Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. It’s Tuesday, what can I say? Meh…..
It’s been frustrating listening to political discourse on the budget. The debate is so one-sided and the revenue portion is never mentioned. Steve Benen explains the “do nothing” approach to deficit management:
Matt Yglesias had a good item last week, explaining the value of the “do nothing” strategy, whereby policymakers make a massive dent in the deficit, simply by allowing time to elapse.
If you don’t repeal the Affordable Care Act, don’t do a Medicare “doc fix” and don’t extend the Bush tax cuts then the medium-term deficit problem basically goes away. Most people don’t regard this as a credible policy trajectory because they think congress wants to do “doc fixes” and wants to extend at least some of the Bush tax cuts. Which is fine. But it means that all a member of congress needs to do in order to effectuate massive deficit reduction is say “I’m open to voting for doc fixes or ACA repeal or tax cut extensions, but only if they’re offset — I refuse to vote for any measure that increases the deficit.”
Those who claim to care most about the deficit don’t care for this advice at all, probably because they don’t really care about the deficit. These folks — I believe they’re generally known as “congressional Republicans” — prefer to approve policies that make the deficit worse, without even trying to pay for them, just as they did during the Bush era when they added $5 trillion to the debt.
Because our politics are completely ridiculous, no one is talking about this. Instead we are discussing stealing Social Security taxes to pay for more tax cuts for the rich.
The RWNJs are worked up again about William Ayers. Ayers “admitted” that he wrote Obama’s book (don’t ask me why some RWNJs believe this I have no clue).
Recently, Ayers appeared at Montclair State, where he very clearly mocked right-wing conspiracy nuts who have previously credited him with this particular feat. The right took this as an admission that he actually did write Dreams.
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The above transcript, which originally appeared in a World Net Daily post, even includes the phrase “laughter and applause,” which are typical reactions to – wait for it – a joke, or a sarcastic remark. The World Net Daily post goes on to state: “A close reading of the transcript from the Montclair State speech on Friday shows that Ayers again volunteered he was the ghost writer of ‘Dreams,’ even though he had not been asked that question.” It’s too bad the aforementioned “close reading of the transcript” failed to pick up on clear sarcasm and mockery of the writer and like-minded people and publications.
:eyeroll: The RWNJs have gotten so nutty that it’s hard to get worked up about specific examples of insanity amongst the noise.