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Back in 2002, the Rhode Island General Assembly, in its infinite wisdom, passed what is known as the alternative flat tax option. This special tax break went into effect in 2006, and is essentially a reduction of the top marginal income tax rate for the state. Year after year this flat tax rate gets smaller and will eventually cap out at 5.5% in tax year 2011.
Now, I know what some of you are going to say, any reduction in taxes is a good thing because Rhode Island’s taxes are just too damn high. While Rhode Island’s taxes may seem high, it’s not entirely true and depends on the specific taxes. More importantly, however, while anyone can use the alternative flat tax to determine their tax liability to the state, the benefits of the alternative flat tax flow almost exclusively to those Rhode Island tax filers making over $200,000 a year. This special tax cut only benefits less than 1/2 of 1% of those filing Rhode Island personal income tax forms. Of the 490,975 tax forms filed in 2007, only 2,267 of them were flat tax forms.
Even more egregious, almost 2/3 (63%) of the people benefiting from the alternative flat tax live out-of-state - there were 1,429 of them in tax year 2007. So not only are we lowering taxes on those who are most able to pay while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet during the recession, 2/3 of the benefit crosses the border into Massachusetts and Connecticut. Only 838 Rhode Island residents benefited from the alternative flat tax in 2007.
Now let’s look at the escalating cost of the alternative flat tax option. In tax year 2007, the reduced personal income tax revenue cost the state $14.1 million. This means that each of the 2,267 flat tax filers, who each make more than $200,000 annually, received an average tax cut of over $6,200. As the flat tax rate decreases, more individual tax filers will benefit from the reduced tax rate and will use the flat tax option, and the state will lose even more money. This will happen year after year, until 2010 when the state will lose over $77 million every year. As a reminder, about 2/3 of this money (around $50 million starting in 2011) will leave the state.
The alternative flat tax is expensive, and it is a growing problem. It benefits only a handful of Rhode Island residents while 2/3 of the tax cut leaves the state. So, let me ask a simple question… Why did the state “spend” $14.1 million for the benefit of the wealthiest 838 Rhode Island residents?
We are at a critical point for Rhode Island’s fiscal health. The newest update from the Revenue Estimating Conference shows Rhode Island’s deficit grew by $200 million to a total deficit of $590 million for FY 2010. Since 2004, the structural deficit has grown each year, despite the repeated claim that tax cuts will generate jobs and grow our economy. The Governor has presented his budget designed to handicap Obama’s stimulus plan, the House and Senate Finance Committees are debating it now, and it is assumed that the vote will happen sometime in mid-June.
Please join us for a discussion about Rhode Island’s current budget deficit and taxation policy. The current fiscal crisis will be examined with regard to recently enacted budget and taxation policies and the current economic recession. Components of the Governor’s Fiscal Year 2010 budget will be explained and a responsible alternative will be presented to ameliorate the ongoing structural deficit.
Ample time will be provided for a question and answer period. After the presentation, attendees will be encouraged to contact their state Representatives and Senators.
For your convenience, the budget presentation will be given in six different locations around the state. Space is limited, however, so please RSVP by clicking the links below.
Monday, June 1st - 6:30-8pm - RSVP Richmond Senior Center, 1168 Main Street, Richmond, RI
Tuesday, June 2nd - 6:30-8pm - RSVP
Middletown Public Library, 700 West Main Road, Middletown, RI
Wednesday, June 3rd - 6:30-8pm - RSVP
Harmony Public Library, 195 Putnam Pike, Harmony (Chepachet), RI
Thursday, June 4th - 6:30-8pm - RSVP
Rogers Free Library, 525 Hope Street, Bristol, RI
Tuesday, June 9th - 6:30-8pm - RSVP
Peace Dale Library, 1057 Kingstown Road, Peace Dale, RI
Thursday, June 11th - 6:30-8pm - RSVP
Rochambeau Public Library, 708 Hope Street, Providence, RI
In recent weeks, new revelations about the harsh interrogation and torture of detainees during the Bush administration years have made headlines and stirred controversy. The positions of prominent advocates and opponents on each side are clear. But what do we know about how the American people in general have come to view the use of torture by the U.S. government?
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has been polling Americans on this key question for almost five years. Since 2004, representative samples have been asked, “Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?” The results over this time period have shown only minor fluctuations. The most recent numbers, from last month, reveal that 15% of Americans believe torture is often justified, 34% think it is sometimes justified, 22% consider it rarely justified, and 25% believe torture is never justified. So not only do 49% consider torture justified at least some of the time, fully 71% refuse to rule it out entirely.
Further insight into these numbers can be garnered from a different poll conducted a few months ago, in January 2009. Fox News/Opinion Dynamics asked a national sample of Americans, “Do you think the use of harsh interrogation techniques, including torture, has ever saved American lives since the September 11 (2001) terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?” The results: 45% “Yes” and 41% “No” (with 14% responding ‘Don’t Know”). In other words, almost half of Americans think torture “works.”
BAGHDAD – An American soldier opened fire at a counseling center on a military base Monday, killing five fellow soldiers before being taken into custody, the U.S. command and Pentagon officials said.
Although it was unclear what prompted the shooting, the incident draws attention to the issue of combat stress and morale after six years of war as the mission of the 130,000-strong force transforms to one of training and mentoring the Iraqis.
Attacks on fellow soldiers, known as fraggings, were not uncommon during the Vietnam war but are believed to be rare in Iraq and Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama said in a statement that he was “shocked and deeply saddened” by the report, adding that “my heart goes out to the families and friends” of all those involved “in this horrible tragedy.”
After a meeting with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Obama said he would make sure “that we fully understand what led to this tragedy” and will do everything possible “to ensure that our men and women in uniform are protected as they serve our country so capably and courageously in harm’s way.”
A brief U.S. military statement said the assailant was taken into custody following the 2 p.m. shooting at Camp Liberty, a sprawling U.S. base on the western edge of Baghdad near the city’s international airport. Obama visited an adjacent base last month.
The current economic crisis threatens to be worse than the Great Depression, yet our federal government hasn’t shown any indication that it will thoroughly investigate how it happened and why. Instead, we’ve only been told that our economy will collapse unless we give unprecedented amounts of public money to the very financial markets whose actions have created this crisis. It is unwise to carry on in the same way without fully understanding what occurred in the financial markets to bring us to this outcome.
To this end, we advocate for the authorization of a special prosecutor with full subpoena power to investigate any person or institution that had a major role in creating or exacerbating this crisis. A precedent for this has already been set when in 1932 the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency began the Pecora Investigation to determine the causes of the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
A thorough investigation is necessary to learn the facts in order to guide corrective legislation and to prevent further financial crises. The public has suffered dearly in terms of lost employment, lost retirements, lost homes, lost health care, as well as the staggering sums of money paid to banks instead of being spent for other public needs. These catastrophic losses have occurred to the public even though they have done nothing wrong.
In particular, the following subjects need to be critically examined by a special prosecutor with unrestricted subpoena power:
1) To what extent did the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act by the Gramm-Leach-Billey Act (1999) contribute to the economic crisis?
2) To what extent did the unregulated nature of Credit Default Swaps (CDS) contribute to the crisis? Furthermore, because CDSs are essentially derivative contracts more akin to an insurance policy rather than a financial instrument, should they be regulated according to insurance industry standards?
3) To what extent did members of Congress and/or their family members benefit from the deregulation of derivatives and CDs and did the potential monetary gains influence the method of passage of specific deregulation (the legislation was added to the 11,000 page Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2001 leaving no time for review it before its passage)? Specific individuals to investigate in this regard are: Senators Gramm, Lugar and Ewing.; Larry Summers, then Treasury Secretary, now in the President Obama’s National Economic Council; Alan Greenspan; Arthur Levitt.
4. To what extent has the creation of specific derivatives led to payment avoidance of U.S. taxes? These derivatives should be identified and outlawed.
5. Should a tax be levied on any or all financial instruments in order to assist investment banks in the repayment of public monies granted from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)? Reliable sources estimate that a small 0.1% tax on such instruments could generate about $500 billion each year.
6. Would the direct lending from the federal government through a newly establish consumer lending bank be more fruitful in relieving the credit crisis than giving money to failed banks, at no interest, so the banks can begin loaning money back to the public at an interest rate of their choosing? Moreover, should the banks receiving public funds through TARP be allowed to charge interest on the loans given to the public?
7. Explain where the trillions of dollars of money went which was made each and every year on financial instruments. How could that money have simply vanished, causing a credit crisis which required interest-free public money to correct?
8. Address why, If Larry Summers helped cause this crisis, why is he still on the Obama team?
9. Have any of the sellers of bundled mortgages, derivatives, CDS’s, or other financial instruments committed consumer or banking fraud according to existing laws?
10. Is it possible that a group of financial extremists within the financial industry didn’t intentionally create this crisis so they could profit when the market was going up (i.e. selling derivatives and CDS’s) and then make even more money when the market was in decline?
11. Did the Federal Reserve have any role, specifically through the promotion of banking deregulation, in causing the current crisis?
12. To what extent did Standard & Poors, Moody’s, and other rating agencies engage in fraud and/or other corrupt practices by issuing extremely high ratings (AAA) to extremely risky derivatives and other financial instruments?
13. Restrict the practice of selling hedge funds, short selling, and options trading.
14. Investigate employees of banks receiving TARP funds who were recipients of bonuses.
“In the past, I opposed gay marriage while supporting the idea of civil unions,” Baldacci said in a statement. ”I have come to believe that this is a question of fairness and of equal protection under the law, and that a civil union is not equal to civil marriage.”
There is serious legislative activity to approve gay marriage in DC (where last night the city council voted to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere), New Jersey, New Hampshire and New York.
Also, in California, there’s a state Supreme Court challenge to Prop. 8.
As we wrote this morning, it’s example #457 that we’re long removed from 2004.
Here’s Baldacci’s full statement:
I have followed closely the debate on this issue. I have listened to both sides, as they have presented their arguments during the public hearing and on the floor of the Maine Senate and the House of Representatives. I have read many of the notes and letters sent to my office, and I have weighed my decision carefully. I did not come to this decision lightly or in haste.
I appreciate the tone brought to this debate by both sides of the issue. This is an emotional issue that touches deeply many of our most important ideals and traditions. There are good, earnest and honest people on both sides of the question.
In the past, I opposed gay marriage while supporting the idea of civil unions. I have come to believe that this is a question of fairness and of equal protection under the law, and that a civil union is not equal to civil marriage.
Article I in the Maine Constitution states that ‘no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor be denied the equal protection of the laws, nor be denied the enjoyment of that person’s civil rights or be discriminated against.’
This new law does not force any religion to recognize a marriage that falls outside of its beliefs. It does not require the church to perform any ceremony with which it disagrees. Instead, it reaffirms the separation of Church and State,” Governor Baldacci said. It guarantees that Maine citizens will be treated equally under Maine’s civil marriage laws, and that is the responsibility of government. Even as I sign this important legislation into law, I recognize that this may not be the final word. Just as the Maine Constitution demands that all people are treated equally under the law, it also guarantees that the ultimate political power in the State belongs to the people.
While the good and just people of Maine may determine this issue, my responsibility is to uphold the Constitution and do, as best as possible, what is right. I believe that signing this legislation is the right thing to do.
Health care activists disrupted a Senate Finance Committee hearing Tuesday, standing up one after the other as Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) tried to restore order.
As soon as police escorted one protester out of the room, another would stand up, criticizing the committee for convening a panel of 15 experts and excluding witnesses who support creating a Medicare system for all Americans. About eight were led out of the hearing.
Today, Sunday Loon Watch focuses on former Republican (edit: and now Democratic) Senator Arlen Specter’s interview on Meet the Press.
In the interview, Specter came out clearly and unambiguously against a key part of President Obama’s health care reform plan, the establishment of anoptional public health plan. (Democratic Senator Ben Nelson also doesn’t support the president’s plan.)
In another interesting comment, Specter affirmed his opposition to using reconciliation to pass health care reform, putting the possibility of a filibuster on the table.
Transcript:
MR. GREGORY: It was reported this week that when you met with the president you said, “I will be a loyal Democrat. I support your agenda.” Let me test that on probably one of the most important areas of his agenda, and that’s health care. Would you support health care reform that puts up a government-run public plan to complete with a private plan issued by a private insurance company?
SEN. SPECTER: No. And you misquote me, David. I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat. I did not say that. And last week, after I said I was changing parties, I voted against the budget because the budget has a way to pass health care with a 51 votes, which undermines a basic Senate institution to require 60 votes to impose cloture on, on key issues. But I…
MR. GREGORY: All right, just to be clear, Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal Jonathan Weisman and Greg Hitt reported that when you met with the president you said, “I’m a loyal Democrat,” and, according to people familiar with the White House, “I support your agenda.” So that’s wrong? You didn’t say those things?
SEN. SPECTER: I did not say I’m a loyal Democrat. You know, I read once another mistake in the newspaper, some newspaper.
MR. GREGORY: Let me—I just want to turn, then, to the issue of health care. You would not support a public plan?
SEN. SPECTER: That’s what I said…
MR. GREGORY: OK.
SEN. SPECTER: …and that’s what I meant.
MR. GREGORY: Do you support taxing the value of, the value of employer-provided health care for workers?
SEN. SPECTER: No, I’d be very reluctant to do that. Health care provided by employers, which is deductible for them and not added on as income to the recipient, has been the mainstay of health coverage for millions of Americans, and I’d be very reluctant to abandon that.
MR. GREGORY: So the health care reform you would like to see is what?
SEN. SPECTER: I would, I would like to see all Americans covered. I’ve joined with the Wyden-Bennett plan, has 14 co-sponsors. I would like to see health care which emphasizes exercise and diet and, and makes premiums lower on that basis. I would like to see health care which had very tough prosecution against Medicare and Medicaid fraud, put people in jail as opposed to fines, which are licenses to steal. I would emphasize National Institute of Health research. What better way to reduce the cost of health care than to, than to have—prevent illness? I would support advanced directives, where we find so much of medical care is paid for the in the last few hours or few days or a person’s life. Not to tell people what to do on their care at that time, but have them, have them think about it. I support programs which improves technology, as the stimulus package has $19 billion. I’ve been in this field for a long time and have a lot of ideas, participated in the president’s task force, and I’m ready to put my shoulder to the wheel to get legislation adopted. But I’m going to take a look at it piece by piece. I’m not committed.
Apparently, Specter doesn’t realize that if he stands in the way of progress on key priorities like health care reform, he could find himself just as unpopular within the Democratic Party as he was in the Republican Party.
He’s a beefy, 41-year-old former Australian army officer who served in Iraq as a top advisor to U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus. He’s one of the counter-insurgency warrior/theorists who designed Petraeus’ successful “surge” of troops into the streets of Baghdad.
But a few days ago, when a congressman asked Kilcullen what the U.S. government should do in Pakistan, the Australian guerrilla fighter sounded like an antiwar protester.
“We need to call off the drones,” Kilcullen said.
In the arid valleys of western Pakistan, the United States is fighting a strange, long-distance war against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their Pakistani allies. Unmanned “drone” airplanes take off from secret runways, seek out suspected terrorists and, with CIA employees at the remote controls, fire missiles to blow them up.
Washington - The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.
The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.
“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
Clearly not. We should be wary of pollsters who phrase their questions like this. A better question might be, “How likely is it for someone who really wants to work to find adaquate employment?” Many of those who are employed, and many of the jobs available, do not provide enough hours for the average person to support him or herself. While it is still possible for most adults to find an undesirable minimum wage job, these are likely not sufficient to support a single adult living on one’s own, or to raise a child with or without a partner. Even if one is lucky enough to be given 40, 50, or 60 hours per week.
In some areas, even these jobs are becoming rare.
The recession is not an imaginary condition. It is not a “doctor’s note” for the lazy to avoid work. It is the economic reality that well-qualified, hard-working people are losing their jobs and cannot find adaquate employment.
Like every town across the nation, south suburban Crestwood tucks a notice into utility bills each summer reassuring residents their drinking water is safe. Village leaders also trumpet the claim in their monthly newsletter, while boasting they offer the cheapest water rates in Cook County.
But those pronouncements hide a troubling reality: For more than two decades, the 11,000 or so residents in this working-class community unknowingly drank tap water contaminated with toxic chemicals linked to cancer and other health problems, a Tribune investigation found.
After 38 years as mayor and 50 years in public office, Crestwood Mayor Chester Stranczek said he plans to give up his post this fall.
Crestwood Mayor Chester Stranczek will be stepping down from his post this fall due to health issues even though he has two years left on his term. Who’s next in Crestwood?
The Republican leader’s legacy includes rebating a portion of his residents’ property taxes, outsourcing most village jobs and building a town where the number of businesses has gone from about 50 to nearly 600 during his tenure. In fact, Stranczek said, the village has little land left to develop.
Stranczek’s son Robert is mayor now, and political power in Crestwood is a portrait in stability. Before Chester retired, he was described in the Daily Southtown as “America’s best small town mayor.” In many ways, Crestwood is a Republican success story, a place where taxes are low despite being situated in one of the most urbanized counties in the United States. The village prides itself on having among the lowest municipal taxes in the country. In the shadow of Chicago, it is a tax haven that Grover Norquist could brag about.
How did Crestwood achieve this? Norquist would be proud of the ways in which the village ignored regulators and endangering the health of its citizens for years. The Illinois EPA informed the village in 1986 that its municipal well had been contaminated by dry cleaning solvents, including the highly toxic chemical vinyl chloride.
Crestwood, a village open for business, had developed a strip mall less than 300 feet from its well. One of the businesses in the strip mall was a dry cleaner.
Given this information from the EPA, local officials might have moved to close the well, or to clean it up.
avoided scrutiny by telling state regulators in 1986 that they would get all of their tap water from Lake Michigan, and would use the well only in an emergency. But records show Crestwood kept drawing well water on a routine basis—relying on it for up to 20 percent of the village’s water supply some months.
The well wasn’t shut off for good until December 2007, after the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency tested the water for the first time in more than 20 years. The agency found not only that the well was still contaminated but that Crestwood had been piping the water, untreated, to residents.
This decision had consequences. Local residents have reported incidences of cancers, including brain tumors and kidney cancers. Now the Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is investigating why this well was used for more than 20 years after regulators brought its dangers to the attention of local officials.
Today, village leaders past and present are quiet as the investigation begins. It is possible that criminal charges will be brought; it is almost certain that afflicted residents will bring civil suits to court in the coming months.
What would have been the cost of remediating the well or bringing water in from another source? Would residents now, with all the information at their disposal, prefer to have had higher water rates over the past twenty years instead of unknown exposure to carcinogens?
Too often, anti-tax advocates fail to disclose the real costs of low tax rates. Perhaps the participants in Fox News Channel’s tea parties could comment on the choice the village of Crestwood made opting to save money over human health.
The “Tea Party” is being held at the state house today. We, along with some like-minded groups, are going to hold a counter-protest. If you are available from 3-6, or part of those hours, you’re welcome to join us!
While the “tea party” is supposedly a grassroots movement, it has been engineered, funded, and supported by rightwing thinktanks (such as FreedomWorks) and corporations (such as Fox News) from the start. This supposed tax protest is effectively protesting the George W. Bush tax structure, if we were to take it at face value. In reality, it’s a thinly veiled anti-Obama, anti-Democratic Party, and anti-Progressive agenda protest.
The media will be there. Show up, and tell them where Rhode Islanders really stand!
A number of people I have spoken with are planning to attend a “tea party” tomorrow, so I thought it might be a good idea to write about this. They are not what they claim to be. They are not “spontaneous” or “grassroots.” They are another corporate-funded campaign to trick people into supporting more cut taxes for the rich.
The idea is supposed to have started on February 19, when Rick Santelli of CNBC “spontaneously” complained about plans (click link for video) to help people avoid foreclosure, saying this is the government “subsidizing the loser’s mortgages.” Santelli called for organizing a “Chicago tea party” against helping people pay their mortgages. But investigators starting finding clues that the on-air rant was not spontaneous, and signs that the campaign was organized by the right-wing, corporate-funded Freedomworks . According to a March 2 New York Times story,
“Mr. Santelli’s televised commentary appeared spontaneous to viewers. However, the Internet domain name ChicagoTeaParty.com was registered in August 2008 — well before his commentary — but not used until afterwards.”
The events have been widely promoted by corporate-funded conservative PR professionals who specialize in “astroturf.” This is a term for the use of money to create an appearance of widespread “grassroots” support. Currently the corporate-funded conservative lobbying groups Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity, are organizing the events and conservative media including talk radio and FOX News are widely promoting them. Supportappears to be coming from Koch Industries, the largest privately-owned company in the country. According to the Think Progress blog post, Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping To Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests,
“This type of corporate ‘astroturfing‘ is nothing new to either organization. While working to promote Social Security privatization, Freedom Works was caught planting one of its operatives as a “single mom” to ask questions to President Bush in a town hall on the subject. Last year, the Wall Street Journal exposed Freedom Works for similarly building “amateur-looking” websites to promote the lobbying interests of Dick Armey …
Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, [a] former partner in the lobbying firm Century Strategies. The group is funded by Koch family foundations – a family whose wealth is derived from the oil industry. Indeed Americans for Prosperity has coordinated pro-drilling ‘grassroots‘ events around the country.”
The “tea parties” are promoted as a “grassroots uprising” against “high taxes.” Tea stands for “Taxes Enough Already.” However, 95% of Americans will received a tax cut in the next year if the upcoming Obama budget passes. Only Americans with incomes above $250,000 will receive a small tax increase – and even then their taxes will be much lower than almost any time in the last 80 or so years. This increase on the top incomes will help pay for some of the Republican-caused economic damage as well as reduce the budget deficits that the country has faced ever since the same income group received tax cuts after George W. Bush was elected. (This is similar to the tax increase in first Clinton budget that led to the great economy of the 1990s and large budget surpluses.)
The other complaint from tea party organizers is that President Obama is “spending too much.” The increased spending in the stimulus package and upcoming budget funds education, unemployment checks, efforts to ward off foreclosures and other programs designed to help bring us out of the recession and provide jobs. These are programs that benefit regular people instead of big corporations and the rich.
So regular people who go to these corporate-organized tea parties are asking the government to undo their own tax cuts and reduce their own government services in order to keep taxes low for the very rich. I wonder if people have really thought this through?
This is a column about Republicans — and I’m not sure I should even be writing it.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
Today’s G.O.P. is, after all, very much a minority party. It retains some limited ability to obstruct the Democrats, but has no ability to make or even significantly shape policy.
Beyond that, Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats.
But here’s the thing: the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. And they could return to power if the Democrats stumble. So it behooves us to look closely at the state of what is, after all, one of our nation’s two great political parties.
One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the “tea parties” that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties — antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.
But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.
Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.
But the charge of socialism is being thrown around only because “liberal” doesn’t seem to carry the punch it used to. And if you go back just a few years, you find top Republican figures making equally bizarre claims about what liberals were up to. Remember when Karl Rove declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to the 9/11 terrorists?
Then there are the claims made at some recent tea-party events that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in America, which follow on earlier claims that he is a secret Muslim. Crazy stuff — but nowhere near as crazy as the claims, during the last Democratic administration, that the Clintons were murderers, claims that were supported by a campaign of innuendo on the part of big-league conservative media outlets and figures, especially Rush Limbaugh.
Speaking of Mr. Limbaugh: the most impressive thing about his role right now is the fealty he is able to demand from the rest of the right. The abject apologies he has extracted from Republican politicians who briefly dared to criticize him have been right out of Stalinist show trials. But while it’s new to have a talk-radio host in that role, ferocious party discipline has been the norm since the 1990s, when Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, became known as “The Hammer” in part because of the way he took political retribution on opponents.
Going back to those tea parties, Mr. DeLay, a fierce opponent of the theory of evolution — he famously suggested that the teaching of evolution led to the Columbine school massacre — also foreshadowed the denunciations of evolution that have emerged at some of the parties.
Last but not least: it turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.
But that’s nothing new, and AstroTurf has worked well for Republicans in the past. The most notable example was the “spontaneous” riot back in 2000 — actually orchestrated by G.O.P. strategists — that shut down the presidential vote recount in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.
So what’s the implication of the fact that Republicans are refusing to grow up, the fact that they are still behaving the same way they did when history seemed to be on their side? I’d say that it’s good for Democrats, at least in the short run — but it’s bad for the country.
For now, the Obama administration gains a substantial advantage from the fact that it has no credible opposition, especially on economic policy, where the Republicans seem particularly clueless.
But as I said, the G.O.P. remains one of America’s great parties, and events could still put that party back in power. We can only hope that Republicans have moved on by the time that happens.
