Despite doing very little until a government shutdown seemed inevitable, Barack Obama looks to be the big winner in the eyes of the American public according to a new CNN/Opinion Research poll. 48% of Americans think Obama/Democrats are responsible while only 35% think the Congressional Republicans are responsible. Full results are here.
Mitt Romney surprised everyone today by announcing the creation of a Presidential exploratory committee. The political universe is shocked by this development. They thought he just liked Iowa and New Hampshire as winter vacation spots.
Seriously, Romney and Tim Pawlenty are probably the only two current Republican candidates for President that can beat Barack Obama. He is strong centrist that has a shot against Obama in states in all regions of the United States and is a good enough fundraiser to challenge Omaba’s predicted war chest.
He does need to stop ripping off AquaFresh though. Take a gander at his new campaign branding compared to that of that fine toothpaste.
In his Path To Prosperity, Representative Paul Ryan(R-WI) projects revenues to jump from $2.2 trillion in FY2011 to $3.1 trillion in FY2014. That is a 40.9% increase in revenues in just three years. Even if you make the totals inflation* neutral, that is still a 30% revenue increase. That is quite a jump.
I realize that there will be a revenue jump due to an improved economy, but even keeping at current tax levels, a 30% jump in revenue would be nearly impossible.
If you look at the two seminal tax cuts of the last 30 years(Reagan 1981 and Bush 2001), the three year out revenue intake was nowhere near 30%. In 1984, tax revenues were only 9.5% above FY1981 levels. The numbers look even worse for the Bush tax cuts. FY2004 tax revenues were 5.9% BELOW FY2001 levels.
So here is my question. When history has shown us that large tax cuts produce a modest rise or even decreases in total Federal tax revenues, why does Representative Ryan forecast and depend on more large tax cuts to increase revenues by an amount four times more than has ever been achieved by similar multi trillion dollar supply-side tax cuts?
*—-Using the average inflation since 2000(2.5%)
From the New York Times:
Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the founder of the Tea Party caucus in the House and a likely 2012 presidential candidate, tweeted Friday afternoon: “I am ready for a big fight that will change the arc of history. The current fight in Washington is not that fight.”
In an article on Redstate, Ms. Bachmann concludes that “the current battle has devolved to an agenda that is almost too limited to warrant the kind of fighting that we’re now seeing in Washington.”
Likewise, Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a possible presidential candidate, said Friday afternoon in an interview that a shutdown would “hurt the Republicans, not the Democrats.”
Mr. Huckabee, who was a favorite of religious conservatives during his 2008 presidential campaign, said: “Nobody’s more pro-life than me. Nobody. But as much as I want to see Planned Parenthood defunded, as much as I want to see N.P.R lose their funding, the reality is the president and the Senate are never going to go along with that. So win the deal you can win and live to fight another day.”
Speaker Boehner has lost control of his caucus and the larger GOP base. Whether or not he was forced into this fight over Planned Parenthood doesn’t matter. What matters is that he is an ineffectual Speaker who has issues controlling message because he isn’t respected by his caucus, the Tea Party, or the rest of the GOP base.
If he is Speaker by the end of May, I would be shocked.
From the Heritage Foundation in 2001:
One element of the debate over President Bush’s tax plan concerns how it will affect household and government budgets as well as the U.S. economy.2 To assess the plan’s economic and budgetary effects and to help frame this debate, analysts in The Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis (CDA) conducted a dynamic simulation of the proposals in the President’s tax relief plan. The final results show that the Bush plan would significantly increase economic growth and family income while substantially reducing federal debt.3 For example:
- Under President Bush’s plan, an average family of four’s inflation-adjusted disposable income would increase by $4,544 in fiscal year (FY) 2011, and the national debt would effectively be paid off by FY 2010.
- The net tax revenue reduction, after accounting for the larger tax base that would result from higher employment and faster economic growth under the Bush plan, is $1.1 trillion from FY 2002 to FY 2011, 33.4 percent less than conventional static estimates.
The National Debt is currently over $14 trillion and unemployment is 4.3% higher than when the article was written in April 2001.
Gleen Greenwald writing about Instapundit:
Boy, those primitive, dirty, lowly Muslims sure do have a bizarre, unique cultural compulsion toward violence and barbarism, don’t they? Reynolds is highlighted here not because he’s unique but because he’s so drearily common. Behold the spectacle of those who cheered for the attack on Iraq (resulting in the deaths of at least 100,000 innocent people), who casually call for massive first-strike nuclear attacks on other nations (certain to vaporize hundreds of thousands or millions of human), who loyally marched lockstep behind a leader who instituted a worldwide torture and disappearance regime, lamenting how those grimy, backward Muslims over there have a disturbing and incomparable affinity for violence (and for examples of religious-motivated violence among Christians and Jews, see here).
It’s inherently unfair for me to compare the actions of an entire religion to that of one man. Unlike Glenn Reynolds, I realize that 99% of Muslims are not violent and do not care about killing Americans, have never tried to kill Americans, or ever been successful in killing Americans.
With that said, Glenn Greenwald is out of line. Glenn Reynolds has never killed a Muslim, or even attempted to kill a Muslim. Writing about the barbarity of a religion, however incorrect, still doesn’t equal taking another human’s life. Greenwald’s comparison is unfair and really unnecessary.
I grew up only 20 minutes from the Mississippi border and have been to the state countless times. I even dated a girl from Hernando, MS for two years. None of the following surprises me in the least.:
We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal. For the most part there aren’t any huge divides in how voters view the candidates or who they support for the nomination based on their attitudes about interracial marriage but there are a few exceptions.
Palin’s net favorability with folks who think interracial marriage should be illegal (+55 at 74/19) is 17 points higher than it is with folks who think interracial marriage should be legal (+38 at 64/26.) Meanwhile Romney’s favorability numbers see the opposite trend. He’s at +23 (53/30) with voters who think interracial marriage should be legal but 19 points worse at +4 (44/40) with those who think it should be illegal. Tells you something about the kinds of folks who like each of those candidates.
I just happened to be watching CNN when Representative Tom Price(R-GA) laid down this doozy:
We don’t get paycheck either if the government shuts down.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised by a politician lying, but the chutzpa is mind boggling. As of now, all Congressmen will get paid if the government shuts down.
You think these jokers could find something better to do with their time than insult each other.
He learned, to his amazement, that modern members of Congress spend about 27 percent of the time just taunting each other.
“It’s jarring and surprising,” said Prof. Gary King, an expert in using computers to find patterns in large amounts of data. And, King said, probably counterproductive if we want Congress’s members to trust one another enough to make deals.
“The entire government may go bankrupt, I guess. This week, right?” King said in a telephone interview. “We probably want our representatives to be listening to each other rather than calling each other names.”
To come up with this insight, King and two graduate students analyzed 64,033 press releases sent out by all U.S. senators from 2005 to 2007.
