Budget talks: This is getting nasty

I'm not sure that deregulation = lax enforcement.

Enron was fraud on a massive scale.

But, even beyond regulators, their own accounting firms and banking partners should have blown the whistle on them.

The accounting firms & banks are also regulated, and they failed to do their duty.

Their trading partners should have also been more diligent. You don't enter into a trade unless you understand it and know the person on the other end can cover it.

 

Enron Loophole allowed Enron traders to operate in a completely unregulated environment.

Clearly lax enforcement helped to create the mess.

 

Poll stuff

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/us/politics/05poll.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimespolitics&seid=auto

Approval rate of how different sectors handled the debt crisis

Congressional Republicans 28 percent
Congressional Democrats 34 percents
Obama 46 percent

And this nugget:

"Sixty-three percent of those polled said that they support raising taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year, as President Obama has sought to do — including majorities of Democrats (80 percent), independents (61 percent) and Republicans (52 percent)."

Nearly a supermajority.

 

But you'll put the brakes on all this job creation!

 

In tough economic times, you could get 50 percent of any group to support ritualistic murder of animals if they thought it would make things easier on them. All those dead cats might make people feel better, but it's not a solution.

 

So, you're trying to tell me that when people were asked if they'd prefer to have their services cut, or have someone else pay higher taxes, they chose higher taxes on other folks?

I'm shocked.

I also love how you'll all jump on Print or someone else when they site majority opinion on various topics.

Is majority opinion all that matters or not?

 

President Obama needed any more indication of how much his public support has eroded, he need look no further than a recent memorandum of sorts published in the New York Times by former President Bill Clinton’s pollster, Stanley Greenberg. Listen to Greenberg, whose progressive polling firm partners with Clinton strategist James Carville, advise Obama and Democrats on what his latest round of polls and focus groups reveal are their only hope to survive politically, given the current reality:

•“Voters in the developed world are turning away from liberals and progressives in general.”
•“Voters feel ever more estranged from government—and they associate Democrats mainly with government.”
•“If they are to win trust, and votes, Democrats must show they are as determined as the Tea Party movement to change the rules of the budget game."
•“This distrust of government and politicians is unfolding as a full-blown crisis of legitimacy [and] sidelines Democrats."
•Greenberg says that his public opinion research now reveals that voters believe, “Government rushes to help the irresponsible and does little for the responsible."
•To win, Democrats must “advocate policies that would control the borders and address problems of workers,” and voters want to “see strong enforcement at the border and in the workplace, and the expulsion of troublesome undocumented immigrants."
•“Finally, progressives have to be serious about reducing the country’s long-term deficits” because “the deficit matters to people and has real meaning and consequences.”
To recap, after analyzing his reams of public opinion research, President Clinton’s pollster just advised the most progressive President in American history to mimic the Tea Party’s resolve, stop government from rewarding the irresponsible over the responsible, crack down on illegal immigration and get tough on border enforcement, stop illegal immigrants from being hired over legal citizens, and deport violent or law-breaking illegal immigrants, and to top it all off, Obama and the Democrats should stop the government’s profligate spending spree and bring down deficits.

In sum, to have any shot of surviving the political onslaught of the rage roiling in the land, the leftist pollster, writing in the New York Times, has just pleaded with Obama to morph himself into a Tea Party conservative.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=45290&s=rcme

 

Larry Sabato tweeted today that if Republicans could choose the date for the next Presidential election, it would be tomorrow.

 

The Debt Crisis Is Another Example Of Progressive Politics' Failure
Voters like Democratic ideas and policy proposals, notes Greenberg, and on a wide range of issues, the public prefers Democratic positions to Republican ones. The problem is that they don’t think the Democrats can or will make their ideas work. The rhetoric inspires; the reality disappoints.

"Government operates by the wrong values and rules, for the wrong people and purposes, the Americans I’ve surveyed believe. Government rushes to help the irresponsible and does little for the responsible. Wall Street lobbyists govern, not Main Street voters. Vexingly, this promotes both national and middle-class decline yet cannot be moved by conventional democratic politics. Lost jobs, soaring spending and crippling debt make America ever weaker, unable to meet its basic obligations to educate and protect its citizens. Yet politicians take care of themselves and party interests, while government grows remote and unresponsive, leaving people feeling powerless."

Greenberg is right to call this a crisis of legitimacy for liberal and progressive thought. A strong and active federal government is the cornerstone of progressive politics. If voters lose faith in the power of more government to better their lives, the progressive era has come to an end.

The progressive, administrative regulatory state and more broadly the technocratic and professional intelligentsia who operate it sold themselves to the public as an honest umpire in charge of American life. No more corrupt urban bosses robbing city hall to feather their nests, they said. No more robber barons of the Gilded Age buying and selling legislatures and congresses.

Instead, we would have government by philosopher kings, or at least by incorruptible credentialed bureaucrats. Alabaster towers of objectivity such as the FCC, the FDA, the EPA, the FEC and so many more would take politics out of government and replace it with disinterested administration. Honest professionals would administer fair laws without fear or favor, putting the general interest first, and keeping the special interests at arm’s length. The government would serve the middle class, and the middle class would thrive.

That was the theory; as Greenberg eloquently tells us, fewer and fewer voters believe it describes the actual government in our actual world.

The next questions for Democrats are obvious: what is the cause of this problem and how can it be treated?

Greenberg’s answer is a more sophisticated and comprehensive version of a classic progressive idea. It is not simply, Greenberg points out, that special interests fight progressive initiatives; special interests have actually managed to subvert the institutions of the government itself. The progressive state has been taken captive by those it was supposed to keep in check. A growing section of the American population wants to think and act for itself, without the guidance of the graduates of ivy league colleges and blue chip graduate programs.

The fight for limited government that animates so many Americans today isn’t a reaction against the abuses and failures of government. It is a fight to break the power of a credentialed elite that believe themselves entitled by talent to a greater say in the nation’s affairs than people who scored lower on standardized tests and studied business administration in cheap junior colleges rather than political sciences in expensive ones.

In this new progressive era, the hierarchy of American adult life came to look more and more like the opposite of the social hierarchy in a typical high school. There, the unpopular and awkward smart kids were marginalized by the jocks and the cheerleaders. In adulthood the nerds ruled the roost and the ex-jocks pumped gas. Or if they sold cars or developed real estate, the nerds looked at them as if they pumped gas.

One way of encapsulating the aims of people drawn to figures like Sarah Palin is to say that these are people who want adult America to look more like high school, with intellect slightly less highly regarded and rewarded, and people smarts and character counting for more. There might have been a time when the regular kids were in awe of the special knowledge of the brainiacs, but the serial policy failures of recent years have dramatically eroded the prestige of the smart kids.

To understand the populist anger that seethes in a significant portion of the electorate (not, I think, a majority, but a group large enough that it’s hard to build a stable majority without at least a fair share of them), policy wonks and political intellectuals need to go back to those dark adolescent days and think about the resentment and anger they sometimes felt when the social hierarchy seemed hostile and unfair. Think about that resentment slowly ripening and deepening for decades or more.

Think about it tied to a sense of economic grievance and compounded by the (perceived at least) serial failures of brainiac policy on matters like immigration, health care, multiculturalism and trade. This anger feeds the energy that a Sarah Palin is able to tap; it is part of why the jocks and cheerleaders on Fox News so consistently outdraw the nerds on CNN—to say nothing of PBS.

This is the new Jacksonian surge, and progressives will have to dig deeper than even Stanley Greenberg has yet done to figure out how to come to terms with it.

Read more: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/08/02/the-progressive-crisis/#ixzz1U6vHBm00

 

I don't like it when the talking heads on MSNBC or Fox News cite polls, but I think you're oversimplifying the tax issue.

Sure there are probably people who only see it as sticking somebody else with the bill, but there are plenty of people who think the rich should pay more, even the rich.

 

Of course $250,000 a year in income doesn't necessarily mean you're rich.