The Case for a Mac (and it's PC!)

Those of us in the progressive community know that the conventional wisdom is wrong. We know that the country has not rejected the policies of the Obama administration at their core and we also know that America is not fundamentally center-right: not on the economy, not on health care, not on the role of government, not on climate, etc. Unless there has been a huge philosophical shift in the past 2 years, the reason that the Democratic Party has been falling from the favor of the country is the Democratic Party itself. Quite simply, we have been shooting ourselves in the foot.

Admitting that problem is the first step to recovery. We are all responsible for this problem, especially when the same one or two legislators keep on biting us on crucial issues. See, in 2010, there is no enthusiasm for a new wave of politics like there was in 2008. The Tea Party isn't championing any political tide. Rather, this year is all about grumpiness directed at incumbents (aka us). Philosophically, I really don't think the country has changed much from 2008. We just have not delivered. So how can we fix this mess? Simple, buy a Mac.

It's not as if all Democrats have been inert for the past two years. That's hardly the case, as there are plenty of good soldiers to be found. What's interesting though, is how the leadership of the party caters to anybody who's NOT a good soldier and then wonders why poll numbers are dropping. A prime example of this is the stimulus fight. Because the party spent so much energy reducing the stimulus and making it more ineffective for ConservaDems, the stimulus didn't have the effect it should have had. Now it's a dead end. The party can't raise another stimulus bill because the ConservaDems are still there, and even if they could, it might not be popular because of the triangulation in 2009, and all of this feeds into bad economic vibes hurting the party.

But even when it's been bitten before, the White House keeps on supporting the very element of the party that is self-destructive. For the leadership, it seems obvious that continuity and tenure of members is motive numero uno, regardless of how much it will hurt actual progress.

This is where we come in.

Progressives have already issued a giant gut check to the status quo in Pennsylvania and we nearly did it again in Arkansas. By and large, we understand that the problem lies not with our core philosophy, but by bad actors who help to undermine that philosophy. By enforcing the "better" part of the "more and better Democrats" meme, we can ensure that stuff will actually get done in Washington. This effort needs to extend not only to big-name Senate seats, but to local seats in all of your districts. One notable case is in my home state of Massachusetts.

Stephen Lynch, a relatively (until now) safe incumbent from the 9th district, has quite simply, made some terrible decisions. Of course, his votes for the Patriot Act and Iraq War aren't discussed nationally because he serves in the chamber of Congress that a) is bigger and b) can usually pass bills even with the occasional in-party dissenter. This is additionally frustrating because Congressman Lynch is in a blue state where other people are actually getting stuff done. However, we can't let actions like standing up against health care at this time, when the most important problem for the Democrats are the Blue Dogs who continue to block the progressive agenda and hurt everybody's approval in the party. I'm sure all of you know a public official like Stephen Lynch who can hide behind the sheen of being a "Democrat", maybe in a blue state, and maybe hiding behind the anonymity of just being another Congressman.

However, there is an answer for these people. Lynch's answer is a Mac. Mac D'Alessandro, to be specific, who is running an under-the-radar, yet quite effective grassroots campaign against the incumbent. House seats are ripe for picking for grassroots campaigns like Mac's: the 9th district only has 21 cities in it. However, this is where people-powered politics like yours can make a difference. If you know a Stephen Lynch, get yourself a Mac to solve the problem, whether you're in Massachusetts, the West Coast or anywhere else. Quite simply, progressives have to send the massage that the thumb-twiddling dillydallying of the obstacles to a way forward is not acceptable. This has to be a nationwide statement, and the only way to do it is to get Macs all around the country. If you have a Mac, work for him, canvass for him, call for him, and kick the Stephen Lynch out of office. If you don't have a Mac, draft a Mac or become one yourself. But right now, you have to do something for a Mac and fix the Lynch problem that is the only reason the party is not in its finest hour today.

Taking Back Our Country...

From those darn 9/11 responders...

But no, the GOP is oh so patriotic and standing on those good old family values like saying the biggest terrorist attack in the nation's history is just a New York problem.

Pathetic.

Enough

No, seriously, enough. The parodies were funny there for a while on SNL and on the Report and on the Daily Show for the summer and the fall, but it's too much now. Now we're talking about homes and jobs, now we're talking about lives. We don't' want an empty promise that we'll get it right the next Congress, or the next presidential term, or the next decade. No. We want every damn piece of what we wanted right now.

They're telling us that passing some Swiss cheese in the name of health care reform will be a "starter home" for things down the road. But what is going to change? Will "next time" have even bigger majorities? Will "next time" be coming off an amazing grassroots victory across the board? A starter home is fine, if there's an actual plan for adding improvements later. Now all we have are pinkie swears.

Actually, it's worse than that. It's worse than that because there are 44,000 people every year who don't have the option that senators have of just putting it off every year. They cannot wait for our little sweetened improvement projects on our "starter homes". They don't care who's buying Joe Lieberman dinner next week for a vote, because all they care about is getting what they need passed. We would be advised to follow their lead.

Some might say that letting Republicans have the victory of passing nothing and killing the bill without a public option would spell doom for Democratic chances in the 2010 midterms. I wholeheartedly agree. This is exactly why we need to put pressure on Reid and Durbin and the entire caucus to get a public option in the bill: they don't want to be labeled as the people who stood by, the people who did nothing, the people who missed a chance. If it really is their wishes to be reelected that's driving their votes, then let them put their money where their mouths are and see how November of 2010 looks after doing nothing.

Some might say that killing the bill means we have to start all over again. But isn't that what we have to do if we pass a bill, anyways? Not only do we have to wait until the next time senators feel like passing something, but we give confidence to everyone who doesn't need it. We let insurers and PACs get away with a big victory, we let Nelson and Snowe go home free as dealmakers and moderates who got something done, and we let complacency seep into the senate. If we get a public option, then every single conservaDem there is will be painted as somebody who stood in the way of groundbreaking reform. If we miss that chance for better Democrats to try to pass garbage, in the end, none of the three goals of electoral success, better (not necessarily bigger) majorities, and getting something done will come to pass.

Healthcare Update

• I've given Arlen Specter a lot of flak for not being a real Democrat (which he isn't), but this is good stuff from both him and his primary challenger, Rep. Sestak.
• What a great explanation from Christopher Hayes at the Netroots Nation conference of the healthcare proposals
• Speaking of healthcare disinformation, "left of the left"?? What the heck? We already gave up single-payer for political expediency, and now we're being told to stick with breadcrumbs. This is honestly infuriating stuff, being told that we're being "wild" compared to the guy in the lawn chair 6 feet away with a Hitler 'stache painted on Obama's face.

The Dog Days of Summer...

are finally over. Hopefully the August heat has finally let up and I'm happy to report I am back. August, on another note, has been equally troublesome to healthcare reform in the Beltway. There still are people standing up on the good side of things, though. Although he was quite a pain last July on FISA, I'm really impressed with Sen. Rockefeller on the Ed Show recently. Saying companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield can be co-ops isn't exactly an "enforcer" role to take. It's just changing words around so that nothing happens.

Change-up

So, I'm going to try to limit the columnist imitation posts to about 2 per week and try to make this blog more twitteringfacebookoraimupdatish. Speaking of tween talk, during the blogging hiatus, I saw Palin really just talking mavericking it up, yall! with the greatest American, Sean Hannity, somewhere in Real America. Also. They move on to talking about the UPCOMING SCARY SOCIALIST REVOLUTION!!!!!, aka the effects of the stimulus package, and Palin says something to the effect of "If you're in a hole, you just don't dig deeper!". I'm thinking "If you're ignorant of the past 70 years in macroeconomics, you just don't talk about macroeconomics!" Still, up to this point it's just conservative old hat. But all of a sudden, after a quick wave to Putin, Palin says "It just goes against everything you and I have learned in college, Sean." "Mmm..."

Cue cachinnation. The dual images of Sarah and Sean sharing their sweatshirt collections of colleges that they almost graduated from and Palin having the attention span to sit through an actual economics class did it for me. That would be a caption contest frenzy if you think about it. "Well, looks like I win, 3 states to one on the colleges. Unless you count that radio job, Sean. But seriously, New York and California? I mean, what side are you on anyway?"

If you're unfamiliar with the well-documented history of these two, prepare yourselves. We'll start with Hannity, who likes to cruise sans diploma. His dropouts from NYU and Adelphi aren't really the kicker, though. Nine years after his high school graduation, he joined the volunteer radio team at UC Santa Barbara where after less than a year and a sparkling 40 hours of airtime, he was cut for making homophobic remarks and parading an AIDS conspiracy book. He took this amazing new credential by calling himself "the most talked about college radio host in America". Hannity said about his time there, "I was terrible"(what's changed?), but also said it was the left-wing management's fault. It makes you think, does he think he was terrible because he went too far, or becuase he didn't go far enough?

The Barracuda's story, albeit not including a bailout from the ACLU, is still colorful. She chased her childhood dream of becoming a sportscaster by heading off to Honolulu's Hawaii Pacific University...in the business administration program. By spring, she headed off to North Idaho College as a general studies major (a lack of passion is only transcript deep) for two semesters. But things got darker from there when she associated with the dark, anonymous, bored, lying bloggers at her journalism major for a year at the University of Idaho. Disgusted, and apparently nostalgic for nosebleeds, she came to Alaska's Matanuska-Susitna for a semester. Unfortunately, the Republican Party couldn't mail her half a million dollar suitcase in time for the winter, and she went back to UI for graduation and its amazing newspaper and TV stations. Except she didn't really join them. That would be a rub. But hey, I bet she could see the editor from her dorm! After graduation, Palin reportedly attributed her success to saying "thanks but no thanks" to any clubs or associations at any colleges. Of course, we all know that not cutting and running from college, the Oil and Gas commission, your state, and the nation has a pretty liberal bias. So about the economics remark: when she said that the stimulus went against everything she learned in college, what did that mean? Did she pick a particular university, flip a 4-sided coin, mix-and-match, consider each in ideology starting with most conservative? It leaves one to wonder: maybe Palin wasn't lying when she said "Everything I've ever needed to know I learned through sports."

Seriously, this is the problem with conservatives nowadays: hypocrisy. They claim that looking back to the college years is elitism, but then say stuff that uses their education to justify their views. Personally, I don't care what ranking Palin's colleges had. I just think that if she's going to use them to her advantage, they would probably look better as an "I've changed since then" moment than as springboards. Otherwise, floodgates are open.

LOOOONG BREAK....

Ok, I need to slap down suspicions that the break in the blog posts is due to my defection of the party and then hiking on the Appalachian trail, preparing my "bullet box", and electing 40-year-old white supremacists to lead my "young" coalition. Actually, it was more because of my computer's hard drive being severely bugged up and preparing for an outside arrangement for a month that I was gone. As is already clear, I have missed many things since I last left: Obama's Cairo speech, Obama's torture speech, Obama's healthcare speech, the Twitter Iranian revolution, Al Franken's saga to the Senate, Sanford's non-resignation and Palin's real one, strange right-wing violence, the All-Star game, Lance Armstrong, the health care "oh noes!" because of that...that...socialist, Emmy nominations, and Goldman playing the fiddle while America burns, and the deaths at 50 of Michael Jackson and Billy Mays. I have so much more so I'll be blazing away posting all that stuff I should have posted. In the words of Jack Black, I will see you cats on the flip flop later!"

Battle Lines: Massachusetts Taxes

So, there's been a lot of outrage down here about some developments in the past couple of weeks. While the State Senate here was doing its debate on the budget, two crucial issues came up: freezing the corporate tax rate (excise) and increasing the sales tax by 25% to 6.25%. Let's start with the first: apparently it was politically unacceptable for anyone to be raising excise taxes to make up for the state's revenue deficits, so the best that could be managed was a sales tax freeze while sales tax increases were on the table. Simply said, the legislature was perfectly OK with raising the taxes of regular consumers, but when it came to companies, that was perfectly unacceptable.

But first, some background on the situation is warranted. Massachusetts is bound by its Constitution (specifically Article XLIV under the Articles of Amendment) to keep a flat income tax for its citizens, currently 5.3%. The state finds ways to get around this, namely deductions such as the $4,400 personal exemption, no tax status for some people with low income, deductions for renters, the property tax circuit breaker for seniors,and the EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) also for people with low income. All these help make the tax system more progressive because they proportionally affect people with low income less than others.

However, even with these "fixers", taxes such as the sales tax and gas tax push Massachusetts taxes as a whole away from progressivity. For the distribution see this graph via the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. With the recession dominating the political discourse, spending cuts have been made, but more tax revenue is needed to keep the state government functioning. Thus, this should seem like a golden opportunity to fix the regressivity of the tax system.

With the votes by the Senate to protect the rich by voting down an excise tax freeze and to burden the people with a sales tax increase, this opportunity has been lost. The sales tax is extremely regressive (as you can see with another MBPC graph) and it is just another example of something politically expedient that hurts the common man. Nobody is even offering to touch the income tax or to make it more progressive, even though it would seem that that is a much more sensible choice here. Instead, we have a tax that on top of being regressive, continually raises less than expected revenue, which is why institutions like the MBTA are constantly underfunded.

So what's a better approach? The simple approach would seem to outright create tax brackets in the income tax by amending the Massachusetts Constitution. The main problem with this approach, sadly, is the political impossibility of getting such an amendment through the legislature. It would have to pass the legislature twice and then go to a referendum to the voters, after which new rates have to be made, passed again, and sent to the Governor. This would take years after any situation could be addressed with short-term taxes, and that is only if everything goes perfectly politically. Not gunna happen.

However, there are ways to accomplish something very close through other approaches. First, increasing the personal income tax credit would eliminate the income tax for families it puts a real pressure on now. No tax exemption only applies to couples with $16,400 and under, and the threshold increases by a thousand dollars for each child. However, families of four who make $60,000, for example, are still put under a heavy load with the income tax. Eliminating their income tax would make the system more progressive, and its revenue shortfalls could be easily corrected with a higher flat tax rate. Another approach could be to extend the property tax circuit breakers to all people by making eligibility for the circuit breakers more lenient and removing the cap on its usage. This would also make the system more progressive, although it would require some spending cuts or tax increases to make up for the lost revenue. All of these ideas have been proposed by other people, but their voices have been lost in the overall debate.

Overall, this debate signifies the new battle lines between progressives and the Democratic Party. In these times of crisis, there is little temptation to turn to Republicans who simply propose balancing the federal budget nationwide to provide "stimulus" or cutting essential programs while also proposing irresponsible tax cuts. They are the ones who have driven Massachusetts to the deficits that have made this recession even worse for those in the state. The new battle lines are between those of us who favor a progressive approach to taxes and increased revenue and those in the Democratic Party who would prefer doing something politically easy like increasing the sales tax instead of tinkering with the progressive income tax or making tough reforms on corruption, transportation, and pensions.

UPDATE: Here's a step forward, but it's not a leap...Legislation here

H E L L O W O R L D

So...somehow I got this random idea one Friday to start a blog and here I am! If you're one of the three people who actually knew this existed before now, yes, I actually have one blog post up now. Otherwise, welcome to the club. Disclaimer: I don't pretend to be neutral or "center" or "independent" about the stuff I post on here: it's going to be pretty unapologetically progressive with its stances on the issues of the day and age, usually dealing with politics in the state of Massachusetts and the country as a whole. The party has started.