skippy the bush kangaroo

Sunday, January 06, 2008

george won't

george will doesn't heart huckabee...or edwards, or populists in general. (in fact, we are beginning to suspect that george doesn't heart the populace in genearal!) he writes over at realclearpolitics:

[huckabee] and john edwards, flaunting their histrionic humility in order to promote their curdled populism, hawked strikingly similar messages in iowa, encouraging self-pity and economic hypochondria. edwards and huckabee lament a shrinking middle class. well.

economist stephen rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of americans are in that category than in 1979 -- because the percentage of americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. "so," rose says, "the entire 'decline' of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder." even as housing values declined in 2007, the net worth of households increased.
huckabee told heavily subsidized iowa -- washington's ethanol enthusiasm has farm values and incomes soaring -- that americans striving to rise are "pushed down every time they try by their own government." edwards, synthetic candidate of theatrical bitterness on behalf of america's crushed, groaning majority, says the rich have an "iron-fisted grip" on democracy and a "stranglehold" on the economy. strangely, these fists have imposed a tax code that makes the top 1 percent of earners pay 39 percent of all income tax revenues, the top 5 percent pay 60 percent, and the bottom 50 percent pay only 3 percent.
first of all, aside from not making clear if the middle class definition of $30 to $100k is 1979 dollars or 2007 dollars, george fails to point out that the poverty level today for a family of 4 is $20,650/year. so the middle class defining watermark is not even twice the poverty level? that's a pretty darn poor middle class!

but worse, will trots out that old standby, the logical fallacy of comparing the percentage of human beings to the percentage of tax revenues paid. this would make sense if the irs demanded pounds of flesh in payment. but no matter what you think of the internal revenue service, they are not shylocks.

the tax code demands a percentage of incomes for payment, not a percentage of human beings.

again, will fails to point out the actual numbers involved with the incomes of the people he cites. edward wolf, professor of economics at new york university and author of top heavy: the increasing inequality of wealth in america and what can be done about it, tells us that the top 1 percent who pays (as george will points out) 39% of the tax revenue, also happens to own 38 percent of all wealth in the country.

and the top 5% of tax payers, who pay 60% of all tax revenues, actually own 59% of the wealth in this country.

so will goes on, dumping on, and lumping together, huckabee and edwards:

the way to achieve edwards' and huckabee's populist goal of reducing the role of "special interests," meaning money, in government is to reduce the role of government in distributing money.
[ed. note: hah? does george honestly believe that special interests wouldn't then influence private corporations if they are the distribution system for money? come on, george, private corporations are special interests! unless you're hoping that the actual definition of "special interest" would then disappear and everyone would just magically forget about the whole mess, you're not really fixing the problem, bubbi!]

but populists want to sharply increase that role by expanding the regulatory state's reach and enlarging its agenda of determining the distribution of wealth. populists, who are slow learners, cannot comprehend this iron law: concentrate power in washington and you increase the power of interests whose representatives are concentrated there.

barack obama, who might be mercifully closing the clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in american politics. he is the un-edwards and un-huckabee -- an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic "fights" against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.
pardon our recrudescence, but we have to mention that george manages to paint huckabee as a left-wing cartoon. nice trick, considering the huckster just won the iowa repubbb primary!

but as we told you before, the gop establishment is deathly afraid of the monster they've created.

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posted by skippy at 12:39 PM |

4 Comments:

A belated "Happy New Year!" to you and your readers, skippy. This year we can all do better than we have been doing. And if we keep building on what we already have our numbers (and the fact that we deal in reality) will easily overcome the right wing echo chamber's lies and propaganda.

Start the new year off kicking Blogtopia (y!sctp) up a notch by Celebrating Blogroll Amnesty Day! BAM!
commented by Blogger Connecticut Man1, 2:13 PM PST  
commented by Blogger Connecticut Man1, 2:17 PM PST  
I just watched the repeat of the Repub debate and heard their take on health (care) insurance. Basically they said if you can find insurance that costs, say, $11,000 per year then you'll be all set, so the markets need to compete. Uh, yeah, I take home $1500 per month, so I'll be sure to grab that insurance for $1000 per month and live on the remaining $500.
commented by Blogger Marylou, 5:27 PM PST  
Hi Skippy. I don't thing old George has anything to worry about. If he wins, Huckabee's populism will go the way of compassionate conservatism. If he's not disingenuous about it from the beginning, they'll get ahold of him and use him as a Bush-type front man for a new Cheney-type character, probably Rudy. No way the republican money interests will let a real religious person get ahold of all that power.
commented by Blogger Ellen Beth, 5:22 AM PST  

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