Easy Times (9/13/10)

More and more Democrats are going on the public record as acknowledging that universal tax rate reductions lead to REAL economic growth and job creation, and universal tax rate increases lead to the opposite.  This leads to the next logical question for these dragged-kicking-and-screaming-towards-economic-sanity-crats: If tax cuts for the "wealthy" promote job-creation, why just temporarily extend them?  Why not make them permanent?  It really isn't arguble, once you take that first step towards economic policy redemption.

Now do you see why The One is balking at leaving the Bush tax cuts in place?

-Me, four days ago

Now rank & file Donks on their political deathbeds, fully cognizant of having been put there by their extremist Politburo and extremist "some kind of a god," aren't just committing the heresy of conceding the efficacy of Reaganomics, they're actually putting it in a quasi-Gipperesque manifesto:

POLITICO has obtained a draft of a letter from rank-and-file lawmakers to Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer urging them not to let tax rates rise for Americans at the highest income levels.

“We believe in times of economic recovery it makes good sense to maintain things as they are in the short term, to provide families and businesses the certainty required to plan and make sound budget decisions,” the House members write in a letter that was being circulated for signatures on Friday and is expected to be delivered today or Tuesday.

Representatives Jim Matheson (Utah), Glenn Nye (Virginia), Melissa Bean (Illinois) and Gary Peters (Michigan) drafted the letter and are working to gather support, mostly from the moderate Blue Dog and New Democrat coalitions, for at least a temporary extension of the rates for top income earners as well as those in the lower brackets.

There's a great deal of frantic self-interest in this petition, to be sure, but I find myself wondering if there isn't something actually more noble motivating them: the survival of their party.  Once tax rates shoot (back) up next year, whether for everybody or for just the wealthy job-creators, as Barack Obama is determined to ensure, the spectre of another epic economic collapse - this one unblameable on any Republican in or out office, alive or dead, but inescapably and indellibly hung around the chicken neck of The One and what's left of his party - will be a Hooveresque catastrophe that will bury the Obama/Donk "brand" for years, even decades, to come.  This will be completely, absolutely, and utterly unspinnable.  If Barry O is "petulant" about his polling now, a year from now when he's making Harry Truman circa 1952 look popular and George W. Bush circa two years ago look like a freaking rock star, he'll look back at today's low-40s numbers like they were from a golden age.

This draft letter isn't a rebellion, it's an intervention by Dems who are dimly realizing the disaster they helped bring on their party by skipping after this sinister pied piper and are trying to save him in order to at least retain a Democrat Party to come back in.

But they're wasting their time and wood pulp.  Lucifer's a True Believer in Marxism-Alinskyism, and he's never going to deviate from his discredited dogma.  Oh, he's aware of this uprising in his own ranks; that's why he keeps trying to make on ogre of John Boehner for advocating essentially the same thing and "holding economy recovery (that was supposed to have been a done deal with Hogzilla I nineteen months ago) hostage" to spare the rich job-creators the brutal pillaging they deserve.  He knows that next year Speaker Boehner will be pushing through a full restoration of the Bush tax cuts with bipartisan majorities (even after the five dozen or so seats they lose in November) and public acclimation as Obama's economy is in freefall.  It'll be the complete opposite dynamic that gave us TARP and the Obamidency in the first place.  And there he'll be, all by his lonesome, as Senate Dems up in 2012, the '10 bloodbath terrifyingly fresh in their memories, will be acutely disinclined to join his obstructionist suicide pact.

Boehner knows it.  That's why he was able to adopt the pose of sweet reason (dirty, filthy, rotten RINO!!!) and offer to support extending just the middle class rates provided they were in a standalone bill.  The White House has blithered itself so deep into a policy and PR corner that they can't escape their own demogoguery, and Republicans aren't about to throw him a lifeline.

Less than serendipitously, Stone Cold went on Fox yesterday and offered a self-righteously grim 2011 forecast:

But it won't be the fault of George Bush, or John Boehner, or rebel House Donks, or Europe, or Sarah Palin, or Mike Castle, or George Bush.  The "double-dip" recession will be the fault of Barack Obama, and it will have been the intended result of his economic policy.  And every American will know it.

Matheson, Nye, Bean, and Peters may want to try tranquilizer darts, because B.O. is probably not going to undergo deprogramming voluntarily.