Open Letter to the President: Re Resolution of Fiscal Cliff
Dear President Obama
I always credit you with saving this nation's bacon from falling into the abyss of a New Great Depression at the beginning of your first term.
I also really like what you did for marriage equality and the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.
And most recently, your initiatives on gun control.
In most other regards, however, you are the third term of the Bush/Cheney White House:
You've had a very busy year and I've forgotten little of it.
You are also a very smart man, so let's do some simple math.
Bush/Cheney began their administration with a budget surplus. Their first round of tax cuts turned that surplus into a deficit. Every additional round of tax cuts just dug that hole deeper and deeper. They also had two wars (one justified, the other criminal as selling drugs to pre-schoolers dressed as a nun) which they tried to fund with...wait for it...the stimulative effect of additional tax cuts.
Do you remember how that movie ended?
It was the disaster flick you were the hero of at the start of your first term.
As of the end of the fiscal cliff, the tax cuts you have enshrined into permenance - 99% of the Bush tax cuts - when set against the Clinton surplus, still creates a a substantial and growing deficit.
Republicans and blue dog democrats all argue that the deficit must be ameliorated by by the gutting of domestic spending, principally taken from entitlements and social safety net programs which enforce a bottoms-up form of austerity [ increases in age eligibilty for entitlements is addressed in http://donquixokie.blogspot.com/2012/12/bring-out-your-dead.html] bringing pain to the people at or below the poverty level.
I repeat: "Middle class" tax cuts paid for with Greek-style AUSTERITY for the lower classes. Especially if the sequester goes into effect.
The Bush/Cheney tax cuts were WRONG.
99% of the Bush/Cheney tax cuts are WRONG.
Even if all of the Bush tax cuts had been repealed and every middle class house hold member would have been forced to pay their fair share as much as any tycoon, the revenues raised would have been enough to support the social safety net programs and entitlements.
Money in the pockets of the poor and the retired would have created demand for goods and services which would have kept people employed and grown the economy; while tax revenue from economic activity (buying, selling) and pay checks would have paid down the deficit.
This is the exact opposite of Reagan style supply-side trickle-down economics.
You tell me Mr. President. Which economic and social policy set pulled the America out of the Great Depression, and which has made multi-trillion dollar deficits and economic crashes the New Normal?
As it stands, permenant tax cuts = permenant and growing deficits = permenant and growing austerity for the bottom up and permenant economic contraction.
The slow walk to destruction.
And that's under leadership like yours or Clinton's.
Tax hikes are NOT going to throw the nation back into recession.
The sequester, with its guaranteed contraction of the economy, will be certain to.
Test that.
Cuts to entitlements and the safety net will be like water in the gas tank of the economy.
Remember how the tax cuts to the stimulus slowed down the recovery? Just like that!
In enshrining this much of Bush policy, you are seconding disasterous Reagan economic policy and that of Warren G.Harding who's policies gave us the Great Depression in the first place.
And you - like Bill Clinton before you with his deregulation of trust laws, financial industries, and trade agreements with third world nations - are slow walking the nation to destruction and leaving the driver's door open for a Reagan/Ayn Rand fetishist with a lead foot.
Just like Bill Clinton did. The Wall St Meltdown should have been no worse than the 1987 stock market crash. You do the math.
You have enabled future economic dysfunction just like Clinton did.
Try moving the ball toward the goal of future stability and prosperity instead of toward Conservative dystopia and national dissolution.
The Republicans will get their hands on the the White House and the damage they do will be nigh insurmountable to repair for the next progressive president in the short 4 to 8 years he will be alotted.
You are doing America no favors by ceding to the Republicans on budgetary matter, especially on entitlements.
The whole Grover Norquist philosophy of shrinking the government is crap.
People don't move into into smaller houses as their fortunes improve.
Families don't respond to disaster by moving into their car if their house is still sound, yet this is exactly what Conservatives are calling for when they demand set asides to deal with disaster relief, especially when it comes to areas outside of their districts.
As a sign of recognition of the reality of climate change - move heaven and earth to abolish all subsidies to petroleum/carbon energy companies (mythical "clean coal" and natural gas included,) reserving those corporate welfare checks only to incentivize non-carbon based renewable energy research and developement. The taxes we finally collect from them will help pay for extreme weather events like Katrina and Sandy and maybe even reduce the incidents of earthquakes caused by frakking and slow down climate change if it isn't already too late.
In the face of extreme weather events, we need to give our nation the same breaks we gave Japan and Germany after WW II. We need to take the opportunity to modernize infrastructure and power grids which had been destroyed.
We can't have disasters be the excuse why we are an increasingly impoverished nation with an increasingly impotent government. That's not how being a globally exceptional nation works. You 've got to pay the cost to be the boss. American exceptionalism IS NOT FREE!
And this is not how America rose to pre-eminance after the Great Depression and WW II. America under Reaganomics never grew as strong as America under FDR. Fact!
Under Reaganomic /Ayn Rand Orthodoxy, we are well on our way to become a 3rd World Banana Republic. Mississippi, Texas, Lousiana, and Oklahoma are the future of the nation as it stands.
Tax revenue is an investment made by every contributing member of society and it is in our government that we get what we pay for.
You should know this.
Your narrative should decribe this.
Your policy should reflect this.
I'm on your side, I really am.
But you keep trying to make deals with devils that don't want you and in so doing you try to sell out everything many of us on the Left believe in.
Every policy ever touched by Reagan or Bush/Cheney leads to failure. History did NOT begin in 1980!
It's not worth winning the battle if it LOSES THE WAR! Clinton never understood that.
Just saying.
I always credit you with saving this nation's bacon from falling into the abyss of a New Great Depression at the beginning of your first term.
I also really like what you did for marriage equality and the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.
And most recently, your initiatives on gun control.
In most other regards, however, you are the third term of the Bush/Cheney White House:
- You gave an umbrella to the war criminals of the previous administration; you exchange the policy of torture with drone assassination which are proving as fine tuned and precise as brain surgury with a baseball bat. [On that note, some advice. The people who engineered 9/11 (World Trade Center edition) were our FRIENDS once upon a time. They were the mujahadeen trained and armed by the CIA against Russia. Osama bin Laden and even Sadam Hussein were OUR creatures at one time. How do you see this working out, killing their children and blowing up wedding parties, in 20 years time when they gave us 9/11 and had been our FRIENDS? Just think on that for a second. Not even mentioning what a really bad example flying killer robots provides for rogue nations to follow.]
- Letting Wall St criminals not only remain unpunished for applying the strategies pioneered by ENRON to the housing markets and nearly destroying the nation's economy, but mostly letting them write their own rules while the foreclosure crisis chews up millions of families.
- Opening up domestic drilling, making such disasters as Deep Water Horizon possible and then not ONLY letting BP usurp cleaning and containment, but local, state and federal law enforcement as well? Tacky, very tacky. Letting BP laugh in your face over their use of Correxit when you ordered them not to. It was like letting al Qaeda clean up and take control of the mess after 9/11.
- Giving support to the environmentally disasterous practice of hydraulic frakking by ordering the government fleet of vehicles to operate on natural gas. Destructive to air and water purity, I also have a add-on with a bathroom seperating from the rest of my house because of EARTHQUAKES. IN OKLAHOMA! Hard to not take that personally and a warning to everyone to avoid real estate in this vile third world excuse of a state. This is absolutely no joke!
- Continuing and expanding domestic espionage and the prosecution of whistle-blowers. And for shits and giggles I'll also include continued employment of those skeevey murdering, thieving, child prostitute buying criminals Blackwater/Xe/whoever the fuck else they are now and Halliburton...Deep Water Horizon again, GOOD ONE! Have them put in more of those shower installations that electrocute American soldiers to death while you are at it. Way to represent the American brand.
- You caved to the very people who want destroy you by gutting the public service sector which artificially increased the unemployment numbers - whereas every other REPUBLICAN president in a recession had done the opposite. Word to the wise: taking advice from those who want to destroy you is like Julius Caesar trusting Brutus to have his back. Bad idea.
- You sat on your hands during the Rust Belt union struggles in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, and even shafted public union members with wage freezes.
- You allowed local and state law enforcement to violate the Occupiers constitutionally protected right to assemble, to associate, and to demand redress of grievances.
You've had a very busy year and I've forgotten little of it.
You are also a very smart man, so let's do some simple math.
Bush/Cheney began their administration with a budget surplus. Their first round of tax cuts turned that surplus into a deficit. Every additional round of tax cuts just dug that hole deeper and deeper. They also had two wars (one justified, the other criminal as selling drugs to pre-schoolers dressed as a nun) which they tried to fund with...wait for it...the stimulative effect of additional tax cuts.
Do you remember how that movie ended?
It was the disaster flick you were the hero of at the start of your first term.
As of the end of the fiscal cliff, the tax cuts you have enshrined into permenance - 99% of the Bush tax cuts - when set against the Clinton surplus, still creates a a substantial and growing deficit.
Republicans and blue dog democrats all argue that the deficit must be ameliorated by by the gutting of domestic spending, principally taken from entitlements and social safety net programs which enforce a bottoms-up form of austerity [ increases in age eligibilty for entitlements is addressed in http://donquixokie.blogspot.com/2012/12/bring-out-your-dead.html] bringing pain to the people at or below the poverty level.
I repeat: "Middle class" tax cuts paid for with Greek-style AUSTERITY for the lower classes. Especially if the sequester goes into effect.
The Bush/Cheney tax cuts were WRONG.
99% of the Bush/Cheney tax cuts are WRONG.
Even if all of the Bush tax cuts had been repealed and every middle class house hold member would have been forced to pay their fair share as much as any tycoon, the revenues raised would have been enough to support the social safety net programs and entitlements.
Money in the pockets of the poor and the retired would have created demand for goods and services which would have kept people employed and grown the economy; while tax revenue from economic activity (buying, selling) and pay checks would have paid down the deficit.
This is the exact opposite of Reagan style supply-side trickle-down economics.
You tell me Mr. President. Which economic and social policy set pulled the America out of the Great Depression, and which has made multi-trillion dollar deficits and economic crashes the New Normal?
As it stands, permenant tax cuts = permenant and growing deficits = permenant and growing austerity for the bottom up and permenant economic contraction.
The slow walk to destruction.
And that's under leadership like yours or Clinton's.
Tax hikes are NOT going to throw the nation back into recession.
The sequester, with its guaranteed contraction of the economy, will be certain to.
Test that.
Cuts to entitlements and the safety net will be like water in the gas tank of the economy.
Remember how the tax cuts to the stimulus slowed down the recovery? Just like that!
In enshrining this much of Bush policy, you are seconding disasterous Reagan economic policy and that of Warren G.Harding who's policies gave us the Great Depression in the first place.
And you - like Bill Clinton before you with his deregulation of trust laws, financial industries, and trade agreements with third world nations - are slow walking the nation to destruction and leaving the driver's door open for a Reagan/Ayn Rand fetishist with a lead foot.
Just like Bill Clinton did. The Wall St Meltdown should have been no worse than the 1987 stock market crash. You do the math.
You have enabled future economic dysfunction just like Clinton did.
Try moving the ball toward the goal of future stability and prosperity instead of toward Conservative dystopia and national dissolution.
The Republicans will get their hands on the the White House and the damage they do will be nigh insurmountable to repair for the next progressive president in the short 4 to 8 years he will be alotted.
You are doing America no favors by ceding to the Republicans on budgetary matter, especially on entitlements.
The whole Grover Norquist philosophy of shrinking the government is crap.
People don't move into into smaller houses as their fortunes improve.
Families don't respond to disaster by moving into their car if their house is still sound, yet this is exactly what Conservatives are calling for when they demand set asides to deal with disaster relief, especially when it comes to areas outside of their districts.
As a sign of recognition of the reality of climate change - move heaven and earth to abolish all subsidies to petroleum/carbon energy companies (mythical "clean coal" and natural gas included,) reserving those corporate welfare checks only to incentivize non-carbon based renewable energy research and developement. The taxes we finally collect from them will help pay for extreme weather events like Katrina and Sandy and maybe even reduce the incidents of earthquakes caused by frakking and slow down climate change if it isn't already too late.
In the face of extreme weather events, we need to give our nation the same breaks we gave Japan and Germany after WW II. We need to take the opportunity to modernize infrastructure and power grids which had been destroyed.
We can't have disasters be the excuse why we are an increasingly impoverished nation with an increasingly impotent government. That's not how being a globally exceptional nation works. You 've got to pay the cost to be the boss. American exceptionalism IS NOT FREE!
And this is not how America rose to pre-eminance after the Great Depression and WW II. America under Reaganomics never grew as strong as America under FDR. Fact!
Under Reaganomic /Ayn Rand Orthodoxy, we are well on our way to become a 3rd World Banana Republic. Mississippi, Texas, Lousiana, and Oklahoma are the future of the nation as it stands.
Tax revenue is an investment made by every contributing member of society and it is in our government that we get what we pay for.
You should know this.
Your narrative should decribe this.
Your policy should reflect this.
I'm on your side, I really am.
But you keep trying to make deals with devils that don't want you and in so doing you try to sell out everything many of us on the Left believe in.
Every policy ever touched by Reagan or Bush/Cheney leads to failure. History did NOT begin in 1980!
It's not worth winning the battle if it LOSES THE WAR! Clinton never understood that.
Just saying.
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