Category: Philosophy
Boeing 787 Faces More Battery Problems
Bummer of a birth mark, Boeing
They have found swelling in another 787 battery:
Cells in a second lithium-ion battery on a Boeing Co 787 Dreamliner forced to make an emergency landing in Japan last month showed slight swelling, a Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB) official said on Tuesday.
The jet, flown by All Nippon Airways Co, was forced to make the landing after its main battery failed.
“I do not know the exact discussion taken by the research group on the ground, but I heard that it is a slight swelling (in the auxiliary power unit battery cells). I have so far not heard that there was internal damage,” Masahiro Kudo, a senior accident investigator at the JTSB said in a briefing in Tokyo.
Kudo said that two out of eight cells in the second battery unit showed some bumps and the JTSB would continue to investigate to determine whether this was irregular or not.
Ummmm….I spent a few months working for a battery manufacturer. This is not a good sign.
Boeing purchasing McDonnell Douglas, and deciding to let McDonnell Douglas’s failed management then take over the firm is bearing bitter fruit.
The Opposite of Noblesse Oblige
In the Guardian, George Monboit talks about his experience as a student in a British public (private) school, and notes that this sort of background creates people who are completely disassociated from the wants and needs of the rest of society. I can’t really do justice through excerpts, but here are two paragraphs to give you a sense of this:
Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the dominant classes of the US: “the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.”
………
So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its frontbench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.
He draws his net a bit narrower than I would, he ascribes these characteristics pretty much exclusively to conservatives, while I would apply it more generally to our ruling class.
It explains why we see so many cases of, to quote Pete Townshend, “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.”
As you ascend the political pyramid, your world increasingly becomes that of the rich elites, and increasingly, their needs become your needs.
Go read this.
Deep Thought
Quote of the Day
How is the world ruled and how do wars start?
Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.
—Karl Kraus
H/t A Tiny Revolution.
Self Entitled, Self Deluded Assholes
Robert Bork, at least later in his life, was a classic example of how the modern Republican Party has deliberately become a manufacturer of narcissistic fantasists:
Even before Robert Bork died last month, he had achieved something close to martyrdom. In the quarter-century since the Senate rejected his Supreme Court nomination, successive generations of conservative lawyers and activists have carried the torch, depicting his defeat as an injustice of historic proportion. Following his death at the age of 85, liberals mostly maintained a respectful silence while conservatives dusted off old complaints about the conduct of the confirmation hearing and the unfairness, in their view, of the “borking” the nominee received. Clearly, the Bork Battle survives Bork.
………
Some time after the Senate vote, I was invited to a conversation with Judge Bork at the offices of The New Republic magazine. He was hurting and angry. When my turn came to ask a question, I asked him whether, at any time during the hearing, he had felt that a member of the Judiciary Committee had met him on his own level in serious constitutional conversation.
“No,” he answered.
“Not even Arlen Specter?” I asked.
“Specter had his mind made up from the beginning,” he snapped.
I knew that wasn’t true, although Judge Bork clearly believed it. Senator Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, had in fact agonized over his vote, as I knew from having talked with him almost daily. A Yale Law School graduate and former prosecutor, the senator went head to head with the nominee through several rounds of questioning, hours of mesmerizing constitutional debate in which he probed for any sign of flexibility in Judge Bork’s view that the entire course of modern constitutional law was profoundly mistaken. Finding none, Senator Specter, who had assumed at the start of the hearing that he would vote for confirmation, decided to vote No, fully recognizing the price he would pay within his own party. Five other Republicans followed. (Judge Bork and Senator Specter, whose paths crossed at such a significant moment in their lives, died within months of each other; Arlen Specter, who eventually became a Democrat, died in October at 82.)
………
I should explain this column’s title, “Robert Bork’s Tragedy.” I see him as a tragic figure: not because he was dealt an unjust hand – he wasn’t – but because of his inability to understand what happened. He spent his final decades surrounded by acolytes who stoked his sense of victimhood, and there seemed to be no one around him to provide a reality check as his rants about the Supreme Court’s depredations and the collapse of Western civilization (he portrayed the two as inextricably linked) became ever more extravagant. (In a symbolic gesture aimed at the Republican base, Mitt Romney named him co-chair of his campaign advisory committee on law.)
What is interesting here is not Robert Bork, but rather how the production and support of this sort of (for lack of a better term) insanity has increasingly become the primary product of the right wing noise machine.
I’m not entirely sure how to fix this rather poisonous and self-reinforcing dynamic.
Truth be told, I’m not sure that would I want to fix this dynamic.
Maybe I’m an optimist, but seems to me that this dynamic has gotten to the point they are choking on their own bile, and I see that as a good thing.
H/t Brad Delong.
Jack Klugman Did the Wrong Thing for the Right Reasons
When actor Jack Klugman died recently, much was said about his career, but special note was given to his role in the passage of the Orphan Drug Act of 1983.
There can be no doubt here that his motives were good. He wanted to see that diseases for which there was a limited number of sufferers, and hence limited profit, had drugs developed and produced.
Unfortunately, what seemed like a wonderful idea, subsidies and exclusivity granted to pharma, which had the added allure of providing a free market aura, has made things worse.
About ⅚ of the money spent on medical research is government money. When one considers the subsidies present under the Orphan Drug Act, that number undoubtedly tops ⁹⁄₁₀ of the funds being from the taxpayers.
BTW, some of the Orphan drugs in question are such “blockbusters” as, “Abilify, Provigil, Vioxx, Botox, and Cialis.”
You see a similar effect with the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act and Colcicine, where a drug that had been in use for 3500 years (no that number is not a typo, the first documented use of the drug is from ≈1500 BCE) went from 9¢ to $4.85 a pill, a 5200+% increase.
The underlying flaw here is the idea that private business is an unalloyed good, so if there is something it will not do, the solution is to subsidize private businesses to do it, even when all indications are that having the government provide this function would provide the most benefit.
This is wrong, and we have seen nearly 40 years of this philosophy, it really became mainstream during the Carter years, has harmed society as a whole.
What a Surprise, US Style Hyper-Capitalism Kills
The shock treatment liberalization of the USSR and the former Warsaw Pact Nations, led by largely Larry Summers, and looted extensively by Summers protege Andrei Shleifer, resulted in over a million deaths:
As many as one million working-age men died due to the economic shock of mass privatisation policies followed by post-communist countries in the 1990s, according to a new study published in The Lancet.
The Oxford-led study measured the relationship between death rates and the pace and scale of privatisation in 25 countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, dating back to the early 1990s. They found that mass privatisation came at a human cost: with an average surge in the number of deaths of 13 per cent or the equivalent of about one million lives.
The rapid privatisation programme, part of a plan known by economists as ‘shock therapy’, led to a 56 per cent increase in unemployment, which the study says played an important role in explaining why privatisation claimed so many lives. Many employers provided extensive health and social care for their employees, so through privatisation workers experienced the ‘double whammy’ of losing not only their livelihood but also their means of surviving the crisis.
Yes, this is a 3½ year old story, but I just found out about this today, and I thought that I should comment.
Running an economy by, and for the banksters, and the privitization of government assets during the breakup of the USSR and WarPac was an invitation for the finance types to steal as much as they could carry, does more than impoverish people.
It kills people.
If you look at these numbers, and see this, plus the arbitrage in world food markets that had prices (and malnutrition) rising, the dismantling of the Greek healthcare system, etc. it could be argued that the extreme free market policies espoused by the US since at least the Carter administration have killed more people than all the wars over that period.
The refrain of the free market mousketeers out there is not about freedom or free markets, it rather about a kleptocratic and parasitic society whose primary purpose is to impoverish the rest of us to their benefit.
Thanks Merkel
Not only is Angela Merkel’s hard money policies impoverishing much of the Euro Zone, which might cause the currency zone to break up, but it looks like it’s going to lead to the dissolution of Spain:
The center-right Catalan nationalist bloc CiU and the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) on Wednesday reached an agreement to call for a referendum on independence for Catalonia within two years.
The deal paves the way for Artur Mas to remain premier of the region. The CiU emerged as the biggest party in regional elections held last month but fell short of the absolute majority it was seeking. ERC was the second most voted party. The two sides still have to agree on the budget for next year. The accord on the referendum states that it must be held before the end of 2014 but does not give a specific date.
In a parallel development, the CiU, the ERC and other Catalan parties — with the exception of the local branch of the ruling Popular Party — reached an agreement not to implement the reform of the education system put forward by Education Minister José Ignacio Wert, which restores Castilian Spanish to the same level in the classroom as co-official regional languages such as Basque or Catalan.
The accord says the parties will adhere to the Catalan Education Law, which promotes immersion in the Catalan language. The parties described Wert’s proposals as “unacceptable” as they “prevent linguistic immersion by segregating pupils on the basis of language.”
Seriously, the pain caucus in the Euro Zone (Angela is their most senior member) is laying waste to everything that they touch.
Tax the Rich, or Eat the Rich, Your Choice
John Judis demolished the idea that rich need piles of money for our economy to grow:
As the negotiations over the fiscal cliff continue, President Barack Obama has insisted on retaining the Bush tax cuts for the middle class, while letting the cuts for the wealthy lapse. Republicans have insisted that raising taxes on the rich would cost jobs – as many as 700,000, according to House Speaker John Boehner.
Obama, for his part, says that a tax increase would not cost jobs; that it would help the economy by reducing the deficit; and that it would be fairer than imposing new taxes on the middle class. “I’m not going to ask students and seniors and middle-class families to pay down the deficit while people like me who make more than $250,000 are not asked to pay a dime more in taxes,” he has declared.
Obama is right that a tax increase on the rich would not cost jobs; and he is certainly right that it would be fairer to tax the wealthy whose incomes have shot up, even during the downturn. And he is also correct that taxing the rich will actually benefit the economy–but not primarily for the reasons he cites. If the government extracts income from the wealthy, and then spends it on a $50 billion infrastructure program, an extension of unemployment insurance, and a Social Security payroll tax cut, as Obama has proposed, that will not only boost the recovery, but will also discourage the wealthy from rerouting their savings into the kind of speculative activity that helped create the Great Recession. A closer approximation of income equality is not only better for our souls—it’s also better for the economy. The question of fairness aside, the rich have been making relatively too much money for the country’s good.
Last September, the Congressional Research Service published a report countering Republican claims that lowering top tax rates would lead, or had led, to higher economic growth. “Changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth,” the report concluded. Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell responded by having the report suppressed, but its findings were incontrovertible.
………
Regressive policies can also lead to financial crises. When firms suffer from global overcapacity or merely from domestic overproduction – when a glut arises of automobiles, ships, textiles semiconductors or fiber optic cable — as happened in the late 1920s and again in the earlier part of the last decade, the wealthy, joined by corporate treasurers and bankers, have tended to pour their money into speculation rather than productive investment. The financial sector has become a casino for the rich, where they have gambled away funds that could have fueled the economy. So redistributing income through tax policy isn’t just fair; it is one way to began restructuring the economy to prevent future slowdowns and crashes.
Republican pleas to retain tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations and to eviscerate social programs do suggest a Romneyesque indifference to the 99 percent; they also presume an economy that no longer exists. “These incentives,” Livingston writes, “are merely invitations to inflate speculative bubbles.” Obama’s concession to arguments about the deficit, which come from Tea Party Republicans and business groups like Fix the Debt, is understandable, but unfortunate. There will come a time — when unemployment dips, say, below six percent, and the countries’ businesses are at full capacity – when it will be important to reduce government deficits. And raising marginal taxes on the wealthy will be one way – along with other measures – to bring the deficit down.
But bringing down the deficit should not be the principal objective right now. What’s important is to continue the recovery from the Great Recession and to take measures to prevent future crises. Supply-siders were right about one thing: the best way to reduce the government deficit is to create economic growth. Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy and to transfer those revenues to workers and the unemployed isn’t just the fair thing to do; it is exactly what’s right for the economy.
Not only does coddling the rich not help the economy, it destroys it.
Go read, and supply your recipes below.
Well, That Didn’t Take Long………
2 weeks ago, a staffer at the Republican Study Committee published a study calling for common sense reductions in copyright regulation.
It was retracted in less than a day.
Now the author of this paper has been fired:
The Republican Study Committee, a [right wing even by the standards of Congressional Republicans(!)] caucus of Republicans in the House of Representatives, has told staffer Derek Khanna that he will be out of a job when Congress re-convenes in January. The incoming chairman of the RSC, Steve Scalise (R-LA) was approached by several Republican members of Congress who were upset about a memo Khanna wrote advocating reform of copyright law. They asked that Khanna not be retained, and Scalise agreed to their request.
The release and subsequent retraction of Khanna’s memo has made waves in tech policy circles. The document argues that the copyright regime has become too favorable to the interests of copyright holders and does not adequately serve the public interest. It advocates several key reforms, including reducing copyright terms and limiting the draconian “statutory damages” that can reach as high as $150,000 per infringing work.
The interesting thing is that it is likely that the real effect of the briefly released memo may be that it moved the Overton Window, because the proposals appear to have gone from unthinkable to merely radical, which is a very significant move.
Gee, What a Surprise, Regulation Encouraged Cell Phone Companies’ Investments
Last year, the government blocked the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile, and the free-market mousketeers said that it was going to kill private sector investment.
Well, not so much:
Last year, the regulatory agencies charged with overseeing the wireless communications market did something unusual: they actually regulated. After spending the Bush years eagerly facilitating the consolidation of the wireless market, in 2011 the FCC and the Justice Department blocked AT&T from merging with T-Mobile over fears that the deal would be anti-competitive and result in job losses. At the time, conservatives in the media decried this move as gross overregulation of a burgeoning market that would dampen investment and stifle technological development. But here we are almost one year out, and those dire prognostications haven’t played out. In fact, quite the opposite has happened.
………
So what’s happened since then? Well, when the AT&T/T-Mobile merger was first announced, T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom, was looking to wash its hands of the U.S. market. But after the merger fell through and AT&T was obligated to fork over $3 billion to T-Mobile along with a sizeable chunk of wireless spectrum, T-Mobile took the money and invested it almost immediately in network modernization. Now Deutsche Telekom — once eager to be done with the U.S. — is moving to acquire low-cost carrier Metro PCS to build out T-Mobile’s high-speed 4G LTE network.
Meanwhile, the Japanese telecommunications firm Softbank is snapping up Sprint Nextel and infusing $8 billion into the wireless carrier, which will be used to build out its own network. Back when people still thought the AT&T/T-Mobile merger was a sure thing, it was assumed that Sprint would have had to merge with Verizon and we’d be left with a wireless duopoly. Now both Sprint and T-Mobile are investing in their own networks and working to emerge as serious competitors.
And what of AT&T? When the company first announced the proposed merger with T-Mobile in March 2011, it made much of the fact that it would “increase AT&T’s infrastructure investment in the U.S. by more than $8 billion over seven years.” Three weeks ago, AT&T bumped up that number significantly, announcing that “it would invest an extra $14 billion to expand its wireless and broadband services over the next three years.” The New York Times reported on November 9 that the decision to boost infrastructure investment “was motivated by AT&T’s failed $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile USA.”
As a rule of thumb, if a free market absolutist says that something is white, bet on black.
Deep Thought
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
My God, Actual Regulation!
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has effectively shut down Intrade, the online gambling house futures trading exchange, for US investors:
Facing accusations that it allowed American investors to bet on the outcome of wars and other world events without the blessing of regulators, Intrade announced on Monday that it was closing its Web site to United States residents.
The disclosure, which referred to “legal and regulatory pressures,” was released hours after American authorities sued the company, which is based in Dublin, over its popular trading network. Investors log on to Intrade by the thousands to bet on the outcomes of elections, the weather and even whether the United States will bomb Iran.
But in a civil complaint filed in federal court in Washington, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission took aim at the company and an affiliate for offering the contracts outside traditional exchanges and without regulatory approval. The agency also accused the companies of “making false statements” to regulators and violating a past order barring it from offering so-called prediction contracts outside traditional exchanges.
“Unfortunately this means that all U.S. residents must begin the process of closing down their Intrade accounts,” the company said on its Web site. “We understand this announcement may come as a surprise and a disappointment, and we apologize for the short notice and haste required to deal with this.”
I’m stunned.
I’m pleased, but I am stunned.
It’s a refutation of the philosophy of the “free-market mousketeers” who are inclined to allow all kinds of crazy sh%$ to pretend to be high finance, as opposed to a particularly abusive casino, in which the house takes even more than Vegas.
BTW, Intrade’s record sucked too, witness the gyrations in the 2008 Democratic and 2012 Republican primary markets.
Signs of the Apocalypse
The fact that I am actually approvingly quoting American Conservative magazine.
Specifically, I am quoting an article by Bruce Bartlett, in which he excoriates the modern Republican Party for going completely bat sh%$ insane:
………
A couple of weeks before the 2004 election, Suskind wrote a long article for the New York Times Magazine that quoted some of my comments to him that were highly critical of Bush and the drift of Republican policy. The article is best remembered for his quote from an anonymous White House official dismissing critics like me for being “the reality-based community.”
The day after the article appeared, my boss called to chew me out, saying that Karl Rove had called him personally to complain about it. I promised to be more circumspect in the future.
Interestingly, a couple of days after the Suskind article appeared, I happened to be at a reception for some right-wing organization that many of my think tank friends were also attending. I assumed I would get a lot of grief for my comments in the Suskind article and was surprised when there was none at all.
Finally, I started asking people about it. Not one person had read it or cared in the slightest what the New York Times had to say about anything. They all viewed it as having as much credibility as Pravda and a similar political philosophy as well. Some were indignant that I would even suspect them of reading a left-wing rag such as the New York Times.
I was flabbergasted. Until that moment I had not realized how closed the right-wing mind had become. Even assuming that my friends’ view of the Times’ philosophy was correct, which it most certainly was not, why would they not want to know what their enemy was thinking? This was my first exposure to what has been called “epistemic closure” among conservatives—living in their own bubble where nonsensical ideas circulate with no contradiction.
………
I later learned that the order to ignore me extended throughout Rupert Murdoch’s empire. For example, I stopped being quoted in the Wall Street Journal.* Awhile back, a reporter who left the Journal confirmed to me that the paper had given her orders not to mention me. Other dissident conservatives, such as David Frum and Andrew Sullivan, have told me that they are banned from Fox as well. More epistemic closure.
………
I hit upon the idea of ignoring the academic journals and looking instead at what economists like John Maynard Keynes, Irving Fisher, and others said in newspaper interviews and articles for popular publications. Recently computerized databases made such investigation far easier than it previously had been.
After careful research along these lines, I came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100 percent right in the 1930s. Previously, I had thought the opposite. But facts were facts and there was no denying my conclusion. It didn’t affect the argument in my book, which was only about the rise and fall of ideas. The fact that Keynesian ideas were correct as well as popular simply made my thesis stronger.
………
For the record, no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman. The blind hatred for him on the right simply pushed me further away from my old allies and comrades.
………
For the record, no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman. The blind hatred for him on the right simply pushed me further away from my old allies and comrades.
This is a particularly deep vein of schadenfreude.
Matt Taibbi is Right
When he observes that Paula Broadwell’s hagiography of David Petraeus was indistinguishable from what the rest of what the press corps said:
The book is so one-sided that it is almost supernaturally dull, and I was forgetting about it just minutes after I put it down.
Then it hit me – it was an interesting book, after all! Because if you read All In carefully, the book’s tone will remind you of pretty much any other authorized bio of any major figure in business or politics (particularly in business), and it will most particularly remind you of almost any Time or Newsweek famous-statesperson profile.
Which means: it’s impossible to tell the difference between the tone of a reporter who we now know was literally sucking the dick of her subject and the tone of just about any other modern American reporter who is given access to a powerful person for a biography or feature-length profile
.(Emphasis Mine)
Modern American journalism, by which I mean access journalism, where sucking up to highly placed sources trump shoe leather and intellect is deeply flawed.
I’m Surprised that It Made It a Full Day
The far right wing caucus of the Republican Party (I know, it buggers the mind), released a paper saying that the current copyright regime destroys markets, and needs to be reformed:
Right after the Presidential election last week, Chris Sprigman and Kal Raustiala penned an opinion piece suggesting that one way the Republicans could “reset”, and actually attract the youth vote, would be to become the party of copyright reform. We had actually wondered if that was going to happen back during the SOPA fight, when it was the Republicans who bailed on the bill, while most of those who kept supporting it were Democrats. Since then, however, there hadn’t been much movement. Until now. Late on Friday, the Republican Study Committee, which is the caucus for the House Republicans, released an amazing document debunking various myths about copyright law and suggesting key reforms.
Among other things, it stated that the purpose of copyright is to benefit society, not to provide a revenue stream to content owners, and among other things, calls for an expansion of fair use.
Basically, they said all the things that I have been saying for years.
Have no fear though. Less than 24 hours later, the IP Mafia browbeat them into withdrawing the report.
Well, there’s another chance to pick up the youth vote that they just pissed away.
H/t Firedog Lake;
A copy of the Report from the Republican Study Committee after the break:
rsc_policy_brief_–_three_myths_about_copyright_law_and_where_to_start_to_fix_it_–_november_16_2012
Deep Thought
H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Some Navel Gazing on My Part
I’ve been fairly clear on this blog that I think that various actions of Obama renders him unfit to be President.*
I also understand that there are people who make arguments that could be called compelling to vote for him, most notably the Rude Pundit’s, “In the End, Vote for Obama Because F%$# Romney,”† (%$# mine) because Mitt Romney is unfit to be President as well.
While I was in Ashland, I talked with my dad about this, and explained to him my position, and further explained that, living in Maryland, I had no moral dilemma, because my vote for President had not consequence.
He asked me what I would do if I lived in a battleground state, and I responded, “That way madness lies.”
My was flip, and it was a cop out.
I simply don’t know what I would do if I lived in Ohio, or Virginia, or Florida,‡ or New Hampshire, or Wisconsin, or Colorado, or Iowa, and any statement that I might make would be self serving and shallow, and ultimately meaningless.
What I’m saying here is that, on this matter, if you think that I’m full of sh%$, then I’m full of shit, and if you think that I have a f%$#ing point, then I have a f%$#ing point.
There are any number of times where I make an argument that is fact based, and I try my best to supply links to those facts, but this is not one of those times.
I think that I’m right, but opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.
*Normalizing torture by refusing to prosecute, his war on whistle-blowing, his steadfast refusal to prosecute the malefactors of wealth, his assertions of a executive authority that makes Dick Cheney look mild, etc.
†H/t Cthulhu for the catch.
‡OK, I know what I would do if I lived in Florida, I would kill myself.
Fred Hiatt Goes Rogue
The Washington Post editorial board called out Paul Ryan’s budget proprosal as 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag:
Finally, if you heard a glimmer of responsibility from Mr. Romney lately, think again: Mr. Ryan pulled back on it. Mr. Romney has been saying that middle-class families shouldn’t expect their tax bills to go down very much, if at all, because their lower rates would be offset by, yes, curtailing deductions. Fox News’s Neil Cavuto pressed Mr. Ryan on that score. “Was he trying to brace us for some bitter news?” Mr. Cavuto asked. Mr. Ryan: “No, not at all. . . . Middle income taxpayers get higher take-home pay.”
Mr. Wallace asked what Mr. Romney’s priority would be if his numbers didn’t add up and the reduction in tax rates couldn’t be done without losing revenue. Mr. Ryan didn’t flinch. “Keeping tax rates down,” he replied.
In other words, revenue-neutral would be nice. Lowering tax rates is the Republican priority, deficits be damned.
I am stunned. The Washington Post editorial board is ground zero of “very serious people” inside the Beltway wankertude, and they love people who want to sh%$ on the poor and elderly.
I’m wondering whose cheerios that Ryan pissed in.
H/t Paul Krugman.