Tag: Paul Ryan

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 1, 2015

A Republican debate, a new Speaker of the House, boots on the ground in Syria, the World Series, not to mention Halloween. Quite the week. Did you set your clocks back?

This tweet pretty much sums up the Republican debate poutrage:

COW GOP Debate Tweet

Rubio had a good debate. Suddenly, people see him as taller:

COW Tall Rubio

 

GOP Halloween:

COW GOP Halloween

Now that Paul Ryan is Speaker, it will be a wild ride:

COW Mastadon

 

 

Ryan will try to be first with the leash:

COW Ryan Speaker

Uncle Sam whistles past America’s foreign policy graveyard:

COW FP Graveyard

NY Mets World Series tix are pricey:

COW Citi Field

 

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 18, 2015

Happy Sunday! From The Hill:

With the House still clueless about who its next Speaker will be, Congress has just 10 legislative days to tackle a topic at the center of some of the most pitched fiscal battles of the last several years. The deadline was moved up Thursday by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who told Congress it has only until Nov. 3 to raise the government’s $18.1 trillion borrowing cap.

Paul Ryan is still avoiding the opening for Speaker:

COW Speaker Opening

Mr. Obama decided to keep troops in Afghanistan until at least the end of 2017. He says that combat operations in Afghanistan are over. He says the job of “train, advise, assist” won’t change. Mr. Obama says our troops just need to stick around until the training begins to take hold:

COW President Chelsea

Bernie gives Hillary a hand at the Democratic debate:

COW Thanks Bernie

And the Benghazi hearings are about to start:

COW Benghazi Hearings

Here is the NRA/GOP vision of school safety:

COW Skool Gunz

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Monday Wake-Up Call – February 16, 2015

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn” − Alvin Toffler

Today’s wake-up call is for Americans who can’t unlearn that trickle-down doesn’t work, and that voting in politicians who espouse it will prolong the nation’s agony. Do people know that the new GOP House began passing a series of deficit-hiking tax cuts that will primarily help the rich at the expense of everybody else?

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee (which writes tax legislation), wants to make some previous tax breaks permanent. From HuffPo:

The House voted 272 to 142 to make permanent a number of temporary provisions that are aimed at helping businesses earning up to $2 million. The main cut, which would add $77 billion to deficits over 10 years, allows businesses to immediately write off new equipment purchases up to $500,000. Temporary versions of the measure have been passed about a dozen times before, generally as economic stimulus measures.

The GOP then passed a second tax cut, aimed at giving bigger tax breaks for charitable giving. Ryan wants even more tax cuts that would add another $300 billion to the deficit. Those may reach the House floor later this month.

Here’s the Republican strategy: Slice the elephant and eat it a bite at a time. Pass small pieces of tax legislation while ignoring the deficit impact, then when their corporate and wealthy individual patrons are taken care of, remind everyone that the deficit is the biggest, baddest enemy the economy has. Then propose budget cuts that hit the working poor and the middle class. Ryan’s current strategy can be seen here: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

If you dare try to make these things that we all agree on that need to stay in the tax code permanent, it’s ‘You’re not paying for it; it’s a budget buster; you’re being irresponsible; you’re jeopardizing tax reform.’ Process, process, process…Here’s the problem. What we’re trying to do here, we’re trying to grow the economy. We’re trying to get people back to work.

That meme will end soon. It will be replaced with: “growth is being stifled by the deficit”.

The NYT’s Upshot notes that a number of Republican governors are proposing tax increases — and in every case, the tax hike would fall most heavily on those with lower incomes, while they propose simultaneous tax cuts for business and/or the wealthy. Krugman analyzes it thusly:

If you look for an overarching theme for overall conservative policy these past four decades…It has been about making the tax-and-transfer system harsher on the poor and easier on the rich. In short, class warfare.

Class warfare. These folks keep bottling snake oil and voters keep buying it. Lowering income taxes on the wealthy doesn’t create jobs. Why would it? The focus of the GOP on cutting income taxes is solely intended to protect the rich.

Wrongo has run businesses for 35+ years and never saw taxes as an impediment. Taxes are paid out of profits, not revenue, and paying taxes means you are running a profitable business. Cutting taxes for small business can be a disincentive: Why should the owners expand the business when their net is greater, and they didn’t have to increase sales? For large corporations, tax cuts mean that people in the C-suite get richer. Nothing. Filters. Down.

Here is your Monday tune to fight the Plutocracy. “Rich Man’s War” by Steve Earle, from his 2004 album, “The Revolution Starts Now”:

And some Monday hot links:

The Westminster Dog Show starts today. Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right are attending.

Researchers are using drones and satellites to spot lost civilizations. Remote sensing technology is revealing traces of past civilizations that have been hiding in plain sight.

Lobbyists move though the revolving door back to House and Senate committees. There is a profound change taking place among Capitol Hill staff, as many GOP lawmakers are handing the keys to K Street corporate lobbyists. Public Citizen’s Paul Holman notes that Speaker John Boehner, has “encouraged new members to employ lobbyists on their personal and committee staff.”

More than 4,000 Fort Carson soldiers are heading to Kuwait, where they will become one of America’s largest ground forces in the troubled region. Did you know that the Army has kept a brigade in Kuwait since the end of the Iraq war in 2011?

Majority of public school students are now considered low-income. Another success brought to you by trickle-down economics.

Unaffordable rents here to stay say experts. They aren’t likely to ease up for at least two years, according to the latest Zillow Home Price Expectations Survey

 

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Who Gets the Dynamic Score?

No, it isn’t Kobe, it’s the corporations that backed the GOP in November. When Republicans took control of both houses of Congress, they won an important new power: They now can change how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores tax cuts and budget cuts. The changes they are planning can be used to make tax cuts appear less harmful to the deficit.

For years, the GOP has wanted to change the way that the (supposedly) nonpartisan CBO calculates — or, in Washington speak, “scores” — the budgetary impact of changes to the tax code. The methodology that the Republicans want to use is called “Dynamic Scoring”. Dynamic Scoring has been popular among conservatives since the 1970s. Instead of just figuring out how much more money a tax increase would produce for the Treasury, or how much a tax cut would cost in lost revenue, the GOP wants to use complex computer models to try to predict the long-term, and broader impact of hikes and cuts on the economy, since they are looking for proof of GDP and tax revenue growth.

Here’s how it would work. In January, Republicans will be in charge of the CBO, which produces official budget projections and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), which calculates how tax laws affect revenue.

Today, when the CBO and the JCT calculate the impact of tax laws on government income, they consider how Americans might alter their behavior in response to tax rate changes. But the two staff departments do not evaluate how tax legislation could affect economic growth—largely because those sorts of impacts are hard to predict.

Republicans have believed this as an article of faith since the days of St. Ronnie. Tax cuts lead to greater economic activity, which in turn produces greater tax revenues—a perpetual motion revenue machine that is the wet dream of most Republicans. Scott Walker used this kind of “math” in Wisconsin. The result? A $2.1 Billion budget shortfall. Oh, and there is Kansas, where another Republican governor, Sam Brownback, is staring at $1.3 billion in deficits after cutting taxes and  hoping for economic growth.

Math can be much easier when the answer is whatever you want it to be. But, the new math is the first step toward passing the Republican version of tax reform.

A keystone of any successful tax reduction plan is that they ought to be revenue neutral, that is, tax receipts will not go down, despite tax cuts. Using this form of new Republican math, you can inflate the value of possible future revenues from today’s tax cuts. That can be sold to the American people as a new version of “revenue neutral” although it is really a new version of “take the nickel little boy, it’s bigger than the dime”. This is extremely appealing to Republicans, since it makes tax cuts appear to cost the government less than they actually do – it allows them to say that tax cuts mostly pay for themselves—and wave the JCT-CBO seal of approval to justify that claim.

Democratic leaders and progressive economists reject dynamic scoring as an accounting gimmick, pointing to the aftermath of the Bush tax cuts as evidence that tax breaks do not create tax revenue. The Washington Examiner reports that Kenneth Kies, a GOP-nominated former director of the JCT, says that this accounting device falls:

Somewhere between pure mathematics and theology.

The real dynamic score will be by America’s corporations and financial firms.

Think it won’t happen? Incoming Chair of the House Ways and Means committee (which has jurisdiction over tax reform), is Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Last week, in an interview with the Washington Post, Ryan said he will push to make sure that the two congressional budget scorekeepers use dynamic scoring when evaluating GOP tax reform legislation. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), incoming Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said last week that he was open to implementing the change.

Ryan and Hatch can implement dynamic scoring by simply ordering the two budget scorekeepers to accept this budgeting method. If such direct intervention seems too heavy-handed, Republican legislators have another option: They can appoint directors at the CBO and JCT who will use the kind of assumptions the GOP favors. Democrats can do nothing to prevent that.

So, what will stop Congress from using politically motivated economic models that incorporate rosy assumptions? Absolutely nothing.

Behold the future − you voted in the Republicans.

In practice, Dynamic Scoring is just another way for Republicans to enact tax cuts and block tax increases. It is not about honest revenue-estimating; it’s about using smoke and mirrors to institutionalize Republican ideology into the budget process.

 

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