The mistake made most often in discussion of tax burdens for this or that segment of the population is to focus on federal income taxes and ignore payroll taxes. Probably the second most frequent mistake is to focus on federal taxes and ignore state and local taxes.

As Kevin Drum notes today, the data on state tax burdens, as illustrated by a new report from the Corporation for Enterprise Development, shows a sea of regressivity, particularly in states that rely disproportionately on consumption taxes and property taxes that are levied at flat rates on assets that are disproportionately limited for those at or near the bottom of the income scale. I’m not sure the rankings Kevin cites are truly definitive, in that they may not reflect targeted tax credits, sales tax exemptions, or other offsets aimed at cushioning the burden. But the overall picture is a grim confirmation of the fact that the limited progressivity of federal taxes must be weighed against the unwillingness or inability of most of the states to follow suit.

This is a useful reminder at a time when conservatives are so hell bent on making federal taxes considerably more regressive to liberate those poor, overtaxed job creators to whom the rest of us entirely owe our daily bread. Proposals to make federal income taxes “flatter” will simply make overall levels of taxation regressively worse.

Newt Gingrich is obviously in a position where he thinks he has to throw the kitchen sink at Mitt Romney. He also obviously thinks he has to get Tea Party zealots to forget his many years in Washington and make him their insurgent champion.

But it’s getting a little out of hand, as reflected in this report from Nevada by Benjy Sarlin:

After using the Occupy Wall Street playbook to attack Mitt Romney last month, Newt Gingrich is cribbing from the Tea Party’s anti-Obama files, identifying his rival as yet another co-conspirator in a vast leftist plot to destroy capitalism itself. Not a great sign for those Republican strategists who hope Romney’s Florida victory will quickly unite the party.

Addressing fired up supporters in a cowboy-themed Vegas bar on Friday, Gingrich offered a new depiction of Romney as a tool of George Soros who doesn’t respect the Founding Fathers and is little different from Obama himself.

Gingrich mentioned Soros, who gave an interview in Switzerland last week saying he expected Romney and Obama to pursue similar policies, more than a half dozen times in his speech. The billionaire financier received boos and jeers at almost every mention — one supporter shouted out “The Devil!”

I really wish Hunter Thompson, the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, could have lived to write about this scene. Or since this was a cowboy bar, maybe Sacha Baron Cohen could have shown up as Borat and warmed up the crowd with a few verses of “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” [EMPHATIC NOTE TO THE HUMOR-IMPAIRED: No, I am not accusing Gingrich or his fans of anti-semitism; just of being receptive to some lethal intentions towards one particular Jew named Soros. If this reference is troublesome, we could substitute “Throw the Muslim Down the Well,” which would definitely work for a Gingrich crowd.]

Don’t know what Newt will try next, but don’t think he’s gotten around to associating Romney with ACORN just yet. Maybe next week.

Yesterday I fulminated a bit about the rapidly developing conservative claim (abetted by dumb media reports) that the President had claimed Jesus would support his tax policies during remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday. Suffice it to say, he said nothing of the kind. But now it’s getting worse: on the floor of the Senate, Orrin Hatch claimed Obama was comparing himself to Jesus. Here’s The Hill’s summary:

“In 2008, the president declared that his nomination was the world historical moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Hatch said in a speech from the Senate floor.

“Someone needs to remind the president that there was only one person who walked on water and he did not occupy the Oval Office.”

Hatch skewered the president for a remark he made at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday morning, during which he suggested Jesus might support his plan to raise taxes on wealthy Americans.

I’m sure some conservative CSPAN watchers enjoyed Hatch’s fine exercise of wit, but his quip began with a complete fabrication about what Obama said in 2008, and concluded with a fabriction of what he said yesterday. To help us understand the context, The Hill chipped in with another fabrication of what the president said yesterday.

C’mon, folks, don’t you have enough differences with the president to talk about without just making stuff up?

The quick reversal today of the Komen Foundation’s decision to stop funding breast cancer screening services long provided by culture-war-target Planned Parenthood was an impressive testimonial to the power of rapid reaction. While there will undoubtedly be additional wrangling over this issue within Komen’s leadership, at the very least the charity has decisively avoided the precedent of rewarding anti-choicers who have sought to make Planned Parenthood an institutional leper by holding political show trials in Congress.

The quick push-back on Komen may provide an important lesson for reproductive rights advocates in the increasingly toxic fight against new Obama adminstration rules requiring access to contraceptives in federally subsidized employer-based health insurance plans, with a “conscience exception” for plans directly sponsored by religious organizations for their own members.

With the active support of the Republican Party, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has sought—and to some extent have already succeeded—in framing this dispute as “Obama versus Catholics,” instead of “the GOP and the Bishops versus preventive health care.” The dispute, meanwhile, is being hitched to the “War on Religion” wagon that the Christian Right and Republican opinion-leaders are laboriously hauling through the streets with lights flashing and horns honking.

If progressives respond to this campaign by mocking Catholic sensibilities or religious-based politics generally, it will play directly into the hands of those who are trying to use it to“wedge” Catholic voters into the GOP column, even though the vast majority of Catholic women do indeed depend on contraceptive services as a preventive health measure, and the vast majority of Catholics generally do not agree with the Bishops on contraception. And that’s aside from the fact that on issues other than birth control, abortion, and same-sex marriage, traditional Catholic teaching is hostile to the pro-corporate, anti-labor, pro-war, and anti-immigrant views of the GOP pols who are trying to exploit this manufactured dispute.

read more »

At The Nation, Ari Berman has an important and exhaustive article on the GOP’s use of its control over redistricting in southern states to draw congressional and state legislative maps in a way that undermines biracial coalitions that might support Democratic candidates. The basic device, known in legal circles as “packing” and “bleaching,” involves isolating African-American voters in heavily majority-black districts, reducing or eliminating their influence in majority-white districts.

Southern veterans of the redistricting wars remember how powerful these practices were during the 1990s redistricting cycle, which contributed (along with other factors, particularly large-scale retirements of Democratic incumbents) to the 1994 GOP takeover of the U.S. House, and to the partisan realignment of the South. As Berman notes, one big thing that has changed since then, however, is that civil rights groups and African-American politicians, who once cooperated with GOP “packing” efforts in order to give African-American incumbents safe seats (or to put it another way, to consolidate fragile gains), are now generally on the other side of the barricades.

Complicating the picture considerably is that the federal courts, and particularly the U.S. Supreme Court, are in a state of chronic disarray in terms of its interpretation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 when it comes to race-conscious gerrymandering. And even as Republican pols and lawyers have sought to utilize the VRA tactically to defend “packing” and “bleaching,” they and their friends on the bench have inched closer each year to a major challenge to the VRA and its Section 5 “preclearance” provision that requires (mainly) southern jurisdictions to submit redistricting plans to the Justice Department for a ruling on their impact on minority voting rights.

Speaking of the Justice Department, Berman notes considerable dissatisfaction with the Obama administration’s Civil Rights Division relative passivity towards GOP redistricting maneuvers, but also suggests the administration may be saving its political capital for even more fundamental challenges to the right to vote posed by Republican state legislators around the country.

The one thing that is very clear is that Democrats and minority voters alike are paying a high price for the Donkey Party’s poor performance in 2010, on the very brink of decennial reapportionment.

As the week draws to a close, here are some quick reads for a leisurely lunch:

* Breaking news: Komen Foundation reverses course, will restore funding for Planned Parenthood. More on this later.

* A new poll from PPP confirms the impression that Romney is heading for a big win in Nevada tomorrow—perhaps even a majority. Danger sign for Newt: his approval ratings are in the tank there.

* Adelson ain’t alone: Sushannah Walshe has a profile of the Wyoming billionaire who’s provided about half of the money for Rick Santorum’s Super-PAC.

* Times’ Edward Wyatt reports SEC is going easy on big banks in fraud investigations.

* Retired Supreme Sandra Day O’Conner quips about GOP presidential candidates at Alfalfa Club dinner: “[O]ne is a practicing polygamist, and he’s not even the Mormon.”

* Paul Starobin reports at TNR that Elizabeth Warren is routing Scott Brown among female voters, which may provide some lessons for Obama campaign.

Back to regular blogging shortly.

If you want a better understanding of the potential importance of today’s impressive January jobs report, check out a massive analysis Nate Silver posted (before the report was released, as it happens) on the relationship of election-year jobs gains and the electoral prospects of parties in power going back to 1948. You should read the whole thing if possible, since it is full of nuances and qualifiers. But here’s the nut graph:

If Mr. Obama has an approval rating of 52 percent by November, he will almost certainly win re-election. He’d also be a favorite if he’s at 50 percent. And 48 percent or 49 percent might also do the trick, since at that point Mr. Obama’s approval rating would likely exceed his disapproval rating.

But Mr. Obama is not quite there yet. The surest way for him to improve his approval rating will be to create jobs at a rate that exceeds the rate of population growth.

We can come up with an estimate of just how many jobs this might be if we put a president’s approval rating as of Feb. 1 and the payrolls numbers into a regression equation.

After some additional adjustments, Nate comes up with a figure of 151,000 as the average monthly jobs gains the president needs between now and November to put himself in a strong position for re-election, at least in terms of economic fundamentals. So the January figures (a net gain of 243,000 jobs) are a good start for 2012.

It’s hard to tell how much of this is intimidation or even misdirection, but the war talk coming out of Israel right now is getting pretty serious. WaPo’s David Ignatius sums up the impressions of people in Washington:

[Defense Secretary Leon] Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June — before Iran enters what Israelis described as a “zone of immunity” to commence building a nuclear bomb. Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon — and only the United States could then stop them militarily.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t want to leave the fate of Israel dependent on American action, which would be triggered by intelligence that Iran is building a bomb, which it hasn’t done yet….

Israeli leaders are said to accept, and even welcome, the prospect of going it alone and demonstrating their resolve at a time when their security is undermined by the Arab Spring.

“You stay to the side, and let us do it,” one Israeli official is said to have advised the United States.

Now no matter what you think about Iran’s nuclear program—a tolerable nuisance, or a Sign of the End Times—it’s pretty clear this is an unusually sensitive moment in U.S.-Israeli relations. Nobody much believes the old “politics ends at the water’s edge” cliche about bipartisanship in U.S. foreign policy (it was never really true in the first place, and was mainly just a slogan used to encourage support for unpopular wars). But direct public interference with biliateral relations with another country accompanied by an explicit promise to undermine the U.S. position is another thing altogether. Yet that’s pretty much what Republican presidential candidates are doing every time they attack Obama for allowing “an inch” of difference to exist between U.S. and Israeli positions on Iran or anything else, and essentially claim Bibi Netanyahu is a better champion of U.S. interests than the elected president of the United States.

Until such time as the imminent threat of a new Middle Eastern war subsides, it might be a good time for Republican candidates to address one of the many foreign policy topics they never discuss (say, the plight of sub-Sarahan Africa). It’s also one of the better arguments for hoping Mitt Romney nails the nomination down relatively soon. Another few weeks of hearing GOP candidates attack the president as gutless and incompetent, as they compete to see who is most avid to support Israeli military strikes on Iran, is a scenario not likely to help U.S. diplomacy keep the peace.

I’d just published my last, rather dark and brooding post on economic trends when the sun burst from the clouds, at least for a moment, with the release of a January jobs report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that not only exceeded expectations (which were glum), but actually has some mild good news across the board. The economy created 257,000 new private-sector jobs, and these were offset by a mere 14,000 reduction in public-sector jobs (much lower than it’s been). The net job increase figure was nearly double what most economists had predicted. The unemployment rate dipped to 8.3%. And the jobs numbers for November and December 2011, which were expected to be revised downward, were instead revised upward.

As WaPo economics reporter Neil Irwin tweeted: “That sound you hear is champagne corks in the West Wing.”

Conservatives who are puzzled by the rise of “populist” sentiments in the left and center of the political spectrum, or who wonder why progressives become furious when Republicans propose more tax and regulatory relief for “job creators,” need to come to grips with some very basic economic facts. They were succinctly summarized last night by Catherine Rampell at the New York Times’ Economix blog:

The economy has been growing now for 10 straight quarters. It has even made up the ground lost from the recession, and the United States now churns out more goods and services than it did before the downturn began in 2007. But that output is being produced with six million fewer workers, despite population growth.

As a result, the share of income produced in the country that is flowing to workers’ bank accounts has been steadily shrinking.

Of every dollar of income earned in the United States in the third quarter of 2011 — the latest period for which data is available — just 44 cents went to workers’ wages and salaries. That is the smallest share since the government began keeping track in 1947….

On the other hand, American businesses are doing extremely well.

Tepid job growth, stagnant wages for existing employees and growing international demand for American products have all helped corporate profit margins reach all-time highs.

You’d almost be tempted to think there was some sort of “class warfare” going on.

I do not often agree with Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, but he nicely sums up why Mitt Romney’s “not concerned about the very poor” remark has become more than a one-day story:

There are few things more powerful in politics than the confirmation of a stereotype, which is Romney’s main political risk. A wealthy man can prove that he empathizes with average people — see the examples of aristocrats such as Teddy or Franklin Roosevelt. But Romney has yet to prove it.

But then Gerson offers Romney some advice he is very unlikely to take:

He could start by making the economic advancement of the very poor a central concern of his campaign.

That would be nice, not to mention surprising, but the problem is that the ascendent view in the GOP, as expressed yesterday by Sen. Jim DeMint, is that the “economic advancement of the very poor” requires eliminating their “dependency” on the very “safety net” that Romney originally said made concern for these folks unnecessary. If Romney goes around saying nice things about the socialist imprisonment of the poor via the looting of the virtuous middle-class and heroic upper-crust “job creators,” it will enrage his party base. But if he makes a habit of announcing he favors the tough-love of helping the very poor by kicking them to the curb and offering them character-building incentives to compete for non-existent jobs and/or depress wages even more, then the assumption that the very poor don’t often vote may turn out to be wrong.

Quite a blind alley, eh? But that’s what happens when a politician says something many in his party actually believe that confirms what others suspected from the beginning. It’s part of Politics 101, and you’d think a guy like Mitt would know this by now.

A few random items from the clipping-room floor:

* Asked about whether his boss ever asked Donald Trump for an endorsement, White House press secretary Jay Carney replied: “I’m not going to comb over that question!”

* In other Trump reactions, conservative columnist Phillip Klein says Romney’s embrace of the celebrity tycoon “his biggest blunder.”

* Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a former seven-term Republican congressman, calls the House GOP’s reauthorization bill the “worse transporation bill I’ve ever seen in 35 years of public service.” That would date back to the Carter administration.

* Turns out the Palestinian-American whose question to GOP candidates in a televised debate launched them on a Muslim-bashing tirade is in fact, like a significant minority of Palestinians, a Christian.

* Matt Yglesias notes that since users create much of its “product,” Facebook arguably has 800 million employees. They just don’t get paid.

And in cultural news, sort of:

* Atlas Shrugged, Part II due to hit movie screens before the November elections. Budget should be low, since it will probably involve Galt character standing at a radio mike and delivering his 60-page speech til the credits roll.

For tomorrow, still plan to write about Marco Rubio’s “conscience exception” bill after I can absorb John Boehner’s argument that coverage mandate is unconstitutional. Beyond that, we’ll just see what strange news the morning brings. There’s been a lot of that lately.

Selah.

Outside the House Blue Dog Caucus, and the embattled ranks of North Carolina Democrats, the announcement today that Rep. Heath Shuler was retiring at the end of this term is being met with bipartisan huzzahs. Republicans, of course, figure they’ll pick up another House seat in a year when they need it. Many, perhaps most, progressive Democrats wish him a not-so-fond adieu as one of the most regular renegades from party discipline, and as an active force for evil on abortion policy.

Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of intra-party litmus tests or the various “framing” theories that suggest Democrats would win a decisive majority if we spoke without a single discordant voice. The only unimpeachable authorities on who is a “true Democrat” in the 11th congressional district of North Carolina—or anywhere else—are the Democratic voters of that area. And no, I don’t think it can be confidently assumed, these days at least, that a Republican replacement could not do worse.

But Shuler, like Joe Lieberman in the Senate (though for somewhat different reasons) is probably the exception who proves the rule. With the sole exception of his vote for Obama’s climate change legislation, Shuler broke with his party and its president on just about everything that mattered since 2008. He even voted for the abominable “Cut, Cap and Balance” resolution that if implemented would inevitably lead to the destruction of every progressive accomplishment since the 1930s. While that’s still not grounds for being expelled from the Caucus, it sure would justify, if I were in charge, denying him any perks and privileges associated with Caucus membership, up to and including men’s room keys in the Cannon Building. If that sounds petty, too bad; after all, a guy like Shuler would probably use these insults to burnish his reputation as someone who’ll stand up to the godless liberals.

Ah, but it doesn’t matter now. What should matter now for Democrats is an effort, not just in the 11th district of North Carolina, but in every tough or even hostile district, to find candidates who can manage to reflect their constituents’ values and preferences, even if they are far from the progressive mainstream, while maintaining some respect for the traditions of their party and its collective interests as an agency for governing. If that’s impossible, well, you can’t win them all—but you can stop holding out a hand to a “colleague” for the sole purpose of having it slapped away.

With the sound of another shoe dropping, a small group of Republican Senators (McCain, Graham, Kyl, Cornyn, Ayotte, and Rubio) have announced a proposal to cancel next year’s automatic cuts in defense appropriations and instead wring equivalent savings (over ten years) by freezing pay for federal workers and reducing their numbers by 5% via attrition.

The proposal isn’t going anywhere, if only because Democratic support is extremely limited, and the president has already promised to veto any cancellation of the “sequestrations” called for in last year’s deficit agreement unless it’s replaced with a “grand bargain” involving tax increases on the wealthy.

But it’s mainly interesting as a measure of the residual strength of maximum defense hawks—or from a more philosophical perspective, the neocons who once walked so tall in Washington—in a Republican Party whose ardor for dismantling the New Deal and Great Society and making the tax code even more regressive is matched by a continued passion for federal activism in keeping America armed to the teeth, independent of any alliances (other than with Israel), and hyper-aggressive towards real or imagined foes.

It is, after all, one of the sillier parts of the Tea Party myth that “libertarians” uninterested in foreign policy adventurism have taken over the GOP. Aside, of course, from Ron Paul (and occasionally his senatorial son), you’d never know this was the case given the extraordinary support for truculence towards Iran among Republicans, and the continued determination of many to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. Indeed, the likely GOP presidential nominee is one Republican who has yet to indicate that he would pursue a foreign policy significantly different from that of the Bush administration. And most of his top national security advisors would look entirely at home taking turns at the podium in an appreciation dinner for Dick Cheney.

What he, and other Republican opinion-leaders have to say about the senatorial save-the-Pentagon initiative will tell us a lot about the relative priority they assign to the various passions of the conservative movement. Don’t bet against guns trumping butter, ever.