BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

I saw the Capitol Steps some years back. One of their songs was 401-K, done to the tune of the Village People's YMCA. But YMCA was in 1978 and it was not that far back when I saw them. They also had a song Hannukah With Monica. That was more around the time that I saw them.

Humor has become more weaponized. I have no idea of none, or some, or all of the CS group were Jewish but it didn't matter because it wasn't the point. I saw it as bringing a date home to a family gathering, how will that go if the date has been on the front page of newspapers?

Similarly, take Lehrer's song about the Boy Scouts. I was a Scout for about three years. I loved the camping and the Merit Badges were a good idea. I got a badge for some library research and then a write-up about the history of St. Paul (I grew up there). Our troop took a tour of a water treatment facility and I believe I wrote up something about what I had learned. It's true that when I was camping a tornado hit, they were a little slow about evacuating us, and lightning struck a tree five feet from our tent before they got us out. I loved it, but yes, I also had no trouble with the Lehrer song.

Lehrer had a song about Werhner von Braun including "Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down. That's not my department says Wernher von Braun". I think von Braun sued him for this or other lyrics but I thought it was funny.

And, of course, 401-K had no political point, or any point, to make. It was clever, and setting it to the tune of YMCA with the singers in costumes resembling the Village People was brilliant.

Humor is less of a pleasure when scoring a political point takes precedence over being funny. Lehrer got it right, as did the Steps.

Nazi Party membership[edit]
Von Braun had an ambivalent and complex relationship with the Nazi Third Reich.^[5] He applied for membership of the Nazi Party on 12 November 1937, and was issued membership number 5,738,692.^[20]:96

How to Collect $1.4 Trillion in Unpaid Taxes

Wealthy Americans are concealing large amounts of income from the I.R.S. There is a straightforward corrective.

In a remarkable 2019 analysis, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that Americans report on their taxes less than half of all income that is not subject to some form of third-party verification like a W-2. Billions of dollars in business profits, rent and royalties are hidden from the government each year. By contrast, more than 95 percent of wage income is reported.

Unreported income is the single largest reason that unpaid federal income taxes may amount to more than $600 billion this year, and more than $7.5 trillion over the next decade. It is a truly staggering sum — more than half of the projected federal deficit over the same period.

The government has a basic obligation to enforce the law and to crack down on this epidemic of tax fraud. The failure to do so means that the burden of paying for public services falls more heavily on wage earners than on business owners, exacerbating economic inequality. The reality of widespread cheating also undermines the legitimacy of a tax system that still relies to a considerable extent on Americans’ good-faith participation.

Proposals to close this “tax gap” often focus on reversing the long-term decline in funding for the I.R.S., allowing the agency to hire more workers and to audit more wealthy taxpayers. But Charles Rossotti, who led the I.R.S. from 1997 to 2002, makes a compelling argument that such an approach is inadequate. Mr. Rossotti says that Congress needs to change the rules, by creating a third-party verification system for business income, too.

The core of Mr. Rossotti’s clever proposal is to obtain that information from banks. Under his plan, the government would require banks to produce an annual account statement totaling inflows and outflows, like the 1099 tax forms that investment firms must provide to their clients.

Individuals would then have the opportunity to reconcile what Mr. Rossotti dubs their “1099New” forms with their reported income on their individual tax returns. One might, for example, assert that a particular deposit was a tax-exempt gift.

Mr. Rossotti has proposed that the I.R.S. require the new forms only for people with taxable income above a generous threshold. A bill including Mr. Rossotti’s plan, introduced by Representative Ro Khanna of California, sets that threshold at $400,000, to minimize the burden on small business. The money is undoubtedly in chasing wealthy tax cheats, but equity argues that business income, like wage income, should be subject to a uniform reporting standard. Small businesses ought to pay their taxes, too.

The proposal would not increase the amount anyone owes in taxes. It would, instead, increase the amount paid in taxes by those who are currently cheating.

It would have the immediate benefit of scaring people into probity.

Mr. Rossotti, together with the Harvard economist Lawrence Summers and the University of Pennsylvania law professor Natasha Sarin, argued in an analysis published in November that investing $100 billion in the I.R.S. over the next decade, for technology and personnel, in combination with better data on business income, would allow the agency to collect up to $1.4 trillion in lawful tax revenue that otherwise would go uncollected.

The logic of such an investment is overwhelming. The government can crack down on crime, improve the equity of taxation — and raise some needed money in the bargain. There are many proposals to raise taxes on the rich. Let’s start by collecting what they already owe.

I think von Braun sued him for this or other lyrics but I thought it was funny.

"I've heard that a lot, that I have to pay all my royalties for the song to him and so on and so forth. No, that's one of those myths. There is no possible way he could have sued me."

IMO making it inconvenient to vote* is a bad thing to do in a first-order sense. I agree that the partisan impact is likely to be small, but legislatures should try to make life better not worse.

* And making it illegal to hand someone a bottle of water while they wait in line.

Josh Kraushaar at National Journal said:

I see in some headlines that the national media is having withdrawl symptoms so is back writing about what Donald Trump says. Personally, the only article I care to see about Donald Trump is his obituary.

He could die in prison and we'd have a win-win.

Democrats in Congress and White House officials are confident that they can pass a more than $3tn economic recovery package funded by tax increases on businesses and the wealthy, even in the absence of Republican support.

Joe Biden, the US president, this week said that his next “major initiative” after enacting this month’s $1.9tn fiscal stimulus bill would be a multibillion-dollar plan to fund long-term infrastructure, education and childcare spending — partially funded by tax increases.

He is expected to lay out more details of the package in a visit to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Wednesday, ahead of negotiations with Capitol Hill that are expected to dominate the political agenda in the next few months.

While the talks on Capitol Hill are expected to take longer than they did in the case of the stimulus bill, Biden administration officials and congressional Democrats believe that sufficient support is emerging within their party to pass the recovery plan without the need for Republican votes, according to people familiar with the matter.

“I feel 90 per cent certainty that come the fall, we will have passed a major infrastructure bill or bills,” said Don Beyer, the chair of the Joint Economic Committee and a Democratic congressman from Virginia.

“Everybody would love for it to be bipartisan — and that’s sincere. But we’re not going to say in the efforts of bipartisanship we’re going to do nothing, or do way too little.”

Meanwhile, hopes of circumventing Republican opposition with unanimous support among Democrats on Capitol Hill have been growing. Joe Manchin, the centrist West Virginia Democratic senator, this week told NBC he would support an “enormous” infrastructure package funded partially with tax increases.

President Biden’s American Rescue Plan is incredibly popular, even among Republican voters. We don’t have details yet on the next big Democratic initiative, but we can expect it to poll well, because we know that it will combine major infrastructure spending with tax hikes on corporations and the rich — which are all popular things.

But like the rescue plan, the next plan probably won’t get a single Republican vote in Congress. Why are elected Republicans still so committed to right-wing economic policies that help the rich while shortchanging the working class?

Fair warning: I’m not going to offer a good answer to this question. The point of today’s article is, instead, to argue for the question’s importance.

I ask why Republicans are “still” committed to right-wing economics because in the past there wasn’t any puzzle about their position.

Like many observers, I used to have a “What’s the matter with Kansas?” model of the G.O.P. That is, like Thomas Frank, the author of the 2004 book with that title, I saw the Republican Party essentially as an enterprise run by and for plutocrats that managed to win elections by playing to the cultural grievances and racial hostility of working-class whites. Bigotry, however, was mainly a show put on for the rubes; the party would go back to its pro-rich priorities as soon as each election was over.

The classic example came when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then followed his victory by announcing that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. (He didn’t.)

But that feels like a long time ago.

Billionaires may have started the Republican Party on its march toward extremism, but they’ve clearly lost control of the forces they conjured up. The G.O.P. can no longer put intolerance back in the closet after each election so as to focus on the real business of tax cuts and deregulation. Instead, the extremists are in charge. Despite a lost election and a violent insurrection, what’s left of the old Republican establishment has abased itself on the altar of Trumpism.

But while power in the Republican Party has shifted almost completely away from the conservative establishment, the party is still committed to an economic ideology of tax and spending cuts. And it’s not obvious why.

When Donald Trump rolled over establishment candidates in 2016, it seemed possible that he would lead his party toward what some political scientists call “Herrenvolk democracy,” policies that are genuinely populist and even egalitarian — but only for members of the right racial and ethnic groups.

South Africa under apartheid worked that way. There were limited gestures toward whites-only populism in the Jim Crow U.S. South. In Europe, France’s National Front combines hostility to immigrants with calls for an expansion of the nation’s already generous welfare state.

As a candidate, Trump often sounded as if he wanted to move in that direction, promising not to cut social benefits and to begin a large infrastructure program. If he had honored those promises, if he had shown any hint of genuine populism, he might still be president. In practice, however, his tax cut and his failed attempt to repeal Obamacare were right out of the standard conservative playbook.

The exception that proves the rule was Trump’s farm policy, which involved huge subsidies to farmers hurt by his trade war, but managed to give almost all of those subsidies to whites. The point is that there was nothing like this on a broader level.

Was Trump’s continuation of unpopular economic policies simply a reflection of his personal ignorance and lack of interest in substance? Events since the election suggest not.

I’ve already mentioned lock-step Republican opposition to Biden’s relief package. Rejection of economic populism is also apparent at the state level. Consider Missouri. One of its senators, Josh Hawley, has declared that Republicans must be “a working-class party, not a Wall Street party.” Yet Republicans in the state’s legislature just blocked funding for an expansion in Medicaid that would cost the state very little and has already been approved by a majority of voters.

Or consider West Virginia, where another unfulfilled Trump promise, to revive the coal industry, resonated with voters. Coal isn’t coming back; so the state’s Republican governor is proposing to boost the economy by … eliminating income taxes. This echoes the failed Kansas tax cut experiment a few years ago. Why imagine it would work any better in Appalachia?

So what’s going on? I suspect that the absence of true populism on the right has a lot to do with the closing of the right-wing mind: the conservative establishment may have lost power, but its apparatchiks are still the only people in the G.O.P. who know anything about policy. And big money may still buy influence even in a party whose energy comes mainly from intolerance and hate.

In any case, for now Republican politicians are doing Democrats a big favor, clinging to discredited economic ideas that even their own supporters dislike.

I will try to make a point. I'll start by fully acknowledging Krugman is a smart guy, both generally and specifically in economics. but I think there other people, also smart, who think differently than he does. So it is possible to contest his views and not be a total idiot.

I will start with the stimulus checks to make my point.

I have argued that there was no reason to send me a stimulus check. This was for two reasons. First, I didn't need it. Second, it would not bolster the economy because I wouldn't spend it. But also, the people that would spend it are not the same as the people who need it. And "need it" is a matter of degree. So: Are we sending money because we think the recipients need it? If so, that's a nice thing to do and it would be a nice thing to do even if it did not boost the economy. If we are sending money because we think people will spend it and boost the economy, then that might be a good idea even if "need it" only weakly applies. So, and this is my first point, we need greater clarity on intentions. Are we trying to be nice to people in need or are we trying to boost the economy? There is an overlap, sure there is an overlap, but they are not the same thing.

Next, and this is also a repeat of what I have said, I would not be happy if the response was "Ok, fine, we won't send anything to Ken we will just use it to reduce the balance on someone's loan". Whose loan, and why? And I am still waiting to hear the designers of this loan program explain why no one realized that if you lend someone $20,000 every year for four years then that person will be $80,000 in debt. "Who would have thunk?" seems to be the attitude.

A further point regards having to choose. An (imperfect) illustration: When I was 14 I had hopes of buying a convertible when I was 15. When I was 15 I bought a coupe. I still liked convertibles, but I bought a coupe.
I ask: Has Krugman (or someone who thinks as he does) ever listed maybe three, or maybe five or ten, programs that he believed would all be very much worth doing but then said "But obviously we cannot afford to fully fund all of these programs and here are the compromises that I believe we should make"?
I assume (just because I find it hard to believe otherwise) that he does not think that any program that has merit should be fully funded. Surely he thinks that sometimes, even though all programs on a list of programs are very desirable, some choices must be made.
He often sounds as if he just thinks that if a program sounds good then we should fund it for whatever it costs, no reason to have any funding priorities as long as the programs have merit. Yes I know national spending is not the same as personal spending but still, I bought a coupe and that, to me, seems relevant.

This applies to many things beyond stimulus checks. Our objective is what? And how do we prioritize?

PS After poting this I saw
https://www.washingt...structure-plan/
Indeed this seems to speak of how to pay for what. The right idea, I think.

https://www.nytimes....mic-rescue.html (January 27, 2021)

President Biden is proposing a large relief package to deal with the continuing fallout from the coronavirus. The package is expansive, as it should be. But it is, predictably, facing demands that it be scaled back. Which, if any, of these demands have some validity?

We can discount opposition from Republican leaders who have suddenly decided, after years of enabling deficits under Trump, that federal debt is a terrible thing. We’ve seen this movie before, during the Obama years: Republicans oppose economic aid not because they believe it will fail but because they fear it might succeed, both helping Democrats’ political prospects and legitimizing an expanded role for government.

But there are also some good-faith objections to parts of the Biden proposal, coming from Democrats like Joe Manchin and progressive economic commentators like Larry Summers. What these commentators object to, mainly, are plans for broadly distributed “stimulus checks” (they aren’t checks and they aren’t stimulus, but never mind): payments of $1400 to many families.

I’m posting this note to explain why I believe that these objections are wrong. To be more precise, I’d argue that these critics are giving the right answer to the wrong question.

Let’s start from common ground: The main purpose of the proposed plan isn’t stimulus, it’s disaster relief. The U.S. economy will remain depressed as long as the pandemic is rampant, so the goal is to help those parts of our society hit hard by the constrained economy to make it through with minimum damage. This includes families with unemployed workers, state and local governments that can’t run deficits and are taking a financial hit, and businesses hurt by lockdown.

The core of the package, then, is aid to these afflicted groups — enhanced unemployment benefits, aid to state and local governments, and business financial relief. And these things, along with specific pandemic and vaccine funding, account for most of the proposed outlays.

The controversial part is those broad-based grants to families, many of which would go to Americans who are doing OK. And the critics are right to say that many of those who would receive payment wouldn’t need the money.

Where they go wrong is in assuming that the stimulus checks (I’ll call them that, since everyone else does) are in competition with the other parts of the package.

The fact is that the U.S. government is not financially constrained. It has no trouble borrowing, and borrowing is very cheap, with the 10-year interest rate barely above one percent.

This interest rate is far below the economy’s expected growth rate. The Congressional Budget Office expects the dollar value of potential GDP — output at full employment — to grow at an annual rate of 3.7 percent over the next decade. What this means is that borrowing now will not store up big burdens for the future: Any debt we incur will tend to melt away as a share of GDP over time.

So there isn’t a relevant dollar limit on the amount we can spend on economic rescue. The constraints are, instead, political: The crucial thing is to build enough support for aid to those who do need it.

And stimulus checks would help build that support, for two reasons.

One is that the checks would play a useful role. Unemployment benefits won’t reach everyone hurt by the pandemic, so some of the outlays on broad payments would reach people who need help. They wouldn’t be as well targeted as other aid, but again, money is not the constraint here.

The other is that stimulus checks are both very popular and something Democrats have promised. So why not honor that promise and do something that builds support for all the measures in the rescue package?

Put it this way: Given the economic and political situation we’re in, stimulus checks are an “and,” not an “or.” They’re complementary to other emergency relief, not in competition with it.

What about concerns that we’ll end up providing too much aid, and that it will be inflationary?

I’m actually an optimist about near-term economic prospects. There’s a quite good chance that the economy will come roaring back late this year, once vaccinations have produced herd immunity and Americans can resume normal life. If and when that happens, the economy won’t need whatever stimulus the rescue package is still providing.

But so what? We’ll be coming out of the pandemic with inflation still below the Fed’s target, and it would do little harm to overshoot that target and run the economy hot, leading to a bit of excess inflation — and a bit is all that would happen, because inflation responds slowly to economic conditions. If the boom gets big enough and goes on long enough that inflation actually starts to look like a concern, the Fed can always rein it in by modestly raising interest rates.

We need to remember the lesson of the 2009 stimulus: The risks of doing too little are much bigger than the risks of doing too much. Do too little and you probably won’t get a second chance; do too much and the Fed can easily contain any pickup in inflation.

So please, don’t nitpick this plan. Not every dollar has to be spent in the best possible way. Speed, simplicity and broad support, not purity, are of the essence.

U.S. President Joe Biden just rolled out his own version of FDR’s New Deal: a $2.25 trillion infrastructure package. Unveiled on Wednesday, the “American Job Plan” is being billed as the most sweeping economic investment since the original U.S. space program. In part, it’s aimed at propping up the country’s historically underfunded and largely disintegrating infrastructure. The White House plans to fund the bill by taking back some of the tax cuts Republicans gave corporations and the rich four years ago. Much like his Covid-19 rescue bill, the plan faces a narrow path through Congress. Garnering Republican support in either the House or Senate, both of which Democrats control by tiny margins, will be difficult. Even corralling moderate and progressive Democrats will be a challenge. From electric vehicle support to clean water, here’swhat else is in the massive proposal.

So to the extent that stimulus checks are not as well targeted as everyone might like, they are politically popular which is a big part of getting the votes in Congress to make policy.