Study: Romney's tax cuts will bust the budget

What's particularly interesting is the study was done in the manner the republicans have been demanding.  From the Washington Post:

The problem is, even when you do take the economic stimulus of tax cuts into account, Romney’s tax reductions still don’t come close to making up for the lost revenue. The Tax Policy Center used a “dynamic scoring” model that factors in the impact of economic growth brought on by tax cuts, devised by Romney adviser and Harvard professor Greg Mankiw and Harvard’s Matt Weinzierl. It’s exactly the kind of analysis that Republicans have been clamoring for, and the TPC finds that Romney’s individual tax cuts wouldn’t come close to paying for themselves. His tax cuts for individuals would spur economic growth that would ultimately bring $53 billion more to the government. But they would still cost the government about $307 billion in revenue, according to the study.

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GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham urges Romney to embrace "revenues" to stop auto spending cuts

Romney taking a stand, and embracing something that sounds an awful lot like tax increases. Good luck with that:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Tuesday urged Mitt Romney to embrace revenues as part of a plan to stave off the automatic spending cuts set to take effect next year.

“If he gave his blessing, it would be easier for Republicans,” Graham said of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

In a discussion with reporters, Graham said his Republican colleagues are torn over whether to agree to consider revenues – such as tax loopholes and fees for government services – as part of a deal to avert the spending cuts, called sequestration.

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Maureen Dowd on Romney's European misadventure

Maureen Dowd in the NYT:

Obama gave four press conferences and plenty of individual interviews when he went abroad as a candidate. But when reporters traveling with Romney mutinied as Mitt left a wreath-laying at a war memorial in Pilsudski Square, pressing on the gaffes and on why they were being shut out, campaign spokesman Rick Gorka shot back crudely that the press should kiss a part of his anatomy, noting incongruously: “This is a holy site for the Polish people. Show some respect.”

Indeed.

Romney himself tried the same silly spin with ABC News, telling David Muir when asked about the damaging headlines: “You know, I tend to tell people what I actually believe, and referring to the comments that were made in the media is something which I felt was an honest reflection of what was being concerned, or what was concerning folks.”

That quote is alarming on two levels: First, Romney never seems to say what he actually believes, and, second, he doesn’t seem to actually speak English.

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How an ALEC bill becomes law—à la Schoolhouse Rock

For a nice change of pace, here's a Schoolhouse Rock–type video explaining how an ALEC bill becomes law. Enjoy:



Did you catch that ALEC is tax-exempt?

This was produced by Mark Fiore and the Center for Media and Democracy, which is the creator of ALECexposed.

ALECexposed — one of the heroes. Click on over; there are lots of ALEC resources.

GP

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Who is the enemy leading us to climate catastrophe?

UPDATE: A complete list of climate series pieces is available here:
The Climate series: a reference post.
________

We started this Climate Catastrophe series with a number of posts that look at the numbers. That series is listed here.

The bottom line based on the numbers:

  ■ Elite consensus says global warming must stay below 2°C (3½°F) — and even that will cause a great many changes in human habitation.

  ■ There's a mass extinction scenario at 3°C (5½°F) warmer. Will our species be among the 20–50% expected to die off? Perhaps.

  ■ Yet the planet is on track for an astounding 7°C (12½°F) increase by 2100 — certain death for our species. This is the "do nothing" scenario, the path we're now taking.

This is a suicide course, obviously, for the species. How do we change that? The answer takes us into the political realm.

Why can't we fix this?

It would be easy to assign blame to any number of sources. We could talk about human complacency, or the fact that the last generation to live will not be ours. We could mention the numerous nations of the earth, all of which must pull together, each of which has an economic interest not to.

We could talk about the stars, or the moon, or the fact that so many of us are rubes (sorry, underlings). We could blame electro-chemical impulses of the brain, or the networks for showing us so much sports.

We could blame the Tea Party, the Democrats, or the Sunday talks shows (for never talking about it).

But for Bill McKibben in his excellent Rolling Stone essay (and for me) there's really only one party to blame — especially if you want your blame to be effective and not impotent.

If you blame the rubes, for example, or our common rubicity, you will get nothing done. To paraphrase someone, the rubes you will always have with you; trying to change that is a loser course of action.

But all of the lesser agents of our destruction have just one puppet-master, a very small group — the Oil Barons, those who are profiting. McKibben (my emphasis and paragraphing throughout):

But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.

"Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices," says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. "But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they do." ...

They're clearly cognizant of global warming – they employ some of the world's best scientists, after all, and they're bidding on all those oil leases made possible by the staggering melt of Arctic ice.

And yet they relentlessly search for more hydrocarbons – in early March, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans to spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day) searching for yet more oil and gas.

Hold onto that name Rex Tillerson; we'll come back to him.

McKibben does an excellent job of working out the incentives that drive these companies — both the obscene profits, and this:

Much of that profit stems from a single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody else gets that break[.]

No restaurant can pile its garbage in the street for free. No dry cleaner can pour its spent poison fluid down the drain. Oil Can Henry can't dump its oil-can oil in front of the building next door. But hydrocarbon producers can treat the air as private property, and fill it with their waste.

McKibben then talks about the "carbon tax" solution, but let's wait on that (the next post will focus on solutions).

Instead let's go back to Mr. Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil and part of its top controlling class. I want to focus your mind a bit further than McKibben has done.

It's not the corporations; it's the people who run them

Did you notice that I mentioned the oil barons, and McKibben talked about the industry? These aren't quite the same.

I want to make a few points about corporations. The points may be obvious, but it's useful to keep them in mind. They are:

(1) Corporations are not people, and they don't have ideas or will. They are empty vessels.

If you took a neutron bomb to the home office of MegaCorp.com and let it rip, the building, filled to the brim with inventory and IP, would be empty of humans and a dead thing. You could wait for weeks for the offices to act; they wouldn't.

(2) This is especially true today, since the corporation now serves a different function than it was designed for. At first, a corporation served to make its stockholders moderately wealthy — or at least wealthier.

Modern corporations serve one function only — to make the CEO class obscenely rich, even at the expense (that's a Bain link) of the corporation itself (yes you, Carly Fiorina).

Thanks to the incentives in the post-Reagan tax code and the capture of Boards of Directors by the CEOs themselves, controlling the modern corporation — being the Jack Welsh of your world — is a straight path to big-league power and wealth. You've arrived.

As I've said many times, in a number of ways:

      Corporations loot the nation.
      CEOs loot the corporation.
      CEOs then buy everything on earth they want or need.

In the western world, the corporate controlling class lives higher than the kings and presidents who serve them. That's not invective, but a simple fact.

Call it my Flow-of-Funds Rule. Money flows right through the corp into CEO pockets, just like warm beer flows through you on a night of heavy drinking. Your body retains only what it needs. The receptacle gets the rest.

(3) Thus the modern corporation is no more than a power-extender for its hosts, the CEO, CFO, COO and so on, who use it to feed on all the wealth of the world. A perfect image of the relationship between CEO and corp is Ripley and the powerloader from the film Aliens:

The modern corporation serves no other function for its controlling class than to allow that class to live like this (h/t Paul Krugman):

“It’s incredible, right?” shouts Jeff Greene over the roar of the two-seater dune buggy’s motor. “It’s 55 acres!”

Still in his whites from this morning’s tennis match, he’s giving a personal tour of his Sag Harbor estate, barreling at 30 miles per hour through the vast forest of scrubby pines and soft moss of its gated grounds.

“Beautiful nature here!” A blur of deer goes by, and the trees break to reveal the summer sun glinting off a grassy lagoon. Greene slows by its shore.

“This is our swan pond, and this is our private beach,” he says, gesturing toward a slip of white sand encircling the edge of the North Haven Peninsula. “It goes all the way to the ferry. Three thousand feet of beach,” he adds, a smile spreading across his tanned face. ...

“I’ve got a huge, huge position in mortgage-backed securities,” he says. “I started accumulating them in 2009, when the market was really down and things were really scary.” That’s also when he picked up this property for around $40 million (half the 2007 listing price), which he and his wife have christened “Greene Haven.”

“I wish we could spend more time here,” he says. “Honestly, we have so many great homes.”

This is why they exist, what they live for. This is victory, what is good in life. The purpose of the powerloader is to extend its master's reach. The purpose of the corporation, the same.

Ask yourself — if the CEO of Chevron could triple his personal wealth in a day by burning the corp to the ground and salting its earth, would he do it?

Why would he not?

McKibben fingers the fuel industry; I blame the people it serves

I bring this up for a reason, and not just to play with fun prose. As you'll see when we talk about solutions, McKibben builds his strategies around targeting the real enemy. As a result, he focuses on the fossil fuel industry.

Me, I wouldn't shoot at the powerloader, but the person inside, the various Rex Tillerson's of the world. To motivate a corp, you have to motivate its master.

This is a subtle difference perhaps, but as I hope you'll see when we get there, a useful one.

Yours in usefulness,

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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The dinner party of the damned, or how not to throw a "dîner" in France

Preparations for the dinner party of the damned continue. I decided to invite some French friends for a greco-american dinner tonight, and, well, it's been challenging.

First there was translating french recipes into US units, and trying to guess what, say, 10 tablespoons of corn starch looks like by sight, or 2 cups of grated cheese, because we of course don't have those measuring devices in France, and finding the french equivalent of sour cream (I went for light creme fraiche at 15% fat), then realizing that the eggs are bigger here, so the recipes I'm making are turning out wetter.

Costco-sized cheesecake.

Then realizing that mom's cheesecake recipe, which is for an American spring form pan (8.5 inches diameter), is far too little for a French spring form pan (10.2 inches diameter), so I had to run out and get more cream cheese and could only find "light" (considering the guests don't know NY cheesecake, it's rare in france, I'm hoping they don't notice that there's a layer of light cheesecake on top of the full-fat cheesecake).

Sauteing the eggplant, bechamel
for the moussaka in the middle.

Then I go to make the moussaka, and of course, can't find a 9x13 pan, have to go much bigger, so double the recipe (which is great fun when you're pan sautéing a gazillion slices of eggplant (now times two) a few at a time). Surprisingly, the moussaka did not spill out of the pan all over the oven, as expected.

But I write too soon. After spending about 5 hours on the moussaka, the oven almost catches fire from the butter that dripped from the spring form pan when I was baking the cheesecake crust (because I probably used too much butter in the crust - why? - because there are no graham crackers here so I have to improvise with speculoos, a wonderful regional cookie (who knew you needed to put a spring form pan on another pan in case it drips?) Smoke is pouring out everywhere, I put the fan by the window to blow the smoke out, but of course the fan is oscillating, so it's only blowing out the window part-time (I got the fan last week, and quelle surprise, it was missing the part that stops the fan from oscillating - almost returned it, but then figured, when will I seriously need to stop the fan from oscillating?).

So, at 1030 at night, moussaka still unbaked, I wait for the oven to cool down, clean the butter from the inside, start the oven again, more smoke.  This time I crank the oven up to 250 celsius, 500 F give or take, and let it cook a while. Smoke goes away.  Moussaka is done by 1230am, let it cool a bit, throw it in the fridge warm (better than leaving it out to cool all night and risk poisoning the guests (a distinct possibility, the way things are going).

Oh, fun fact about some French ovens.  The temperature can only be set in 25 degree celsius increments, or about a 45 degree F increment - so there's no setting the oven to 325. It's either 300, 350 or 400.  Adjust cooking times accordingly, which is fun to calculate when you've doubled recipes that you have never doubled before.

Shut-off valve conveniently
hidden behind the wall.

Then this morning the toilet begins to leak like niagara, and who knew the cut off valve was in the cupboard, BEHIND a board in the wall? Run to the neighbor across the hall, not home. Run to the neighbors upstairs, no home.  Run downstairs, get the concierge, and frantically explain in utterly incorrect French: "It's urgent, the water is sticking to the toilet."

In my panic, I mixed up the French words "coller" (to stick) and "couler" (to flow). Couldn't help but think of David Sedaris, another neurotic gay Greek-American francophile, who once famously told his French landlord, "the toilet, she cry much of the time."



So I go to take a shower, drenching wet from sweat. And what do I discover? My good friend, Pierre the French mosquito, who's been camping out in the bedroom for the past month or so, decided last night to bite my nose four times. And like Chris, I for some reason have a reaction to European mosquitos (at least the ones in france and greece), where the bite looks like a rather huge pimple (actually a pimple would look smaller).

So that's the last 24 hours so far.

Dinner is tonight. Invited 8 people, me making 9, which of course is too many for this place, but oh well (France is all about making room for extra friends at the dinner table, which is something I very much like about this place). According to the weather, depending when you check, it's either going to pour or be a lovely 79 degrees. I'm counting on the former.

Finished moussaka.

Hopefully most of the possible shoes have dropped already, so tonight's dinner will go off without a hitch (still have to make the strawberry coulis for the cheesecake, mom's crab/artichoke dip, the strips of melon with prosciutto that Chris recommended, and the Greek peasant salad).

It's amazing how hard it is throwing a dinner party in a foreign country when you're a foreigner. It also doesn't help that folks here tend to (but not always) throw rather fancy dinner parties with lots of courses and far too much wine (I was told to plan on buying one bottle per person). I've decided to ditch the cheese course and serve the salad with the moussaka (it's good to push their horizons).

Wish me luck. Photos to follow.  Oh, and we may not have a ton of posts today, as Chris is on vacation and I'm clearly losing my mind.

PS Right on schedule, it's raining.

And it's sunny again.

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