You can call me naive if you want to, or suggest that I lack realpolitik, or even laugh and point. I'm used to it.
I still think the essential focus, the core, the real purpose of our government -- and the grindingly broken political engine that drives it -- is to help people. And not people as cruelly defined by the Roberts Court. People. Me and you.
I have been too close to too many stories of personal heartbreak and unspeakable tragedy of late. More than one. More than two.
More than enough, actually. They involve annoyances, grievances, frustration. They involve heartache and despair. And yet these are the stories which are woven into the delicate fabric, the material of our lives, flawed though it may be. We wear these flaws forever, limping through with our tattered rags, day to day trying to make the uneven patchwork somehow match the golden idea of the more glamorous wardrobe of what we want for our selves, for our lives, for the lives of our children and our family.
In no instance is any of what I've been privy to in the last days, weeks and months at all fair. And in no instance that I know of is any form of our far too-easily demonized government going to rescue anyone from anything which may be wrong. Folks I know will get up and get moving again. They'll dust themselves off. They will spit grit and blood into the sand, glare at the unforgiving sun, and live to fight another day.
They will be back, and they will be ready, and every one of them will once again take on the world. And they will be glad for the opportunity.
Though I don't know, I suspect most of these folks who I have in mind now -- a half dozen or so -- think about the federal government the same way I do (if they think about it at all), as a kind of silent partner in their lives. Important, but not always present in your everyday struggles -- or even the bigger ones. It could be there. But it is usually not.
That is part of the American dream -- work hard and play by the rules, there will be a safety net to catch you if you need it, but the society of your family and your network of friends and neighbors will be there first to right the injustices in your life, or at least comfort you when there is no justice to be had.
The federal government: there if you need it. But you probably won't.
The problem is, the federal government is about to fall down on their end of the bargain. Before we go any further, I'm just going to link to a couple of must-reads:
-- Ezra Klein's Everything You Need to Know About the Debt Ceiling in One Post
-- Simon Johnson's What if the Government Defaults?
...and one more, because I'm trying to tie all this together (which may just be too much, I admit):
-- Matt Taibbi's Corporate Tax Holiday in the Debt Ceiling Deal: Where's the Uproar?
Last one first:
...the tax laws say that companies can avoid paying taxes as long as they keep their profits overseas. Whenever that money comes back to the U.S., the companies have to pay taxes on it.
Think of it as a gigantic global IRA. Companies that put their profits in the offshore IRA can leave them there indefinitely with no tax consequence. Then, when they cash out, they pay the tax.
Only there’s a catch. In 2004, the corporate lobby got together and major employers like Cisco and Apple and GE begged congress to give them a “one-time” tax holiday, arguing that they would use the savings to create jobs. Congress, shamefully, relented, and a tax holiday was declared. Now companies paid about 5 percent in taxes, instead of 35-40 percent.
I'm only putting this in here, because what Mr. Klein and Mr. Johnson talk about is the ugly nature of global economic catastrophe. However, you shouldn't think that the huge corporations are going to suffer like you and I suffer. In fact, it looks like the corporations are going to be awesome. Taibbi continues:
I’m shocked there isn’t more of an uproar about this. Could you imagine what the Tea Party would be saying right now if there was a law on the books that allowed immigrants to indefinitely avoid taxes on income sent back to family members in the old country, in Mexico and Venezuela and India?
Imagine the uproar if Barack Obama, in the middle of this historic revenue crunch and "We're so broke the world is going to end tomorrow!" debt-ceiling hysteria, decided to declare a second “one-time tax holiday” for, say, unwed single mothers, or recipients of public assistance? Middle America would be running through the streets, firing shotguns out its truck window, waving chainsaws in mall lobbies, etc.
As it is, leading members of the Senate are seriously considering giving the most profitable companies in the world a total tax holiday as a reward for their last seven years of systematic tax avoidance. Hundreds of billions of potential tax dollars would disappear from the Treasury. And there isn’t a peep from anyone, anywhere, on this issue.
We’re seriously talking about defaulting on our debt, and cutting Medicare and Social Security, so that Google can keep paying its current 2.4 percent effective tax rate and GE, a company that received a $140 billion bailout en route to worldwide 2010 profits of $14 billion, can not only keep paying no taxes at all , but receive a $3.2 billion tax credit from the federal government. And nobody appears to give a shit. What the hell is wrong with people? Have we all lost our minds?
So while giant corporations will be sitting on piles of cash, what will it look like for you and me? Mr. Johnson, a former IMF chief economist, has more at Slate:
...no bank or other financial institution ...could provide a secure haven for savings. There would be a massive run into cash, on an order not seen since the Great Depression, with long lines of people at ATMs and teller windows withdrawing as much as possible.
See you in line at the ATM.
Or the friggin' breadline.
I'd love for this to be funnier. It's not. From Mr. Klein at the Post:
What happens if we stop paying the interest on our debt? This is too scary to consider for any serious length of time. Treasury securities sit at the base of the global financial system. They are considered so safe that the interest rate on Treasuries is called the “riskless rate of return,” as the market assumes there is no chance of default under any circumstances. Almost all other types of debt — mortgages, credit card, auto loans, business loans, hospital bonds, etc. — are yoked to Treasuries. Almost all major financial players hold substantial portfolios of Treasuries or Treasury-related debt in order to buffer themselves against financial shocks. Consider that the 2007 financial crisis was caused by the market realizing it had to reassess the risk of bonds based on subprime mortgages. If the market has to reassess the risk of Treasuries, the resulting financial crisis will be beyond anything we’ve ever seen in this country.
A "financial crisis... beyond anything we've ever seen in this country."
Beyond anything we've ever seen...
And yet Boehner can't even get his people on-board a deal that by any measure has crossed the center line well to the right. Those who represent the political right in this country have gone about as far-right as you can get in an effort to avoid whatever it is President Obama is serving -- and there's no wiggle room.
Of course, you don't have to take my word for it. Nate Silver of the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight has an excellent post on Republican governors.
This is unusual behavior. Politics 101 would suggest that you need to be at least somewhat responsive to voters in your state. And American political parties in particular are traditionally broad-based coalitions that tolerate a fair amount of intellectual and ideological diversity, especially at the state level. Republicans, of course, are going to try to push policy toward the right and Democrats to the left. But you can go only so far before you get a ticket out of office, so electoral and policy goals remain in some degree of balance.
The "unusual behavior" Nate is referring to is the apparent race Republican governors have engaged in to see who can actually push their conservative agenda so far to the right that it goes off the chart. Nate and other legitimate political scientists would probably not go for it, but I think we can say with some certainty that the conservative governors and Members of Congress share ideological patterns.
Like I said before, there are several folks we know who are hurting these days.
Now they're supposed to worry about this? Because Michele Bachmann and a bunch of lunatic ideologues wants a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, we're going to bring on Great Depression II?
The president offered to cut Medicare and Social Security -- central tenets of Democratic policy and politics -- and yet the other side apparently doesn't have the capacity to accept a deal. I know progressive bloggers whose heads are exploding right now. They have totally turned on Obama and his supporters. From my view, it's about making a deal before we essentially destroy the republic.
I -- and my friends and neighbors, many of whom have seen better days -- don't need government in the practical sense. But we need government to do what it should do as our silent partner. In other words, I work hard, we work hard. We play by the rules. So should government. So should our leaders.
And when they're not, they should be held to account.
Here's what I think. I think that my friends and neighbors will all get back on their feet. I believe they'll be fine. In fact, I expect it of them.
I also think there'll be a deal in Washington. They'll come up with something and the tea party types will hoot and holler about it, and they'll play dress-up and have a march. And the progressives will indignantly blog about it and they'll come up with lists of names to primary against Obama. None of that will amount to much, though because we drug this unnecessary fight on for far too long, we will have likely done damage to the global economy in a time when we can ill afford to do so. But the government will come up with a deal.
I expect it of them, too.
As a post script, being an ideologue does not pay, apparently. At least not in political capital. See this chart below from Nate at the New York Times.
