September 12, 2015: Salt in an Open wound, Compelling and Obvious, Deep Rouge and Tawdry Tinsel

 

Back in the campaign of 1988, George H.W. “Pappy” Bush, then Vice President of the United States, set the country a-titter when at a campaign photo-0p he discovered the check-out scanner at a grocery.  As he marveled at the technology, the country let loose a collective snicker, as once again the Bush family was demonstrating for all to see its collective ignorance of what is going on in America.  To suggest that the Bushes are out of touch is an understatement; no more so than his snot-nosed, drug-addled, alcoholic oldest son somehow construing Reaganomics with ‘compassionate conservatism’. 

Now we have presented before us the latest incarnation of the Bush Dynasty, one John Edward Bush, otherwise known as JEB.  In July, shortly after launching his campaign, Jeb solemnly announced that to his lights the economy would best respond if Americans worked longer hours.   Recoiling from a stinging rebuke from the Democratic National Committee, which issued a statement calling Bush’s remarks “easily one of the most out-of-touch remarks we’ve heard in this campaign cycle so far”(1), Bush protested that he meant part-time and underemployed workers need to work harder. 

 
It doesn’t matter that the jobs aren’t out there or that, according to a recent Gallup Poll, “that already many Americans employed full-time report working, on average, 47 hours a week, while nearly 4 in 10 say they work at least 50 hours a week.” (2)  Moreover, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “US workers toil more hours than workers in any other large industrialized country.”(3) Conservatives in general, and the Bush’s in particular, have been of late fast and loose with the facts, betraying a casual relationship with reality. 

I can forgive the dolt his myopia if what he represents weren’t such a threat to the economic well-being of the country.  After all the Bush boys are a product of the country-club set, far removed from the cares and worries of middle class struggle. What troubles me is the rest of the statement.  Answering questions about his tax reform, Bush told the Manchester Union Leader that

“My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours” and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in.”(4)

This, to me, is the most damning part of his statement.  Increased productivity, it should be obvious to even the most obtuse, has not brought relief to the middle class.  Take the current minimum wage as a case in point.  Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage would be—in 1968 dollars—about $16.00 an hour.  But Adjusted for increase in productivity, we would have to raise the minimum standard to about $21.00 an hour.  Using this index one can gain a rough estimate of how much of the increase in productivity has been ripped off by the investment class, the top 10% of wage-earners, and especially the top 1%.   Seen another way, the top 1% have taken the entire wealth generated by the recovery since 2007, and the top 10% have stolen in the neighborhood of over 110% of the new wealth.  The question remains:  Since the median household income has actually declined over the last 30 years and, as has been reported in this column, it has declined in all 50 states in recent years, what has happened to all this increased wealth?  The answer is at once compelling and obvious, it’s gone to the capitalist pig.

In this context, Bush’s remarks represent a cruel hoax, an insult, a pouring of salt into the wound.

If this weren’t enough the snot-nosed little lord Fauntleroy has earlier this week, unveiled his ‘new’ tax plan.  Professor Robert Reich describes it thusly:

 “Frankly, I have never seen proposed such a huge transfer of income and wealth to the very top. According to Josh Barro of the Times, the plan would save each member of America's top 0.01 percent an average of $1.5 million a year.

A few details: The plan cuts the top federal income tax rate from today’s nearly 44 percent (including the Obamacare surcharge) to 28 percent, cuts the top tax rate on capital gains and dividends, and abolishes the estate tax, and reduces the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent.

Yes it expands the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor and raises the standard deduction for the middle class—but these are tiny compared to the huge giveaway for the top.

It would cost some 3.4 trillion over 10 years.  To pay for this Bush would cut spending

(He doesn’t indicate where the cuts would come from), cut back federal regulations, and allow big corporations to repatriate the hundreds of billions they’ve stashed overseas.

This is a bigger version of the trickle-down voodoo economics his brother unleashed upon America (which itself was a bigger version of Reagan’s voodoo trickle-down economics).

That this plan comes from the Republican Party’s most establishment candidate—at a time when the wealthiest Americans are raking in a higher share of the total national income     and wealth in more than a century, when the middle class is shrinking, and when almost 1 in 5 of America’s children are in poverty—reveals, as if we needed more evidence, the utter moral bankruptcy of today’s Republican Party.” (4)

Indeed, after laboring mightily, the Republican ‘establishment’ to presenting the struggling middle class with these dog-eared bromides, present nothing less than an assault upon our collective intelligence. History repeats itself: A Bush expressing concern, if not compassion, for the struggles and travails of Middle America only to reveal himself to be nothing more than a Koch-addled, curb-crawling practitioner of the world’s oldest profession, once again gussied up in deep rouge and tawdry tinsel, displaying itself as “Republican Principle.   False pearls before real swine.

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1.     http://news.yahoo.com/jeb-bush-people-longer-hours-235206730.html#
2.     Ibid
3.     Ibid
4.     Robert Reich, Facebook post 9/12/15

February 1, 2012: Vulture Capitalism, Protracted Struggle, Frog in a Frying Pan

Willard “Mitt” Romney cruised to an easy victory in Florida last night crushing Baby Huey by over 15 points to win Florida’s 50 delegates to the Rescumlican National Convention. 
Here I must correct a previous error for it seems that in the interregnum between this campaign cycle and 2008 the Rescumlican Party has finally amended its rules and are now requiring proportional allocation of delegates instead of the winner-take-all in all primaries, caucuses or other contests held prior to April Fools Day.   All, except it seems, Florida where the Florida Rescumlican party moved it’s primary date up in the calendar and insisted on winner-take-all in an effort to steal the thunder in the early primaries and perhaps, in so doing, anoint a future President. 

What this means is that the Mormon will have to fight harder for the nomination and that the struggle will be protracted, perhaps long enough for a viable “I-am-not-the-Mormon” alternative to emerge.  Be that as it may, the victory last night was welcome news to the sons of Brigham Young as Romney swept Gingrich and the remaining field winning 46.42 percent of the vote to 31.93 for Gingrich, 13.34 for the faltering Santorum, 7.01 for the Luddite Ron Paul and 0.41 for the now departed Governor Rick Perry of Texas.

Perry pulled out of the race just prior to the South Carolina vote sensing his support evaporate as Gingrich sucked all the scum out of the pond.  As he departed he gave voice to a refrain that, if Romney should prevail, will reverberate from the mountains of the pacific coast to the canyons on the now occupied Wall Street.  Perry, gasping his last words, said that Romney, in his days with Bain Capital, proved himself to be not a great creator of jobs and economic growth but a practitioner of a vulgar form of “vulture capitalism” that proved on close examination to be a mere parasite sucking the blood out of the national economy. This is a charge of some substance and will dog the Romney campaign throughout the primaries as the tea baggers and ideological purists excoriate his record and, should he eventually emerge the Rescumlican nominee, the campaign in the general election as the liberals and the political center turn their guns on him. 

Perhaps Willard has no legs.  The critique of Romney’s economic record has spilled beyond his record as a public official which will be, in due coarse, problematic enough.  For in the Florida debates Willard was continually bombarded about his personal taxes.

Every time Willard is asked about is personal taxes he begins to jump like a frog in a frying pan.  Finally, after repeated inquiries his said that he pays “something like 15%” of his income in income taxes.  In truth it is more like 13.5% while the average schlock pays 18% in federal income taxes.  How is it that the Mitt pays less in income tax than his secretary?  Because, it turns out, almost all of his income is now derived from investments and capital gains which are taxed not at the old rate of 45% but 15%.  With deductions the Vulture Capitalist has been able to pear it down further to 13.5%.  This is the reason that the Son of Brigham Young has been so reticent about his fortune.  There have been some attempts to draw attention to this at subsequent Rescumlican debates but there is a problem here.

The problem for Baby Huey and the others is that Mitt stands before the nation not as the Greed Meister in their eyes but as a living demonstration of the success their several revisions of the tax code have made possible.  Romney is, in a word, simply a living symbol of  the success of Rescumlican economic policy.  The peculiar problem for Baby Huey, however, is that under proposals put forth by le infant terrible Romney would be relieved of his tax burdens for Gingrich and other Rescumlicans would eliminate income from investment and capital gains altogether.  This awkwardness serves to dampen the Romney critique in the primaries but his critics in the general election, being less greedy, will offer no such quarter. 

The question, which the primary in Florida had hoped to solve, is: do any of these fools have what it takes to prevail in November?  In the meantime the skillet keeps boiling as one frog after another pokes out his ugly head. 

October 30, 2011: Imagine There’s No Pizza, If 9 were 6, Thin Crust and Red Meat.

"Cain performed "Imagine There's No Pizza", a gospel-flavored parody of the John Lennon songs "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance", at an Omaha Press Club event in 1991. A video of this performance became popular during his 2012 campaign. "(1)  This, according to Wikipedia Cain performed with a group of “female backup singers while he wore white preacher’s robes”.  Let’s take a look at this erstwhile Rescumlican presidential wannabee and see how he cuts the pie.

Herman Cain emerges unto the presidential stage boasting a background as businessman and radio talk show host, both of which immediately disqualify him from further consideration.   Let’s look at the Business record:
“At age 36, Cain was assigned in the 1980s first to analyze and manage 400 Burger King stores in the Philadelphia area. At the time, Burger King was a Pillsbury subsidiary. Under Cain, his region posted strong improvement in three years. According to a 1987 account in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Pillsbury's then-president Win Wallin said, "He was an excellent bet. Herman always seemed to have his act together."  At Burger King, Cain "established the BEAMER program, which taught our employees, mostly teenagers, how to make our patrons smile" by smiling themselves. It was a success: "Within three months of the program's initiation, the sales trend was moving steadily higher."^[34]

His successes at Burger King prompted Pillsbury to appoint him president and CEO of another subsidiary, Godfathers Pizza. Cain arrived on April 1, 1986, and told employees, "I'm Herman Cain and this ain't no April Fool's joke. We are not dead. Our objective is to prove to Pillsbury and everyone else that we will survive." Cain, over a 30-month period, reduced the company from 640 stores to 563 . As a result of his efforts, Godfather's Pizza sales were reduced from $275 million in 1986 to $242.5 million in 1988^. Godfather's Pizza was performing poorly, and had slipped in ranks of pizza chains from 3rd in 1985 to fifth in 1988 . In a leveraged buyout in 1988, Cain, Executive Vice-President and COO Ronald B. Gartlan and a group of investors, bought Godfather's from Pillsbury. Godfather's sales remained level with Cain as CEO, ending at $265 million for 540 stores in 1996, when he resigned.” (2)

So for all the “smiling” introduced by Cain he enjoyed modest success whilst at Burger King but nevertheless presided over a contraction at Godfather’s Pizza resulting in the closing of stores and the reduction in annual earnings.  Imagine another cheerleader in charge of the national destiny!

One must approach Pizza men with gloves on for the level of ignorance is truly threatening to the republic.  I am reminded of Tom Monihan taking ownership to the Detroit Tigers in the mid 1980’s.  He immediately replaced the retiring Jim Campbell with the University of Michigan football coach Bo Schembeckler.  How a college football coach would be suitable as general manager for a professional major-league baseball team only Monihan could discern.  The fact is that it wasn’t a very good fit.  Within a few short years the Tigers would begin that long slide that led to the eventual loss of nearly 120 games in a single season and would take over a decade to rectify.  In fact, things got so bad, that the league contemplated for a time taking over the team while Monihan still ran the show.  One of Domino Pizza’s executives tried to explain the situation to a reporter late in the Monihan era. “You don’t understand my boss”, he said.  “Whenever Monihan is confronted with a problem his answer it to put more pepperoni on it”.  Therein lies the problem.

Simple solutions for simple minds.  The question is which head holds the mind of the simpleton, the erstwhile candidate or the collective cranium of his following? Perhaps it is one or the other, perhaps it is both.

For our purposes let’s review the 9-9-9 proposal set forth by Cain in the Rescumlican debates as the leitmotif of this attempt to simply weigh the product down with more pepperoni. The "centerpiece" of Cain's presidential campaign has been the "9-9-9 plan", which would replace all current taxes (including the Payroll Tax, Capital Gains Tax, and the Estate Tax) with 9% business transaction tax; 9% personal income tax rate, and a 9% federal sales tax. According to Cain, corporations would be able to deduct costs of goods sold (provided the inputs were made in America) and capital expenditures, but not wages, salaries and benefits to employees. Deductions, except charitable giving, would be eliminated. The federal sales tax would not apply to used goods. Cain also said that the 9-9-9 Plan would lift a $430 billion dead-weight burden on the economy..

Herman Cain stated the following summary about the 9-9-9 Plan:
“Our current economic crisis calls for bold action to truly stimulate the economy and Renew America back to its greatness. The 9-9-9 Plan gets Washington D.C. out of the business of picking winners and losers, using the tax code to dole out favors, and dividing the country with class warfare. It is fair, simple, transparent and efficient. It taxes everything once and nothing twice. It taxes the broadest possible base at the lowest possible rates. It is neutral with respect to savings and consumption,capital and labor, imports and exports and whether companies pay dividends or retain earnings.^” (3) This, of course, is pure balderdash.  It is neither fair, transparent or efficient and it does not tax everything once and nothing twice.  My wages, for instance, are taxed at the workplace, at the supermarket, and with several value-added taxes as goods make their way through the production and distribution chain. Wealth, of course, walks away from the table unburdened.

According to the analysis of Howard Gleckman the Tax Policy Center,
“When you get right down to it, Cain’s [9-9-9] plan is a 25 percent flat-rate consumption tax — not all that different from the FAIR tax that he says is his ultimate goal. This tax would be paid three times: first on wage income, again at the cash register as a sales tax, and yet again by businesses on their sales minus their cost of goods and services. For tax junkies, the first is a flat tax. The second is a retail sales tax and the third a business transfer tax. But they are all consumption taxes.

Although Cain has spoken about having designated 'empowerment zones' wherein a lower percentage, such as 3%, is paid instead, apart from this consideration, some have called Cain's plan more regressive than current policy, thinking it would raise taxes for most households, but cut them for a majority of those with the highest income.’

“However,” (the article continues) “this analysis of Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 Plan seems to have forgotten payroll taxes. With payroll taxes the employer and the employee split the tax.” This agruement is, of course, bogus. Once again, to wit: All of the value generated to pay the taxes is created by the worker.  The employer simply hijacks his portion of the tax burden as part of the wealth he ‘expropriates” from the worker and affixes his name to it.  Ask the proponents of these schemes if they really think the capitalist will give back all that is currently being withheld instead of simply pocketing it.  The fact is these costs are duly factored in to the “costs of labor” by any business accountant worth his salt belying in the language the actual fact that the entirety of the tax burden is in fact borne by labor.
 
“In a October 18, 2011 debate several of the other contenders for the GOP nomination attacked the plan, with candidate Rick Santorum  referencing the Tax Policy Center's claim that 84% of Americans would pay more and that the plan would entail "major increases in taxes on people," a charge Cain has refuted ^{." (3)}


Even Republicans, it seems, can spot a red herring when they see it or, perhaps, more pepperoni that the pie can hold. The 9-9-9 plan could just as easily been 6-6-6 for all the care that has been taken in considering the effect it would have on the commonweal.  Beware of the Pizza man bearing gifts for you will be left with thin crust and as much red meat profit demands.

As a simple litmus test ask yourself why, when these proposals are floated, do not the wealthy bankers, hedge fund managers, holders of derivatives and credit default swaps, or other icons of the rich and powerful howl in agony?  The answer is that these proposals are their proposals. (4)  Pete DuPont made the mistake of putting them on the table himself and, by so doing, being altogether too transparently self-serving.  Now they hire the political ignoramus, or the well-healed shill to do it for them.  Pimps for the Grand O’l Prostitute, the GOP., of which Herman Cain is only the latest in a long sorry line.
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1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-9-9_plan

4. Note that Cain has worked for the Koch brothers “ Americans for Prosperity” a wrong-wing stink tank funded by the Koch family for the purposes of furthering greed in America.  This is yet another attempt to run regressive tax proposals up the pole in the name of “fairness” and “prosperity” when in fact it is nothing other than an effort to relieve the Koch’s of any remaining stigma attached to the concept of “Noblesse Oblige”.