GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

[DSpencer]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

I've never seen campaigns against the inheritance tax pitched as a principle. It's usually the family farm scenario.

Isn't the family farm scenario basically one of principle rather than self interest? Hardly anyone owns a farm (especially one worth millions) and I doubt many people imagine themselves one day owning one.

Looking back it seems I may be misinterpreting your and dcarrigg's comments. I took them to mean that you thought people SHOULD simply try to maximize their own rewards regardless of principle. Instead maybe you're just commenting that people often DO act in that way. Apologies if I'm attributing value judgments that you both didn't make.

The comment about liberals being puzzled that not everyone just believes in whatever benefits them at whoever else' expense was interesting because of the implications. Would these liberals be puzzled if people voted against taking 99% of Bill Gates' money and dividing it up among themselves? There's essentially no difference.

[lektrode]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

Isn't the family farm scenario basically one of principle rather than self interest? Hardly anyone owns a farm (especially one worth millions) and I doubt many people imagine themselves one day owning one.

Looking back it seems I may be misinterpreting your and dcarrigg's comments. I took them to mean that you thought people SHOULD simply try to maximize their own rewards regardless of principle. Instead maybe you're just commenting that people often DO act in that way. Apologies if I'm attributing value judgments that you both didn't make.

The comment about liberals being puzzled that not everyone just believes in whatever benefits them at whoever else' expense was interesting because of the implications. Would these liberals be puzzled if people voted against taking 99% of Bill Gates' money and dividing it up among themselves? There's essentially no difference.

the interesting thing, for those of us in one of the bluest of the blue states (out in the middle of the bluest of the blue seas), was that the congressional delegation voted to preserve/increase(?) the EXEMPTION to the 'death tax' - in the name of small/family owned biz - i dont remember now exactly who voted for what (and dont have the time to go digging for it) - but was quite surprising.

my own .02 is that the inheritance tax is a necessary evil.

else within a relatively short period - measured in generations, at most - we'd have the entire US bought/owned by even fewer than own most of it already - and while some reasonable exemption - 10million seems MORE than 'fair' - to eliminate it entirely would risk The US becoming exactly what the europeans left in the 1600's and what some in the political class, the current occupant and his cheerleaders in particular - being on the other end of the strings being pulled in lower manhattan - are quite apparently intent on re-creating, right here in The New World - the old world aristocracy - with them, of course, running it all, "for the benefit of the workers"

[dcarrigg]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

Isn't the family farm scenario basically one of principle rather than self interest? Hardly anyone owns a farm (especially one worth millions) and I doubt many people imagine themselves one day owning one.

Looking back it seems I may be misinterpreting your and dcarrigg's comments. I took them to mean that you thought people SHOULD simply try to maximize their own rewards regardless of principle. Instead maybe you're just commenting that people often DO act in that way. Apologies if I'm attributing value judgments that you both didn't make.

I'm not sure about Don. I was simply saying that a basic assumption in modern neoclassical economics is that people are instrumentally rational actors. That means maximizing personal utility. If people out of principle choose to pay more in taxes so that some trust fund kid can take $10,000,000+ tax free that she never worked a day in her life for, that's fine. But it's certainly not instrumentally rational. This puzzles many people who operate on the assumption that mainstream economics is correct and people should be self-interested. As I said, that's what that book "What's the matter with Kansas" was about. But I think that people don't actually act in an instrumentally rational manner, and I think that Kahneman and Tversky's work pretty much settled that fact decades ago.

The comment about liberals being puzzled that not everyone just believes in whatever benefits them at whoever else' expense was interesting because of the implications. Would these liberals be puzzled if people voted against taking 99% of Bill Gates' money and dividing it up among themselves? There's essentially no difference.

I don't think that's fair. It's not the same at all. The line of thought goes like this:

1: Total government revenue at all levels of government has consistently been about 18% of GDP in modern times. Even the Heritage Foundation agrees.
2: That money has to come from somewhere.
3: Every vote to cut taxes for people at the very top is a vote to increase taxes on people at the middle and the bottom.

You may not agree with the line of thought, but that's how it goes. And the history of the last 30 years has undeniably been a history of slashing income, capital gains, and corporate rates at the top and backfilling the revenue with payroll taxes, fees, sales taxes, and other regressive tax measures. The result, the argument goes, is accelerating inequality gaps and stagnant or decreasing real income levels for the majority of the population.

The problem with the most extreme libertarian position is that it attaches moral value to taxation. They call it confiscation. That's patently absurd. Nearly 300 years ago Ben Franklin informed us that the only 2 sure things in life are death and taxes. Deciding democratically how progressive or regressive the tax system should be seems like a fair American activity to me. After all, Article 1 and the 16th amendment clearly give Congress this power. But when one side doesn't want government to exist at all and considers all taxation to be a moral evil, we cannot even have a civil conversation about it.

It seems to me that the old conservative value was on God and Country. But now something is changing. The libertarian value on markets and anarchy is taking over segments of the Republican ideology. There's a massive difference between wanting smaller central government with more powers devolved to states and wanting to destroy government entirely because one begins with the first principle that taxation is violent moral evil.

And I think that this is where we talk past each other.

If one considers taxation to be an amoral activity, looks at recent (80 years) historical precedent, and decides that the 18% of GDP revenue must come from somewhere, one can begin to have the conversation as to where it should come from.

If one considers taxation to be an immoral activity, looks back in distain at the last 80 years, and decides that government should not exist, one is not even willing to have the conversation as to where revenue should come from.

[vt]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

I certainly don't support Israel's expansion, and this is American policy. But the call for the destruction of Israel by Iran and others are wrong too. The left attacks Israel over the call for a homeland for Palestine, but that has been a controversy for decades.

The left does not take an even handed view of Israel's right to exist.

American Jews are socially liberal in many cases, but more are leaving the Democrat party over the move leftward. You saw evidence during the last convention.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ab91_blog.html

We're seeing evidence in academia too:

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/david-h...-night-at-usc/

[vt]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

Thank you. We have reached some common ground we can agree on.

I appreciate and respect your viewpoints, and hope our nation can discuss differences and arrive at some basic agreements.

[dcarrigg]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

In fact both parties are helping FIRE!

No argument here.

I respect your viewpoints. Yes, some corporations are hurting society, but so are governments.

I actually wasn't at all saying anything about corporations hurting society. I'm actually not really of that viewpoint at all. I think that recent developments have made it too easy for corporations (not the people within them) to donate unlimited money to politics. I think that laws and lax enforcement have made tax evasion too easy throughout the first world. I think that too many markets - especially commodities - have become increasingly financialized and this leaves average people paying what essentially amount to taxes to banks. And this is not considering that debt might be offered too freely and at too high an interest rate and with too much confusing fine print to be good for people generally.

But I'm not anti business. I'm not anti corporation. And I have no desire to end free enterprise. I feel like I have to repeat that too much around here. People assume that because you want a tax system that is more progressive or want to crack down on tax havens or want to regulate finance or want to undo Citizens United that you're anti-corporation. I am not. I want commerce to flourish. I do not know how much more clear I can be on this point.

I was involved with the anti poverty program years ago and our group worked. Today after a trillion dollars spent the poor are still hurting. Government spending is not working; we need to free the innovation of free enterprise, with reasonable regulation, to create millions of jobs. This is what will free people from poverty.

What does this mean exactly? I think this is where we might not agree at all. I do not think that shrinking government will create new jobs. At least, I'm not convinced of the mechanism, and I've seen no evidence to support this view. I do not think that shrinking minimum wage will create new jobs. At least the economists are split and there's empirical evidence to the contrary. I will repeat this, because I think it's important: I have never seen empirical evidence linking tax cuts to job creation. Ever.

So in my mind, something else must be done to create jobs. And something else is the culprit. A recent UN study showed that in developed countries the number one reason for declining labor value is the financialization of the economy. The number two reason is bad free trade deals (globalization). The number three reason is low taxes on the wealthy and social welfare cuts for the poor. And that the last and smallest reason was technological change. Technological change cannot be 'fixed.' So my policy preferences are to deal with #s 1-3 in order. Bruce Bartlett talks some about this here. And here's the take-away graph from the UN report.

The poor don't want handouts, they want jobs.

I agree wholeheartedly. The question is what is the best way to go about doing that. I think that the devil is in the details, and it is in the details where our views diverge.

[lektrode]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

.....
If one considers taxation to be an amoral activity, looks at recent (80 years) historical precedent, and decides that the 18% of GDP revenue must come from somewhere, one can begin to have the conversation as to where it should come from.

If one considers taxation to be an immoral activity, looks back in distain at the last 80 years, and decides that government should not exist, one is not even willing to have the conversation as to where revenue should come from.

+1
and one point for dc.

however - with all due respect - methinks this is somewhat of a distraction, as the REAL problem is on The Spending Side.

as there's certainly PLENTY of revenue coming in, the beltway just flatly refuses to BUDGET - and since 2007 (after the elections of '06) - one particular side of the aisle has been the least willing to negotiate = how we got the sequester, isnt it? (thats a question) - leaving the other (clowns) not much choice, but to 'draw lines in the sand' - and altho we got "deficits dont matter" from that same side - its getting more obvious - esp since 2007 - that they do.

i also think the main argument isnt so much that the budget, or THE LACK OF A BUDGET, more precisely - isnt so much the problem as it is the symptom - and the political class, ON BOTH SIDES OF THE AISLE - flatly refuses to acknowledge that 'the end of the yellow brick road' (of declining interest rates) is COMING UP FAST and they dont know what to do - and maybe simply returning to the previous rates of taxation and SPENDING might just be the answer.

or hey!
how about STOP THE GROWTH OF SPENDING and allow revenues to catch up

and if the entitlements are The Problem?
remove the cap on earnings or at least raise it to something that resembles what the CPI has done over the past 20-30years.
and put a LIMIT on 'retirement income' to some multiple of per capita income, beyond which one is NOT 'eligible' to collect socsec/medicare etc

somewhere SANITY has to prevail in all this and the present status quo is killing us and BOTH SIDES ARE TO BLAME (with the community-organizer-in-chief at the TOP of the list)

[lektrode]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

......

But I'm not anti business. I'm not anti corporation. And I have no desire to end free enterprise. I feel like I have to repeat that too much around here...... .

no worries, dc - some of us DO get you.

but it makes for some very enlightening discussion when you have to stress/illustrate/expound that you arent so much leftist as you are pragmatic.

why eye like reading you.

i also think new englanders tend to more balanced POV on this stuff (if fer no other reason the smaller bordering states 'mix it up' mo better than the larger ones do and give their citizens more opportunity to see first hand the outcome of each others political M.O.'s )

adding: i can certainly share/illustrate/expound upon the many diffs tween states such as MA vs NH vs FL vs CA vs HI vs UT - and had i not been raised as a 'commuter' tween the 1st 2 - esp during my 'formative' years, what, with my ole man being self-employed (like myself for most of my working 'career') - i must say that i'd be quite clueless about most of this stuff - but, with my BS degree from the school of hard knocks, i can speak/type with some authority about these diffs - as i'm sure you can, as well - IF i do say so myself...

but it might be better/safer if i dont get too.... ummmm... shall i say....
grammatically graphically-illustrative in my expounding on some of this stuff
(as in: i'd prolly be shot on sight if i mentioned even 1/2 of what i've seen/heard/experienced in ALL the above ;)

[vt]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

I posted this elsewhere, but it shows what we are up against in trying to get revenues match spending:

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...825#post268825

[dcarrigg]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

I posted this elsewhere, but it shows what we are up against in trying to get revenues match spending:

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...825#post268825

Revenues are up, and they closed the yawn by 35% or so. If we just set rates all back to pre-W. levels and kept spending flat for 4 years, we'd be fine. I'm using Wall Street Journal and Heritage figures here so you believe them. Just please keep in mind that the WSJ cuts off the big 2000 plunge in revenue and the Heritage Foundation projects higher revenue in the future towards the end of the graph (we're still not back up to 18.1%). Their projections are in question. They use them to assert that keeping the Bush tax cuts will get us back to this 18% revenue level. I'm not convinced. Revenues are up, however, since the top rate popped back to pre W. levels and cap gains will increase a smidge for the ACA. But spending is also down since the sequester.

The things to take away are:

# 1: It really was a revenue problem as much as a spending problem (just look at the huge trough in the graph), and


# 2: Spending has been flat or down as revenues have come up over the last couple of years, but revenues just didn't rise as fast as spending because of tax cuts, recession, and the TARP/Stimulus response to it:



The only thing about this graph is that it shows the plunge going into 2010, but it doesn't show the plunge coming out of 2000 that you can see in the first graph. Those are the bubbles bursting. But they're also tax cuts (Bush tax cuts and Obama payroll tax cuts being the 2 big ones).

Spending is an issue. It was close to the 18% sweet spot in 2000. It is more like 23 and change today.



So if we can just get the revenue back up to 18% and hold spending steady for 4 years with continued low GDP growth or decrease it slightly, we'll be fine. But revenue has to come up some to the north side of 18.1% along with it to get there. We can't keep going forever with 23% spending and 16% revenue. If you want the magic "ratio", it's probably about 2:1 cuts to revenue increases phased in over 4 years so it's not a dramatic shock to the economy.

Ideally on the revenue side, we'd just set things back to the rates we saw working in the 90s until we get back to 18.1% of gdp revenue, and hold spending until it hits about the same level. It seems a pragmatic thing to do.

The alternative is to kill programs, not add revenue, and cut government by about 12% permanently. That probably means SS and medicare cuts. And it will probably hit the Gen Xers and Millennials - boomers are always spared in these plans. I'm not so sure I'm willing to sell out the future just to shrink government.

Now, we'll still have a devil of a Medicare/Medicaid problem. These two programs are growing a lot faster than inflation. And we'll either need more revenue, take benefits away, or reform the health system. In the end, we may end up with a combination of all three. But for today's debt problem, I actually think it could be mostly solved before Obama's out the door. It just depends on whether the goofies under the dome can turn off Fox and MSNBC for two minutes to actually solve a damned problem instead of preaching ideological nonsense. We need revenue and spending's going to shrink as a percentage of gdp.

And this is not to mention alternative plans. Were I president tomorrow, I would end offshore tax havens and other methods of tax avoidance by any means necessary. If we just purge the criminality and semi-legal swindling out of the system, trillions in revenue would shake out for developed countries.

It's just all a matter of timing. And since most of Dodd Frank was never implemented and strong rules in the financial sector never took hold, we'd better all pray hard that another wizard tsunami cooked up by the quants in Fairfield doesn't sink the ship on the way to righting her.

[Rajiv]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

DC you really have to look at sectoral balances to discover, why the federal government almost always has to run a deficit. A good article to get you started is Randy Wray's "On Sectoral Balances,Power Imbalances, and More"

But the point is, debts and credits are always in balance. In the private sector, as we always say, inside debts net to zero. Balance. When we include a government, its IOUs are balanced by credits held by the nongovernment sector. The nongovernment sector’s net credits are claims on government. The government’s deficit means a nongovernment surplus. It balances. And when we include an external sector, a domestic deficit must be balanced by a foreign surplus. It, too balances.

There is always financial balance. Imbalance can arise only due to arithmetic errors. Looking at our global mess as a financial imbalance—as almost everyone does—is a mistake. Our mess is not due to excess liquidity sloshing around the world in the mid 2000s. It is not due to excessive borrowing by America from the Chinese. And it is not due to profligate spending by Mediterraneans with too little self-control.

We need to look at this the way Babylonia’s rulers saw it. The problem is a balance of power, not an imbalance of finance. And to understand this, we’ve got to understand what money is.

[DSpencer]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

I don't think that's fair. It's not the same at all. The line of thought goes like this:

1: Total government revenue at all levels of government has consistently been about 18% of GDP in modern times. Even the Heritage Foundation agrees.
2: That money has to come from somewhere.
3: Every vote to cut taxes for people at the very top is a vote to increase taxes on people at the middle and the bottom.

You may not agree with the line of thought, but that's how it goes. And the history of the last 30 years has undeniably been a history of slashing income, capital gains, and corporate rates at the top and backfilling the revenue with payroll taxes, fees, sales taxes, and other regressive tax measures. The result, the argument goes, is accelerating inequality gaps and stagnant or decreasing real income levels for the majority of the population.

The problem with the most extreme libertarian position is that it attaches moral value to taxation. They call it confiscation. That's patently absurd. Nearly 300 years ago Ben Franklin informed us that the only 2 sure things in life are death and taxes. Deciding democratically how progressive or regressive the tax system should be seems like a fair American activity to me. After all, Article 1 and the 16th amendment clearly give Congress this power. But when one side doesn't want government to exist at all and considers all taxation to be a moral evil, we cannot even have a civil conversation about it.

It seems to me that the old conservative value was on God and Country. But now something is changing. The libertarian value on markets and anarchy is taking over segments of the Republican ideology. There's a massive difference between wanting smaller central government with more powers devolved to states and wanting to destroy government entirely because one begins with the first principle that taxation is violent moral evil.

And I think that this is where we talk past each other.

If one considers taxation to be an amoral activity, looks at recent (80 years) historical precedent, and decides that the 18% of GDP revenue must come from somewhere, one can begin to have the conversation as to where it should come from.

If one considers taxation to be an immoral activity, looks back in distain at the last 80 years, and decides that government should not exist, one is not even willing to have the conversation as to where revenue should come from.

You often seem to be having a debate against an extreme anarchist libertarian. But there never seems to be an itulip member advocating those positions. Yes there are anarchists in the world but they don't seem to be here to argue about it. And what prominent Republicans are advocating that the government be destroyed entirely? I never hear that. In practice, they don't even believe in smaller government.

As a less than extreme libertarian, here are the issues I have with the estate tax:

1. It adds complication. The complexity of the tax code leads to corruption, loopholes, selective enforcement and wasteful money spent all around trying to avoid taxes and enforce taxes.
2. The money has already been taxed. Can there never be a point at which a person actually owns anything?
3. Clever people with enough money find ways around it. So instead of paying the taxes to the government they pay a lesser amount to lawyers and accountants. Or else it punishes the less clever or those who don't bother.

That's not to say there are no compelling reasons FOR an estate tax, some of which you've mentioned in other threads in the past.

[dcarrigg]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

You often seem to be having a debate against an extreme anarchist libertarian. But there never seems to be an itulip member advocating those positions.

Just in this thread Master Shake called the estate tax "confiscation." That is a fundamental tenant of extreme anarchist libertarian philosophy. Over the past couple of years it has leaked into the mainstream in a way that I have never seen before.

Bartlett explains how this applies to the current situation in his article from today:

October 14, 2013, 5:05 pm 78 Comments

For Many Hard-Liners, Debt Default Is the Goal

By BRUCE BARTLETT

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of the forthcoming book “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

This week, according to the Treasury Department, it will exhaust its “extraordinary” measures to avoid hitting a hard debt ceiling. It is not known precisely the date at which it will lack the cash to pay interest on the national debt, but on the day that happens, the United States will be in default. The Obama administration and those on Wall Street have long thought that such a prospect was so horrifying that it would necessarily lead to resolution of the current budget impasse. What I don’t think they understand is that there has been a movement under way for some years among right-wing economists and activists not merely to default on the debt, but even to repudiate it.

Those making this argument are largely unknown to professional economists and journalists, but their research permeates the obscure Web sites where Tea Party members get their ideas. And not all are obscure. The late Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan supported debt default, as has the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson.

I have previously noted that defeated Southerners were very hostile to being taxed to repay the Union debt after the Civil War, while the Confederate debt was repudiated and not permitted to be repaid by the states. This is the reason that Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing the validity of the national debt, was included in that amendment. The Columbia University historian Eric Foner, an expert on the Civil War,recently recounted the debate over the postwar debt and demands by Southerners for repudiating the Union debt, which are echoed by many default advocates today. In those days, it was Democrats who supported default while Republicans opposed it; today it is the reverse.

There are still many in the South, where the Republican Party is now based, whose hostility to the national debt traces back to those days. In his 1987 essay, “The Ethics of Debt Default,” Buchanan made an argument often repeated by libertarians and Tea Party members: if the Treasury were to default, no one would ever lend it money again, thus imposing a balanced budget; the government could only spend as much as tax revenue permitted. Buchanan also argued that much debt-financed federal spending is immoral and that it was immoral to tax people to pay for it. “On balance, the moral arguments against default on the debt do not seem so strong as seems to be assumed in the observed neglect of the question,” he wrote.(Buchanan’s essay in not available online, but a recent article by the New Zealand economist James E. Alvey in The Journal of Markets and Morality discusses his thoughts on this topic.) During the 1988 race for the Republican presidential nomination, the televangelist Pat Robertson, whose father was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee in the 1960s, advocated canceling the national debt based on the biblical idea of “jubilee.”

In 1992, the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote an essay supporting debt repudiation, saying, “Why should we, struggling American citizens of today, be bound by debts created by a past ruling elite who contracted these debts at our expense?” Just last year, the Rothbard essay was reprinted on the Web site of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, where Tea Party ideas often originate. A companion Web site run by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., the president of the Mises Institute, often publishes articles advocating debt default by the economist Gary North and others. Just last week, it reprinted a 2011 essay by the University of Missouri economist Peter G. Klein saying that a Treasury default is no big deal.

In 1995, the Foundation for Economic Education, the oldest free market organization in the country, published a study advocating cancellation of the debt on the grounds that the budget would forever be balanced afterwards. That same year, the House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, then embroiled in an earlier government shutdown standoff with President Bill Clinton, gave a speech saying that debt default was a small price to pay to get government spending under control. “I don’t care what the price is,” he said. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 caused a big jump in debt default advocacy among those on the right. In a 2009 interview with Vanity Fair, Mr. Ferguson advocated cancellation of the debt. “There are historical precedents for this,” he said, suggesting that inflation was one possible means of doing so.

The following year, John Tamny of the libertarian Cato Institute said, “It’s time we learn to love the idea of a U.S. debt default.” He dismissed concerns about the consequences: “For Americans to worry about a debt default is like the parents of a heroin addict fearing that his dealers will cease feeding the addition.” Those supporting debt default often say that it’s inevitable because the debt is unsustainable — therefore, we might as well get it over with now. This argument was made by former Representative Ron Paul, for whom I once worked, in a Bloomberg article during the race for the Republican presidential nomination 2011, and more recently by the Wall Street commentator James Grant in The Washington Post last week.

Another argument one often hears among default advocates is that President Obama will get all the blame, so it’s politically expedient. As Donald Trump put it in a 2011 interview on Fox News: “When it comes time to default, they’re not going to remember any of the Republicans’ names. They are going to remember in history books one name, and that’s Obama.” Any number of Republicans in Congress have said they will never vote to increase the debt ceiling, no matter what. Others believe the threat of default is the only way to force President Obama to accept their demands, whether it’s an immediate balanced budget or repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Default advocates are a small minority — 10 to 20 percent of the population,according to a poll conducted in the first week of October by AP/GFK – although at present they appear to be the tail wagging the G.O.P. dog. But most Republicans probably share the view that the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, expressed after the 2011 debt showdown.“I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he told The Washington Post. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.”

But hostages sometimes die in the crossfire.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

Tempting to be even more cynical...

"There is no political ideology among decayed ruling elites, despite choreographed debates and elaborate political theater. It is, as it always is at the end, one vast kleptocracy."

Chris Hedges (today)

[lektrode]

Re: GOP: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

Tempting to be even more cynical...

"There is no political ideology among decayed ruling elites, despite choreographed debates and elaborate political theater. It is, as it always is at the end, one vast kleptocracy."

Chris Hedges (today)

as the ship starts to list, the rats all start heading for the exits/lifeboats = preservation of the status quo, no matter what the cost.

else we'd have some rational debate on energy policy, for one.
and cant even get to that...