Posted inPolitics: National

Why tax cuts won’t stim this time

At the moment, tax cuts make up 42 percent of the so-called stimulus bill. This dooms it to be ineffectual, if not actually making things worse. The latter will happen because this is all borrowed money. Public investments provide the means to repay it by improving commerce and productivity. Tax cuts just piss it away. Where are the fighting liberals who are going to filibuster this mess and make the president realize his bipartisanship dance has only reinvigorated the Republicans, the party that wrecked America?

In 2003, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman laid out the exhaustive case against the cult of tax cuts, in a must-read, must-keep article in the New York Times Magazine. Yet this remains the only idea of the GOP, the party that wrecked America. And it has been given center stage by a naive president and weak Democrats who don't know how to act as winners. As a consequence, public investments in infrastructure, the best way to generate jobs and a return for the future, have been pared back. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good. But this is a rotten bill, and it is the enemy of the good, whether the punked good has realized yet or not.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The only way out for Democrats is 1960 redux

Smoke-filled rooms have a bad reputation. Yes, they gave us Warren Harding, but they also gave us Harry Truman. The only way out now for Democrats is to light up the cigars, close the door and force a Kennedy-Johnson ticket.

The question becomes, who gets to be Kennedy? Surely Barack Obama, who has inspired so many, including, poignantly, JFK’s daughter Caroline, with the similarity. And Hillary, with her sharp elbows, my-way-or-the-highway style and even ham-handed speaking, resembles LBJ. Maybe she even has some of the better angels of his nature, although we would pray she didn’t reach the Oval Office through the same tragic circumstances.

But ah, my foes and oh, my friends, that won’t work. Obama must play the role of the outsized senator from Texas.

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