A Humungus Promise

I feel the need to apologize to you all. I've just looked back at the anemic offering on this page over the first three quarters of the year, and I'm saddened. Yes, because my well of creativity seems to have run low and for a time, life lost its charm. But I'm saddened more so because the previous two posts have been utterly humorless screeds about politics, which nobody comes here to read, and about which, to be honest, I have a significantly diminishing interest/patience.

So starting today, I promise not to waste anyone's time with idle teeth gnashing about any boot-licking snollygosters. From now on, we'll return to exploring the humor of the apocalypse together. I can't promise much more frequency in posting, but I'll try to make up for lack of quantity with higher quality. Dogs of War deserve better.

So as a bit of penance, I have a little morsel for you. It's likely that nobody will get as much enjoyment from this as me, but I nearly peed my little Humungus pants laughing when I received this in the mail:

 Of course you want me back. I understand your pain. We've all lost somebody we loved. But we do it my way! My way.

And so the metamorphosis continues.

American Fifth Column

So any Dogs of War who may lurk around my Facebook page may have already seen most of this post, but I feel it bears repeating. And I know you probably hate people telling you to eat your vegetables, but read it again. It'll be good for you. 

I made a joke comparing the Republican efforts to shutdown the government to a famous Civil War attack during the battle of Gettysburg called Pickett's Charge. The attack is named for Maj. General George Pickett, who was ordered to lead his men -- after two days of fighting -- in a charge on the center of the Union lines, an act that required running nearly a mile across open farm fields under a constant barrage of cannon and musket fire. It ended poorly for Pickett and his men. 

After I made this comparison, a hardcore Tea Partier friend of mine made a comment about how they should just let the government stay shut down and save the taxpayers a few trillion dollars. Which was so short-sighted and lacking in factual basis, he needed to be educated aggressively. Which I did. 

This won't save anybody trillions. 'Discretionary spending', the portion of the government funding that will be affected by the shutdown, in 2011 (the quickest figures I could find at CBO's site) was $1.3 trillion, which was 36% of the total budget. But since Congress already passed a resolution to continue funding defense, that cuts another $700 billion off the affected number. So you're down to roughly $600 billion at stake, or 16.7%. But even then, you're still not to the real number, because then you have to add back the 'essential' workers within State, VA, Treasury, DOJ, Intelligence, etc. This means that IF they kept up this charade for a full year, really they might save $300-$400 billion (wild-assed guess). And those are budget numbers for 2011, which was a far worse budget year than 2013 has been, or than 2014 is projected to be. What's the economic trade-off of removing the spending of 800k workers from the system? And by the way, that 800k figure doesn't even count contractors that the government uses to actually complete a lot of its work. 

No, what this is is a circus stunt by mostly freshman and sophomore congressmen and women who came to DC in 2010/12 with the stated goal of shutting down the government. Take a look at a few sample headlines and their dates:

"Government Shutdown Opposed By Americans in Poll Faulting Cuts." Washington Post, March 2011.
"Republicans Flirt With Another Government Shutdown Threat Over Budget." Daily Kos, March 2012.
"Government Shutdown on the Horizon?" Politico, April 2012.

 They couldn't be happier about their little coup, because for them, the shutdown is the end in itself. Mission accomplished. As such, it is a short-term tactical victory for a sliver of their caucus that won't accomplish any strategic objective, which is what the Tea Party has been about since the beginning. They are less a theory of governance than a barely-intelligible manifestation of emotion. Tea Partiers don't want to govern, they just want to dump tea into the harbor. They're a protest movement in much the same way the OWS movement was a protest. Only they have billionaire backers paying to legitimize them and keep them acting as though they think thoughts.

Meanwhile, back in the Tea Party caucus meeting...

 The way it looks to me, they've been looking for the tactical poison pill that would get the Democrats to dig in their heels hard enough to actually accomplish the shutdown for a couple of years now, as evidenced by their changing goal posts. In the 2011 fight, the headstrong freshmen demanded immediate spending cuts of $100 billion (which leadership later lowered to $61 billion.) Where do they want to cut? Across the board!! Hard to take that low level of thought very seriously. Nobody would be dumb enough to cut that much across the board (he said with a hint of foreshadowing in his voice.) 

In the 2012 fight, they demanded another $19 billion in cuts. But they wanted to be taken seriously, so they decided to only take it from those worthless sinkholes of Democrat profligacy, like transportation, education, and regulation of financial institutions. And just to bolster their Real Americanness, they tried to skim an extra $8 billion from these programs to give to the defense budget.

Then came another chance to shut it down less than a half a year later: the fiscal cliff, in which they did cut straight across the board with the 20% paycut they gave federal workers called the sequestration. They almost had it that time, but they found the Democrats to be too flexible. Exasperated at the lengths they'd gone to only to fall short, these seasoned political veterans asked themselves "What will the president veto at all costs?" Right. His signature piece of legislation that he sacrificed the bulk of his political capital to pass. They finally got it right this time. You may ask why people who hate the government so badly would want to run for office and become part of the government. My suspicion is that they have no desire to improve it. Quite the opposite. They want to be so colossally incompetent that it further erodes peoples' trust in the institution to the point that it collapses. Likely there are a few for whom this means a broader system meltdown and the hastening of Jesus' return, at which time he'll pat them on the head and thank them for screwing it up so bad that only He could clean it up. But it'll be the sinners who burn for it.

My problem with this is the effect it has on government broadly, and the workers in particular, who have chosen that career because they feel it is a noble path to giving service. Tea Partiers might not respect them, but I count many of these public servants as my friends and colleagues. A high percentage are extremely bright and good at doing the job they've been hired to do. If you ask me, they shut down the wrong part of the government. Congress has one job: govern. And they are failing. Furlough them and their staffs without pay. Bar them from coming to work on a volunteer basis. This includes allowing them access to the press corp or anywhere that cameras may be rolling. If they want to continue being circus performers, let them put up a tent in a field somewhere and charge admission to anybody still interested in their antics. Stop allowing them to make decisions that affect the rest of us.

This Week at Clown College

This week under the big top on Capital Hill, leaders of the respective political parties are dueling to out-farce each other in their displays of political theater. POTUS is letting anybody who will listen know that he is inviting dozens of Republican lawmakers to dine with him at the White House, where he will undoubtedly remind them of how badly they lost the election last fall. These highly publicized events are to show The People how hard he is working to reach a compromise, even though I'm not convinced he is. And for the Republican's part, Paul Ryan submitted the Republican's version of a budget yesterday. It should be regarded as noir humor at this point, in part because of what it's provisions would do to the US economy, but mostly because it has no chance of passing.

Let me gaze into my crystal ball and tell you what will happen next. Despite Obama's very showy display of political theater -- last month's whistle-stop tour to take his case to the people and this week's breaking bread with Republican leadership -- the Republican-controlled House will pass some version of this budget just so that they can complain about Obama's and Senate Democrats' refusal to solve the country's fiscal issues. They're not wrong, but they're also not helping. They are not negotiating in good faith. Both parties seem intent on acting like they're trying to solve this, without actually trying to solve it. It's like watching a team of monkeys and a team of clowns play each other in charades.

But why is this budget such a schlocky circus prank? I see four main reasons, none having anything to do with the advisability of the provisions:

1. It repeals The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) outright. What's your pitch on this, House Repubs?

"Hey, Senate Democrats. Many of you have fought for universal healthcare coverage your whole careers. Most of you signed on to this legislation back in 2009 at significant political risk to your own careers, and many of your colleagues that voted for this lost their scalps in the aftermath. How about forgetting all the scars from that battle and passing this repeal.

Oh, and Mr. President, as you know, we hate Obamacare. Like, white hot hate. We know it's the signature accomplishment of your presidency, one that will be the foundation of history's treatment of you, and one that you spent the bulk of your post-election war chest of political capital to get passed. We know that you continued to campaign on its successful passage during last fall's election. And we know that by doing so, you won that election. But we'd take it as a great show of political fence-mending and good intentions if you'd follow the Senate's lead and repeal it. Because we hate it so much. Pretty please." 

Any proposal that includes a provision like this was never intended for anything but Red State Viagra. It's totally DOA.

2. It attempts to balance the budget in ten years without lifting a finger to reform Social Security. Everybody knows that the biggest elements of the federal budget are the safety net provisions: Medicare, Medicaid  and Social Security. Republicans will rail on about cutting spending and needing to "get our fiscal house in order." Here they show that they are no different from any politicians dependent on popular support for survival -- that's to say, panderers. Any serious reform to entitlements must include Social Security reform. Yet the R's won't touch it. Why? Because seniors are the only consistently loyal constituency they have left.

3. Lowers the top tax rate to 25%. The argument here will seem like a bit of a re-tread from #1, but remember the fiscal cliff-ocalypse just two months ago, the one that ended with raising the top tax rate by about 4% back to where it was before the Bush-era tax cuts? Well apparently Republicans would not only like to call a do-over. They want to reduce the top tax rate by an additional 10% from the Bush-era tax cut level.

"Let's just put all of the partisan bickering of the last few years behind us and agree that another 10% in the pockets of The Rich will be better for everybody. The sooner we do this, the sooner the free-market leprechauns can emerge from their cells in the evil Socialist redistribution camps and lead us all to our own individual pots of gold at the end of the Reagan Rainbow."

4.  Continues cutting non-defense discretionary budget (i.e., no cutting defense, Social Security, Medicare/caid). Remember the chainsaw budget mechanism called sequestration? How it was supposed to be so crazy, so damaging, that neither party would ever think of letting it go into law? Well they did it anyway. Because STARVE THE BEAST!! Yeah. Well. Ryan's budget proposes to balance the budget on the back of all remaining government programs, programs like veterans benefits, agriculture, national parks, natural resources, FDA, FAA, NIHS, CDC, infrastructure, law enforcement, justice department, commerce, state department. Et cetera, et cetera. And why? Because he's too cowed to even suggest putting Social Security on the table. I mean, discretionary spending as a part of the budget averaged 8.7% of GDP from 1972-2012. In fact, discretionary spending was below that average from 1992 until the 2008 recession. I assume it rose above that average as a result of the Bush-Obama stimulus packages enacted to combat the recession. But the percentage has again dropped below the 40-year average, and is on pace to drop to less than 6% of GDP by 2022. I have many friends that work in the federal government who are taking a 20% pay cut already because of sequestration. Those in essential services like the FBI or Diplomatic Protection don't get to take that time off as compensation. They work for free. Why are salaries at the Clown College immune from the sequestration? Seems to me they are nothing if not discretionary, especially lately. The way current leadership works, we could limit Congress to working two days a week and get better return on labor.

Ryan isn't a deficit hawk. He's not a national debt hawk. He's an ideologue. Ayn Rand is the only founding father that matters to him. Pretty sure he took his oath of office on a copy of Atlas Shrugged. You could argue that the House leadership's decision to appoint him chairman of the Budget Committee was their first, last, and only answer to any budget proposal that POTUS might make.

"We are happy to negotiate, so long as you agree to everything we demand. We're going to balance the budget by lowering taxes for rich people and corporations, cutting healthcare for poor and disabled people, kicking the burden for infrastructure and education down to the state level, and we're gonna do it all without touching Social Security. And we're gonna do it in just ten years. Because leprechauns."

It's like a non-stop political satire sitcom, with plots so ridiculous, even Stanley Kubrick couldn't have conceived of it. Yet this is the reality of our politics right now. Democracy is messy. But it's even messier with intractable ideologues at the controls.