderate Democrats. They will go so that no Texan need grow up thinking that being a Democrat is acceptable behavior.”

Or I see columns like this one from the Los Angeles Times (warning: intrusive registration required), in which supply-sider Bruce Bartlett describes the evolution of the idea that tax-cut-driven deficits were an affirmative good, because they would “starve the beast.” Not that Republicans, at either the national or the state level, seem particularly anxious to cut spending at present; in fact, spending has risen more rapidly under Republican-controlled legislatures than under those controlled by Democrats. Is it any wonder that some Democrats, staring aghast as tax cuts and rising spending combine to push the federal government deeper and deeper into debt, follow Paul Krugman in beginning to think that the Republican-controlled government is determined to provoke a fiscal crisis that will lead to the elimination of the social safety net? (conservative commentator James Taranto regards this as “the latest in a series of Democratic delusions,” but Kevin Drum rebuts Taranto with Republicans’ own words).

Or I see stories like this one from the Globe and Mail, about the plans of a conservative Hollywood producer and White House insider to convert President Bush into an action hero in a movie about September 11, just in time for the 2004 campaign, with the open cooperation of the White House–and with partial funding provided by the Canadian government, for goodness sake (link via Atrios).

And again I find myself throwing my hands up in exasperation, and hanging my head in despair.

Politics has always been an ugly game; I have no illusions about that. I couldn’t possibly–the first campaign for which I worked was the McGovern campaign against Nixon in 1972 (I was eight). But the ugliness of the present day is absolutely astounding. There seem increasingly to be only two options: demonization and hagiography. And the public and the media tolerate this; indeed, they frequently seem to encourage it.

I need a break. I’m going to take a couple of weeks away from here. I’ll be back–clear-headed, I hope, and with my blogging batteries refreshed–in mid-June.

By the way, the Mets still stink.

During a discussion on methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.

“No one is interested in destroying anyone’s computer,” replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to disrupt music downloads. One technique deliberately downloads pirated material very slowly so other users can’t.

“I’m interested,” Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone’s computer “may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights.”

The senator, a composer who earned $18,000 last year in song writing royalties, acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, “then destroy their computer.”

“If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we’d be interested in hearing about that,” Hatch said. “If that’s the only way, then I’m all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize” the seriousness of their actions, he said.

“There’s no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws,” Hatch said.

First, is the Senator really endorsing destroying someone’s computer to stop them from illegal file trading? Second, has the esteemed Senator of 26 years ever read the Constitution? I seem to remember something from my first year Con Law class about a prohibition of the government from taking something from a citizen without due process of the law. This also extends to laws created by the government.

I’m curious if Senator Hatch will be expanding his thought process. Should cars that go above the speed limit automatically explode? This would certainly teach drivers not to speed! How about exploding phones? Every time someone does something illegal by phone it would explode.

But, what happens if a file trader is scared to use his home computer for file trading and decided to use his work computer? That computer could possibly be in a hospital, airport, fire department, 911 installation, or even the Department of Homeland Security! Should the RIAA be allowed to destroy those computers, too? Imagine the chaos!

Also, imagine the chaos if the RIAA actually came up with a method to destroy users computers and it leaked out. What if it got in the hands of terrorist’s hands, or the mafia, or a foreign government? They could take down the entire internet! (ok, I admit, this isn’t likely, but still a possibility; especially if the government mandated some sort of kill switch to be installed in all computers in America.)

There are also many additional questions about a copyright holder being able to actually identify an illegal file trader. What happens if the copyright holder destroys someone else’s computer whose IP address had been spoofed by an illegal file trader? Under Senator Hatch’s suggestion, those people would be innocent bystanders, because the copyright holder would have immunity from damages!

Senator Hatch placed this response on his Senate website on Wednesday:

Hatch Comments on Copyright Enforcement
“I made my comments at yesterday’s hearing because I think that industry is not doing enough to help us find effective ways to stop people from using computers to steal copyrighted, personal or sensitive materials. I do not favor extreme remedies – unless no moderate remedies can be found. I asked the interested industries to help us find those moderate remedies.”

I usually am accepting of people making retractions of what they have previously said, but in this case I am not. This is a retraction from a man that is going on his 27th year in the Senate soon. If there is a job in American society where people learn very early that what they say can come back to haunt them later, it is politics. The above statements came from a seasoned politician, someone who filters every word that comes out of their mouth. I, as a fairly young lawyer, am always cognizant of every word that I say. I occasionally say things that I wish I could take back, but I am always aware. This man has been a Senator for a few less years than I have been alive! Therefore, I have absolutely no doubts that he knew exactly what he was saying! Asking about the possibility of destroying someone’s computer is not a moderate remedy, it is a completely outrageous remedy!